Read Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One Online

Authors: Karina Sumner-Smith

Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (30 page)

BOOK: Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One
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“Go, go, go.” The words fell from her lips in thoughtless time to her heart’s hammering. She pushed herself up, heedless of her skinned hands and bruised shoulder—only to cry out as she tried to stand. Her knee wouldn’t hold. The pain she’d ignored now redoubled, the joint aggravated by walking and stiffened from hours on the hard ground.

Again she tried and fell back as her knee buckled beneath her with a searing pain. She touched it: swollen to nearly double its size and hot even through the thick fabric of her pants.

Beside her, Shai held out a hand in useless gesture. “Come on.” Xhea tried only to hear the encouragement in Shai’s voice, not the growing panic. “Come on, try again.”

The pain only worsened with each attempt. At last Xhea grit her teeth and scrambled across the gravel on her hands and single knee, dragging her leg behind her—and crying out as the movement jarred her knee, again and again. Behind her, the walker’s footsteps came faster as it reached shallower water, drawing nearer more quickly than she could crawl.

Just get to the service room
, she thought. The door was warped in its frame, but surely she could jam it closed until the walker was chased away by dawn.

As the splashing grew louder, Shai stared over Xhea’s head, transfixed by the sight of the approaching walker. Xhea dared not turn, fighting panic. How far was she from the service room? Another fifty feet down the line, at least, just before the last branch in the tunnel. She whimpered as a rock ground into her good kneecap, and forced herself to crawl faster, knowing it wouldn’t be fast enough.

The thing had come to eat her, and how kind of her to tenderize herself with a good gravel pounding.
Lovely loose joints
, she thought darkly, horribly.
Freshly bruised and delicious
.

“Xhea,” Shai whispered, her voice gone faint.

“I know,” she managed. “I’m trying.”

“There’s another one.”

A second set of splashing footsteps had joined the first—and these sounded as if they were made by something larger. Like the first, this thing didn’t run, but walked, steadily drawing nearer.

She had to stand, she realized, regardless of the pain. Xhea scrambled across the tunnel to where pipes and electrical wires ran along the wall. Untouched since the Fall, the wires were thick with grime and dust, their plastic casing crumbling at her touch. Heedless of her bloodied palms, she grabbed hold of the wires and pulled until she managed to get her good leg beneath her.
Hopping is faster than crawling
, she thought. But she did one better: grabbing on to the wall, she forced herself into something like a stumbling, limping run.

Until she heard the sound of gravel crunching from the dark tunnel before her. Xhea clutched a rusted pipe for balance, and tried to keep moving.

“Shai—there’s someone ahead. Can you—”

“I’ll check.” The ghost hurried into the darkness. As Shai rounded the corner, the glow of her pale luminance vanished, and Xhea struggled to see. From her good eye she saw the gray shapes of gravel and rail lines, distance markers painted on the wall. Her magic-dazzled eye showed only black.

A moment later, Shai’s voice echoed back: “It’s another one!” Before Xhea could reply, the ghost added, “More than one.”

“Before the service room?”

“Yes.” A single, hopeless word.

At that Xhea stopped, still clinging to the wires for support, and turned to face the two figures that approached from the tunnel’s flooded end. Though both now walked dripping across dry gravel, she still heard splashing footsteps: there were more of them in the darkness.

Of course
, Xhea thought.
Of course.
She sagged against the crumbling tunnel wall.

“Be careful.” Xhea’s voice was thin against the sound of countless feet walking, none of them hers. “Remember, they can see you.” Somehow. The only other living things who could see ghosts as she could were blank-eyed, starving mockeries of people, less human than the ghosts themselves.

“Wait,” Shai said. “He’s . . .” Her voice trailed away.

Xhea stared at the approaching walkers. Two she recognized from the streets above: the old man in his fraying sweatshirt and the young woman lost in her oversized clothes. The others were unfamiliar—but their eyes, their fixed and staring eyes, watched her as if nothing else existed in the world.

Xhea drew her knife, long practice allowing her to open the blade with a single hand. The short blade would be all but useless, but it was better than facing them empty-handed. Except these were not normal people, their flesh as devoid of bright magic as that of corpses; perhaps the blade—and her magic, imbued into the silver through years resting in a pocket by her heart—might work against these things as it did against ghosts.

Or perhaps raw magic would be her only defense. Could her magic kill? Shai had died at her touch, though perhaps that had only been from the destruction of the bright spells that kept her alive so long. Weapon or not, Xhea wanted the strength the magic brought her, its calm. She ignored the breathing exercises she’d practiced; control was not what she needed now, at least not the clumsy control that was the only thing she could bring to bear. No, she needed energy, raw force. There was no anger to fuel it now; that was gone, burned from her so fully that she couldn’t even stir its ashes. Only fear was left, cold and hard, smelling like sweat and tasting like bile, and it was enough. It had to be enough.

Had magic already been seeping from her, blood and sweat and tears? It must have been, for it responded to her call with ease, calming her heart and the rush of her breath. The bruise-like pain from the entrapment spell eased, and she blinked as her vision returned. Wires in one hand, knife in the other, Xhea pushed away from the wall and let her good leg take her weight. The magic curled around her hands and the sheen of the darkened blade, rising from her lips to wreath her head with every breath.
Steady now
, she thought.

Still the walkers approached, steps neither hurried nor slowed, merely constant, relentless, as if each walked in time to an unheard metronome. The closest ones dripped, their sodden clothes streaming muddy water, their bare skin smeared with things she could smell but not identify.

Xhea shook her head and the charms in her hair chimed and clattered in the tunnel’s unnatural quiet. “Don’t come any closer,” she said.

If they understood her, they gave no sign, only walked until they were within a few easy paces of her. Then they shifted until they stood shoulder-to-shoulder around her, blocking the tunnel in an uneven arc.

The light brightened as Shai returned. The walkers swiveled toward Shai as one, and their pupils contracted at the ghost’s radiance. Xhea expected to see Shai hurrying toward her but saw only the ghost’s back: step by careful step in midair, Shai stumbled backward, her eyes never leaving the figures that approached from the tunnel’s opposite end.

“No,” Shai whispered. She stepped back and back again, her voice anguished. “No, no, no . . .” A litany of useless denial.

“Shai.” Xhea looked from one blank face to the next. Dark magic poured from her now, falling from her in a slow cascade and spreading in an ever-widening pool about her feet. “I don’t know if they can touch you, but if they can’t . . . you should run.”

“No,” the ghost said. “No, no . . .” The words were a continuation, not a response, as if Xhea hadn’t spoken.

She tried again, eyeing the human-shaped creatures that stared back with unblinking eyes. “There are too many, Shai. I can’t stop them. You don’t . . . you don’t want to see what they’re going to do.” She rather wished she could skip that part herself. She swallowed, choking back something that felt like a whimper.

“Please,” Xhea managed. “Please, Shai, just get out of here while you can.”

Oh, so noble
, she mocked herself silently, and just as silently told that part of herself to shut up and die.

Shai turned to her, crying. Each teardrop shone as it traced a path down her cheek and fell glittering to the rocks below. She ran the last few steps that separated them and, heedless of Xhea’s magic and knife, grabbed her arm. Xhea cringed at the touch, thinking of what her magic might do to the ghost—yet Shai seemed not to notice, her eyes intent on Xhea’s face as she tried speak through her panicked gasping: “It’s—it’s—my da—”

It took a moment for Xhea to grasp Shai’s meaning. She looked toward the walkers that had followed Shai down the tunnel and now joined their brethren in the large, uneven half-circle, effectively blocking all escape. Even without Shai’s cry, she would have seen him: the middle-aged paunch, the faint thinning of the hairline, that face that she’d never seen looking unwearied. He was cleaner than those around him—his clothes sodden and dirtied, yes, but clearly new to such treatment. It was Shai’s father.

Or, rather, what was left of him. Whatever Xhea might have said to him, this City man who had begged her to kill his daughter, died in her mouth unspoken; for his eyes were blank as stones and fixed unblinkingly on hers.

“Oh, sweetness and blight,” she said, and yearned stupidly, desperately, for a cigarette.

She banished the thought as the gaunt old man in his dripping sweatshirt stepped forward, blocking her view of Shai’s father. He walked slowly, no hesitance in the movement, no caution. Only mindless determination.

“Stay back,” Xhea said. She turned the knife to let Shai’s light flash from the blade in vain hope that a sharp edge would give the thing pause.
Oh, please stay back
, she begged in silence, the thought so desperate as to be a prayer to absent gods.

It was not only fear of stabbing the man that made her reluctant to strike. For if Shai’s father was among their number, the walkers could not simply be things, twisted human remains dredged up and out of the ruins. They, like him, might have once been people—real people, with lives and loves and the glitter of magic flowing through them.

There were so very many. She tried to count, eyes darting from one to the next: was it six from the flooded end—or seven? Five from the tunnel’s other end. Her hand trembled. How could she kill so many? How could she even kill one?

Would that she saw light in the old man’s eyes, or purpose, or understanding. He reached for her, curled fingers grasping, as Xhea cringed back against the wall. “Stay back,” she said again, “I’m warning you.” No theatrics now, no threats of movement—only the feel of the knife handle, slippery with her sweat, as she tightened her grip.

His hands closed around her shoulders, his skinny fingers as strong as rusted vice grips and as hard to pry away. He squeezed and did not stop, fingers digging into the already bruised joints single-mindedly, his hold pinning her upper arms to her sides. Xhea cried out in fear and pain and for courage as she struggled to raise the knife. She stabbed him in the only place she could reach: the muscle of his upper arm.

She felt the blade tear through the sodden fabric of his sweatshirt and the resistance as it parted flesh and muscle until it scraped against bone. She twisted the blade and blood flowed, trickling over the handle and her hand, and dribbling to the gravel below. He did not waver, did not so much as flinch, only held her, those iron-hard fingers of withered flesh and bone digging into her shoulders until she gasped.

So close, Xhea could see his storm-dark eyes, the whites veined and bloody. He breathed across her face, and she smelled only dryness, as if his insides were filled with salt and sand, desiccated flesh and ashy paper.

Beside her, Shai grabbed at the walker, clawing at his eyes and the sagging flesh of his throat. He flinched from her touch, but little more; Shai’s ghostly hands passed through him unhindered. She cried out in frustration as he held Xhea ever tighter.

“Xhea!” Shai cried, and fought harder.

There was no fighting him, Xhea knew, though she writhed and bit at his hands all the same. Even when she kicked him, even when the nails of her free hand ripped open the skin of his cheek, he did not falter. Would not falter. She stabbed him again, wherever his crushing grip allowed her arm to move: his shoulder, his forearm, even a nick that opened the flesh along his bony ribs through a hole in his shirt, to no effect.

Still he stared as he pulled her toward him as if closeness was the only message he had, eyes tainted with neither sorrow nor pain, hope nor denial—yet neither were they blank. There was no person inside this flesh, Xhea saw; he was—if such a thing existed—the opposite of a ghost, flesh without inhabitant, life without memory or magic. But not, she thought, without purpose.

What did he want? She could barely imagine: life again? Magic? The power of thought or speech or recollection? Whatever he wanted, how could she possibly grant it?

For a moment the old man’s lips parted, and the flesh between his brows creased with more than age. His fingers curled tighter—not, she thought, to cause pain, though she wept from it nonetheless, but as if he wished to press understanding into her flesh even if he had to tear holes in her to do so. There was something,
something
—but, a blank page of a man, he seemed not to know it himself, only trembled with its echoes.

If only she could comprehend the fractured remnants of the thought that seemed lost inside his head—some way to understand the driving need that she saw in him, this living ruin, before he killed her. Because he would, she knew; she felt it with a certainty as intense as the pain of his hands on her shoulders. Her struggles only brought that death closer as his grip tightened and the intensity of his need deepened.

“What do you want?” she cried, the sound low and hoarse with fear and pain and something that felt almost like terrible sympathy. With her words, the dark smoke of her magic slipped from between her lips to drift into the space between them. It hung there, curling in the currents of their movement, before he inhaled and breathed deeply of its darkness.

Briefly, the pressure of his grip loosened. For but a moment his face seemed to ease, weathered lines softening. He was not so old, Xhea saw; only hurting and starved and stripped of everything he had once been.

BOOK: Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One
8.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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