Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (34 page)

“Define bad.”

“Unless you give me permission to perform a healing, it’s not going to heal at all. Not well, anyway.”

“A healing. At what price?”

“That’s not for me to decide. I have another five years until I earn out my contract.” He was still indentured, in other words, for the time, food, and magic the skyscraper had spent to raise him. Orren would name the cost for his services.

“Xhea,” he said, then hesitated, as if tasting her name. “Xhea, without treatment, you won’t be able to walk again. Even braced, the joint won’t properly support your weight. At best, you’ll have to use crutches for the rest of your life.”

She shook her head. “There must be some other way.”

“In the before-times, there was surgery for things like this.” Lin shrugged, almost apologetically. “I don’t suppose you know any surgeons.”

Xhea closed her eyes. “Is that why you’re here? So they can trap me with a healing I can never pay for?” Indenture herself again—though in truth, she’d never worked off her earlier debt.

“I’m here because I asked to be. I’m apprenticed to Orren’s top medic, you know. Only two more years until I’m fully certified.” Lin radiated pride, and Xhea was impressed despite herself; it meant a lot of work for one with so little magical talent. He added softly, “And I remember you. I’ve heard stories about you these last few years. I want to help.”

He spoke truly, she thought. Yet it was a truth that hid as much as it told.

“They’re watching us, aren’t they?” she murmured. “A camera, a spell—maybe just a couple little holes in the wall back there, huh? They’re watching us, and you’re just here to try and gain my trust.” A familiar person who had never hurt her, kind hands offering help and healing. An attractive face on someone nearly as young as she.

I don’t trust your gifts
, she thought to the unseen watchers.
I don
’t trust your gifts, and I don’t believe in coincidence.

Lin waited silently.

She knew it would be near impossible to get another medic to so much as touch her, never mind perform a healing, even if she had anything to offer in payment. Maimed and crippled people were not uncommon in the Lower City; yet she knew what such a fate would mean to her. She was just hanging on as it was, scrounging for artifacts and talking to ghosts, living in the tunnels beneath the Lower City. What little of that could she still do, unable to walk—never mind run or leap or climb? It was a death sentence, little more; one that would be served in seasons of struggle and pain, the slow waste of starvation.

Could Orren’s price be any worse?

Yes
, she thought with cold certainty. Yes.

Still Xhea whispered, “You have my permission.” For as awful as their price might be, it alone gave her a chance—for herself, and for Shai.

Lin nodded. All he said was, “Keep still. This may feel uncomfortable.”

It was only as Lin reached out that she allowed herself to think what the healing would entail. Oh, for braces and bandages, use of the instruments on the folding table. Anything but magic.

He touched her, fingers cupping the swollen joint, and his weak power flowed through his hands—a bare trickle compared to Shai’s unthinking light. Yet Xhea gasped nonetheless, and bit down on her lip, feeling pain that the injection did nothing to touch. She couldn’t show discomfort or pain—and it was only pain, familiar now as rain in the spring. Let them think her high, her gasp that of an addict reunited with her drug.

Don’t let them know what magic does to you now.
Over and over, she thought it, a slow mantra.
They can’t ever know.

“Do you need more painkillers?” Lin asked.

She shook her head, managing to say, “It just feels a little funny.” He accepted the lie.

Yet every moment that Lin poured magic into her knee, shaping and binding and fixing, Xhea felt worse. Her stomach roiled, and her eyes stung as she saw sparks of color: lightning-quick glimpses of dusty red wire, the off-white sheets, the pinkish golden-brown of Lin’s flushed cheek.

They can’t ever know
, she repeated, fighting down bile. For whatever the price of her healing, whatever they wanted of her, if Orren knew of the dark magic they would never let her go. Death or indenture or bargaining chip in a game of power too large for her to comprehend, she did not know; only feared it, a slow and certain terror.

At last Lin straightened, taking his hands from her knee. “There,” he said, confident for all that his hands trembled, fingers bleached of blood. He fumbled for bandages as Xhea looked at her knee. It seemed no different.
Let it be worth it
, she thought, and sat still as he wrapped the bandages.

“Lin.” Even whispering, her voice shook. “Can you get me out of here?”

He went still for a moment, only that. Didn’t look up or meet her eyes, only paused, shoulders tense, before resuming his careful bandaging. The silence between them grew and expanded until it was almost tangible.

“Are you feeling any better?” Lin asked as if she’d never spoken.

Her leg was still numb. She only imagined the sting and ache of the spells now woven thread-fine through her knee; it was only fear and the after-effects of sedation that made her feel sickly and slow. Lin wasn’t trying to hurt or trap her, she reminded herself; he was a pawn, just as she was. Not a friend or an ally. It was foolish to forget that.

Yet she was angry with him all the same.

For all the magic and healing, none of it even touched the real hurt, the absence and the anger and the fear that laced it all. She’d had a friend, an ally, and lost her—driven her away, failed to keep her safe.

What’s happening to you?
she thought to Shai.
What is Eridian doing to you?

Xhea looked toward the window and the featureless expanse of pale gray cloud, looking at nothing at all. “Not really,” she said, voice cold. “But we can pretend.”

Lin returned after dawn the next morning, the gray beyond the windows heralding a day dull as old iron. The day before had seemed endless, the night worse still. Xhea had sworn she’d never spend another minute within Orren’s steel and concrete walls—had sworn, too, that she’d protect Shai from those who wished to use her. Such vows were only as good as the one who made them, and she felt her broken promises’ sharp edges in heart and hands.

Lin smiled as he set a tray piled high with food and medical equipment onto the table at her bedside. Addled by pain pills, Xhea almost smiled back. She stopped, and pressed her lips into a thin line.

Lin seemed not to notice, talking cheerfully as he unwound the bandages. His eyes unfocused as he concentrated on the workings of the joint, mapped out by the magic he’d laid beneath, and he made a sound of surprise and confusion. He placed his hands on her knee, fingers already lit with magic. Xhea jerked back, despite his gentleness—as did Lin, forgetting to brace for her touch.
A little warning would have been nice
, she thought, all anger and acid, struggling against her suddenly roiling stomach. But when he pulled his hands away, she said only, “What was that?”

“Sorry.” Lin rubbed the back of his neck in a poor attempt to cover his discomfort. “It was just a spell reinforcement.”

“Something else to add to my debt, huh?” There was no hiding her irritation now.

He looked at her in surprise. “What? No! I mean, the spell had just . . . weakened. I thought I’d set it better than that, but . . .”
He shrugged awkwardly, and laughed. “All part of the learning process, right?”

I bet it weakened
, Xhea thought. She’d done her best to keep calm, but her control of her magic was as thin as her patience. She had little doubt that she’d all but ruined Lin’s work overnight.

Lin took her silence as recrimination and made an apologetic gesture. “Is that what you’re angry about? I’ll cover it, all right? My mistake, so I’ll pay. No worries. And here, look, I brought you breakfast.” He smiled again and uncovered the tray.

She looked at the offered breakfast: a grilled sandwich roll oozing melted cheese, a sprig of fresh grapes, and a steaming cup of tea.
Nothing whets the appetite like the taste of bile
, she thought, swallowing.

Xhea picked at her grapes while Lin applied a new bandage and then attached a brace, immobilizing her knee. The brace was hard plastic with wide fabric bands that buckled around her leg. On either side of her knee there was a hinging mechanism, which Lin locked in place. The fraying straps were pale from age, and the hinged plastic spars were scratched and gouged. Xhea wondered how many others had worn it, staining it dark with their sweat.

“How long until I can walk again?”

“Wait at least a few days before you put any weight on it. Take it slowly.”

“Especially considering the glitches in the healing process so far.”

Lin blushed and looked away. “Right.”

Quieter, she said, “You know that they’re using you, right? Using you to trap me and hold me here.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“They need me, Lin. They need what I can do, and if they can push me into debt—”

Lin grabbed his things and stood, leaving only the tray with her barely-touched breakfast. “I’ll be back to check on you later, okay?” he said, not meeting her eyes, and hurried away. The sound of the door’s closing reverberated through the bare room. Xhea listened: his footsteps receded, then an elevator door opened and closed. She counted the seconds in silence.

After two full minutes she pushed the breakfast tray away and untangled her legs from the blanket. Yet the twinge in her knee at even that much movement made her reconsider standing. After clumsily turning in the cot, Xhea managed to shift herself into the chair. It was still warm.

She glanced at the pants waiting by the bedside.
Later
, she thought, ignoring her goosebumps. Heating, it seemed, was too good for a guest of her stature—or Orren’s re-engineers had yet to find a way to force air to the ruins of the upper floors. Neither would have surprised her.

When no one came to force her back to bed, Xhea began to push the chair across the floor with her good leg. It was a slow and frustrating process, the chair’s metal feet squealing against the concrete, but she reached the door and rattled the handle. It was, of course, locked.

She pulled a tool from her jacket pocket. Slim with a pointed end, she had no idea what Lin might have used it for; she hadn’t asked before she’d slipped it from the table and hidden it beneath her leg until he left. The door had no visible locking mechanism, but, squinting, she could just see a deadbolt between the door’s edge and its frame. Slipping her stolen probe into the doorframe, Xhea began the careful work of earning her freedom.

The tool finally snapped an hour later, even surgical steel giving up in the face of the strongest deadbolt in the known universe. Xhea dropped the broken handle in disgust, watching as it rolled to the center of the room and lay there, as useless as she.

She turned to stare at the bare expanse of wall beside her and the dimple in its center that might be a hole or a hidden camera or nothing at all. “I hope you’re finding this funny,” she said, and began the slow work of pushing herself back to the cot.

Despite Lin’s promise to return, Xhea remained alone. The hours passed in slow tedium. It was only when she searched her pockets for distraction that she realized her last cigarettes were gone, along with her matches, any length of string long enough to be useful—and her knife. Of course they would take her weapons. They had no idea what it meant to her—nor would they care. Still she seethed.

Xhea’s only distraction was her knee itself. By unfocusing her eyes and squinting, she could see past flesh and bone to the shimmering lines of Lin’s spell. Threads of energy wove through the joint, differences in brightness, density, and tone indicating hidden meanings at which she could only guess. She was no expert, but it seemed to be good work.

Good, and fading. Despite Lin’s reinforcement, she could see flickers in the lines’ vibration, fraying ends, and bit her lip at the sight. For all her bravado, Lin’s warning echoed. Though she feared Orren and a lifetime of servitude within its ancient walls, she could not imagine how she’d survive if she could not walk at all. She focused on her power until it felt like a small, hard stone lodged beneath her breastbone.

Evening had come before she was disturbed again. The door opened and a short woman stood in the frame, neat and plainly dressed with her dark hair pulled back and a clipboard in her hands. A small light hovered above her right shoulder, dispelling the room’s shadowed gloom. Xhea blinked, her eyes watering in the sudden light. She’d imagined what might happen if Orren recaptured her, but never had she thought that she’d be relegated to some late-shift administrative lackey.

Well
,
that’s one way of putting me in my place
.

The woman crossed the floor to Xhea’s bedside, the heels of her sensible shoes ticking against the bare concrete. She settled in the plastic chair, adjusted her skirt, and began to review the notes on her clipboard, the words scrolling by at a flick of her pen—all without so much as a glance at Xhea.

Hello to you too
, Xhea thought in the silence. But what she said was, “You’re here because of what I said to Lin.” She knew she’d run a risk trying to talk to him about how he was being used, or why Orren wanted her.

“What you did or did not say to your medical care provider is of no consequence in this conversation.” The woman flicked her pen, and more text flew by.

“Then what is?”

A pause, then the woman looked up, the slow lift of her gaze as full of meaning as the eyebrow quirk that accompanied the movement. “The past, Xhea,” she said. “Not to mention your current situation.”

“You’re here to try to indenture me.”

“Try?” The woman smiled slightly, a humorless expression. “I’m afraid that was long since done. You signed yourself into Orren’s keeping—” a brief glance at the clipboard “—more than five years ago. It is merely time to repay that debt.”

Xhea snorted and crossed her arms across her chest, hoping the woman thought her shivers were due merely to cold. “As if the few measly renai you spent on me are worth this hassle to collect.”