Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (5 page)

“What did you do?” She didn’t understand how the ghost had vanished or so suddenly returned, nor what she had done to bring her back—if the darkness had brought her back at all. She only knew that she had to do everything within her power to keep that darkness from overflowing again.

Shai didn’t answer, only stared with pale eyes that gleamed silver. Xhea grabbed the tether and pulled until their faces were but a hand’s width apart. Shai gasped and struggled to pull away, but Xhea held tight, fingernails digging into her own palm.

“Tell me,” she said, voice low. “Tell me what you did, how you left this place. Tell me how—”

And stopped, caught breathless.

For it was only so close, face to face, with all the bright magic gone from her vision, that she saw it: a glint hidden deep within the pupil of Shai’s eye. A single spark, white and fierce and pure. Xhea stared, thinking:
Just a reflection, just a flicker of light.

Then it came again—a glint—and again, in the ghost’s other eye. Xhea refocused her eyes to see the magic more clearly, and then there was no pretending, for Shai was alight with bright magic. And the dead had no magic—unless . . .

“No,” Xhea whispered, a soft and useless denial. Only once had she seen a ghost that glimmered with magic—once—and she had sworn then that if it were in her power, she’d never witness, never allow, such a thing again.

She released her grip on the tether and began to search. She ran her hands through the air around the ghost, fingers outstretched, as Shai watched in perplexed silence. Xhea was careful never to touch the ghost. She knew that she could pass her hand right through Shai with little more than a chill against her skin, but still she shied away, as if her fingers might encounter warm flesh instead. But even focused on the most minute sensations against the skin and hair of her hands, Xhea almost missed it: the familiar slipperiness of a tether.

A second tether.

She followed the length, testing its strength, its boundaries, its shape. This tether was not joined to Shai’s heart, as the first was, nor to her head as tethers often were, but to her body as a whole. As had happened but moments before, within a few feet of the ghost the tether narrowed to little more than a thread—and a ragged thread at that, damaged and fraying. There was something other than her father that bound the ghost to the living plane.

Still that voice whispered in Xhea’s head:
No, no, no
.

Shai might be dead, but oh, it was easy to see now that she had magic. Here in the dark, with no bright magic affecting Xhea’s vision, Shai was strangely alight, the tiny sparks growing brighter and more frequent as Xhea watched.

“Shai,” Xhea said quietly, calmly, as if she were not holding back her fear with sheer will alone. “Did you return to your body?”

Shai’s response seemed startled from her: “Yes.”

“Did you mean to go there? Did you want to?”

The ghost shook her head. “I was here, with you, and then I was just . . . there. Trying to wake up.”

Quieter still: “Did you open your eyes?”

“No. I tried, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t see at all. It was so cold and so dark and I
hurt
. . .”

No. Oh, please no.
Yet still Shai glimmered.

What had Shai said the day before? The words came as if from very far away:
I’m asleep. Only asleep.

Feeling the black fog coil contentedly through her, Xhea whispered, “Then this must be a very bad dream.”

Across the width of the small room and back again, Xhea paced, her hands twitching restlessly at her sides. The sound of her unsteady breath, her echoing footsteps, failed to fill the silence.

An hour or more remained before dawn, but there was no point in sleeping; no need even to try. The shakes from her ebbing adrenaline made it impossible to sit still. She wanted to run, to fight, to scream—anything to relieve the pressure that seemed to come from all sides, as if the walls were closing in. Anything to keep from thinking about Shai, those glints of bright magic, and the horror that they represented.

Anything to keep from thinking of that darkness.

“Okay,” Xhea whispered, trying to think. “Okay, okay . . .” Except it wasn’t. She would wear her boot soles to nothing pretending otherwise.

Fine, then: a distraction. She grabbed a crazed plastic basin from the corner and filled it with water from one of her reservoirs, pouring carefully to avoid disturbing the thick sludge that had settled in the bottom. She threw off her jacket and the sweaty shirt beneath, dropping each to the floor. Her hands shook as she wet a cleaning rag, and she watched waves flutter across the water’s surface, each heavy with a weight of meaning that she could not translate. She lifted the rag and rung it out, fighting for calm. Suppressing the desire to scream.

It’s just fear
, she told herself. Uncertainty and adrenaline.

Felt the lie, and tasted it; closed her eyes and made herself breathe.

She washed her face and neck and arms, rivulets running down her chest and dripping from chin and elbows. The water was cold and it was just this, she told herself, that made her gasp. Only the chill that caught the breath in her throat and twisted it into a sob.

Xhea scrubbed until her skin felt raw and her fingers tingled from the cold, washing away the sweat—if not the memory of the shadow that lingered beneath. She stopped only when her shivers turned violent, then dressed in cleaner clothes. Her jacket came last, its weight a comfort across hunched shoulders.

“Xhea?” That quiet, hesitant voice.

Xhea didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to meet those strange pale eyes and all the unanswered questions in their depths. Even so, she could feel the ghost. She had always been aware of ghosts, sensing them as it seemed they sensed her; yet never before had she felt a ghost’s presence like a bruise in midair. Though she willed it to stillness or oblivion, the darkness woken inside her reached for Shai, as if by yearning it could ease through the boundaries of her flesh toward the imbalance of a ghost lit with bright magic. Perhaps it could.

She should stand, she knew. Leave. Outside, this would soon be a morning like any other. On the edge of the Lower City core, small groups would gather: hunting parties with weapons and survival gear, planning their trips out to the badlands; scrounging teams going to search the ruins for anything usable; a few misguided souls with handfuls of seeds and fertilizer and more hope than sense. The rising sound of voices, the low roar of generators with their stinking plumes of dark smoke, the sizzle and smell of food frying. Breakfast.

It all seemed so far away.

Xhea turned to the ghost and found Shai watching from on high, legs curled beneath her, head cradled in one hand. There was no trace of her earlier pain and fear, only a slight wariness in the eyes Xhea knew to be blue. That was the thing with ghosts. They were terrified one moment, back to normal the next. Fears were strange and fickle when you no longer had a life to lose.

“Can you get down here?” Xhea asked. “You’re cricking my neck something fierce.”

“Can you put the knife away?”

Xhea glanced at her hand, surprised to find her fingers flipping the opened knife over and over in a familiar nervous gesture. There were no traces of blood on the blade, ghostly or otherwise. Years of obsessive polishing had worn the silver clean.

“It’s not like I’m going to cut you,” she said, thinking:
Probably. Not yet, anyway
.

“Still.”

Xhea shrugged and folded the blade but kept the knife in hand, fingers restlessly rubbing the mother of pearl handle, its weight a comfort she little wished to banish to a pocket. Even closed, it held her attention. It was, she knew, the simplest answer to this problem; cutting the tether that tied her to Shai was the only sensible thing to do. What had she promised? A day, maybe two, and then they’d discuss more. Surely, after that night and all the distress the ghost had caused, she’d done work enough for the payment received.

Besides, the longer she kept Shai, the greater the chances that the ghost would be called again to her body, dragged back along the second tether and into the cold shell of flesh that had once been her own. If that happened, what would keep the strange darkness from rising again? Black tears and vomit, breath and sweat, wrenched out of her regardless of what she demanded or desired.

And that, right there, was the part of the problem that she couldn’t cut away. The darkness, she called it—had always considered it such, if only in the part of her mind where fears and bad dreams lingered. Now that she had seen it, felt it ascendant, she knew it had another name and one far truer: magic. Magic unlike any she’d known or of which she’d heard tell. Magic dark and languid, like thick oil, like branching smoke.

Magic at last; her own magic. She choked back a bitter laugh. How long had she wished for magic, even the smallest glimmer? Her whole life, it seemed. She thought of the dark magic rushing uncontrolled from her throat and lips, leaking from her eyes and skin, and she shivered. Never had she imagined that having her wish granted could be so terrible, so horrifying or so cold.

“What are you thinking?” Shai asked softly, and Xhea looked up from her knife. The ghost had come to kneel beside her—or tried to, instead hovering a hand’s width above the floor. She still had a lot to learn about being dead, but it wasn’t a bad first try for a ghost so new.

That I’m afraid
, Xhea thought,
and don’t know what to do
. Instead she said, “Shai, how did you die?”

She expected the ghost’s usual denial, but Shai just shook her head.

“Okay. What’s the last thing you remember? Before you met me.”

The answer came after a long pause. “I remember . . . the dark. A long time in the dark.”

“What does that mean?”

Another pause, the silence stretching between them. “I don’t know,” Shai said, hesitant and unsure, as if Xhea might scold her for giving the wrong answer.

“Okay.” Xhea sighed. “Don’t worry about it.” Shai wouldn’t be the first ghost to forget her death, nor the first to not know quite how it happened. Death snuck up on people in a thousand ways, fast and slow and by surprise, and its inevitability made it no easier to accept.

Yet Shai seemed not to hear. “I remember . . .” she whispered, twisting her hands together. “I remember . . .” As if words might conjure the memories, bring them to the tips of teeth and tongue.

“I remember the dark, and I remember . . . hurting. But there are moments when the pain stops, and my father is there. Those times, he’s with me.” Perhaps she was remembering the first moments after her death—the moments when she left her body? If so, it seemed her dying had been a blessing; caught in the memory of her pain’s ease Shai’s face seemed alight, the faintest of smiles gracing her lips.

“But the rest of the time?” Xhea asked softly, thinking:
Careful, now. Careful
.

“All of me, my whole body. Hurting.”

“Did someone do something to you? Hurt you?”

“No.” Her denial was almost inaudible. Shai shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “No, it’s . . .
me
.”

“You hurt yourself?”

Shai’s voice seemed to come from impossibly far away. “Only by living. By living and breathing, and the magic . . .” She shook her head again. Ghostly tears crept from the corners of her squeezed-tight eyes, sliding down her face to fall and vanish in midair. When she spoke again, the words were rushed and tinged with panic. “The magic . . . it’s sick, wrong. Broken. It’s all going wrong, all of it wrong—it’s eating me from the inside out and I can’t—I can’t—
I can’t stop it.
” With a cry, she buried her face in her hands.

Xhea could barely touch the ghost—was unsure what little comfort she could offer—and so she waited awkwardly, turning the knife over and over as she tried to make sense of Shai’s explanation. Her mind circled the word “sick,” fixated on it. Sick, wrong, broken—something eating her from the inside out. What could it be but an illness? Illness was rare in the Towers where the prevalence of magic brought health and long life, magic enough to keep sickness at bay, with spells to ease pain and cure disease. But their rarity did not mean fatal illnesses were impossible, and someone—her parents, most likely—might have been made all the more desperate for the unexpected nature of her death.

Question was, had they become desperate enough to resurrect her?

Oh, how she wanted to cut Shai’s tether. Yet that would mean turning her back on what could only be an attempted resurrection—a horror Xhea had seen only once, and had sworn she’d do anything, everything, to keep from happening again.

She needed a cigarette. No, she needed a bit of bright magic to cast all this into memory, or the courage to cut the line that joined her to this cursed ghost, and had neither. She waited, rubbing the knife’s smooth hilt, until Shai’s cries quieted.

“Come on.” Xhea forced herself to her feet. “I want to show you something.”

After days of rain, the bare patch of ground that was the Lower City’s only park resembled a lake dotted with islands of churned mud. Xhea grimaced at the sight. Above, the sky had yielded to a sluggish dawn, the heavy cloud cover hiding all but the lowest Towers, their shapes hulking shadows in the haze. No more rain, and praise be for such small mercies; but if the sun didn’t come out soon, the few plants that managed to grow so close to the core would be drowned entirely.