Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “Where are we heading?”

  Xhea considered. “The market,” she said. She could trade some soap or even the hospital shift for food before the crowds got too thick, and pick up the recent news. Perhaps she’d even find customers waiting for her return.

  Shai nodded, looking around. “You know, I never thought I’d see this place again.”

  “Being back must be disappointing.”

  Shai made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I’m happy to be anywhere.”

  Anywhere in the living world: the subtext reverberated between them. Xhea glanced at Shai, studying the subtleties of an expression that she couldn’t quite read. She had so many questions that her mind felt blank—questions about Shai’s magic, about what had happened in those days after her death, about Allenai and the pursuit that Shai had warned of the night before. She asked the first one that came to her lips.

  “Why are you still here?”

  Shai looked as if Xhea had slapped her.

  Xhea grimaced. “No, sorry, I didn’t mean here, with me—” She shook her head in frustration; not giving offense was so much work. “I just meant that I don’t see your tether, so I don’t know what’s holding you to . . . life, this reality. Whatever. Here, stop a sec.”

  As she had done before, Xhea searched the air around the ghost with eyes half-closed, alert for even the narrowest thread of a tether. Yet though the air around Shai felt different—energized, almost, with a vibration akin to a tether’s—she felt no line, no matter how thin.

  “Huh.” Xhea sat back on her heels and looked up at Shai. She’d never seen anything like it. Carefully she stood.

  “When I was in Celleran,” she asked, “how did you find me?”

  Shai considered. “I just thought about you,” she said at last. “Focused really hard on how much I needed to find you.”

  “Can you do it again?”

  Shai closed her eyes, brow creasing. A moment passed, and another. There were more people in the road now, individuals emerging from the surrounding buildings in careful ones and twos, and Xhea began to feel conspicuous. She was about to tell Shai to stop when she felt it—ping, like the impact of a pin against her sternum. She looked down, and there, like a glimmering cobweb, was a tether.

  “You make your own tethers,” Xhea whispered, amazed.

  Shai opened her eyes. “Is that strange?”

  “Very. To have no tether . . .”

  “What does it mean?”

  Xhea shrugged. “A tether is what holds a ghost to the living world. But I interfered with yours before you actually died. Maybe that just means that, now, you have no unfinished business—only what you choose.”

  Shai made a noise that Xhea would have called a snort in someone less delicate. “No unfinished business? Too much, maybe.” A pause, and then: “There was a moment when I was torn between everything. I didn’t know where I belonged—with my father, trying to find my mother, doing my duty for Allenai, being here with you . . .” Her voice dropped as she spoke, as if the weight of all the possible responsibilities were dragging her slowly down.

  “Why would you stay for me?”

  “Probably the same reason that you helped me, in the end.”

  Payment, Xhea thought—then, no. Not at the end. Yet even she didn’t want to put words to the tangled motive that had driven her into the ruins and to the City itself—didn’t want to name what she felt kneeling at the dying girl’s bedside as the spells flared and flickered to black.

  “At first,” Shai continued, “I was staying away from you. To protect you. I’d already caused you so much trouble.”

  “And now?”

  “You can see me.”

  “I could always see you. What changed?”

  Shai just stared at her, a single eyebrow raised, until Xhea turned away. It was true: what hadn’t changed with Shai’s death?

  Xhea again felt the tether-like vibration surrounding the ghost. “Maybe it’s not that you make your tethers,” she said slowly, sounding out the thought, “but choose them. So many things are holding you here, pulling you in different directions, that you can only handle one at a time. You decide, and are bound.” She pointed to the line that joined them as before; though even as she watched, the tether faded and vanished.

  Shai smiled. “I guess that means I choose to be here.”

  Xhea stepped back to avoid being hit by a handcart overflowing with animal skins—poorly tanned, from the smell. “I think you’re the first City girl to say that,” she said, laughing.

  Together they walked down a wide road that led to the Lower City’s heart. It was so loud here, Xhea realized; how had she ever thought the mornings quiet? There were no silences, only lulls between waves of sound: footsteps and rickety wheels, voices calling and laughing and shouting, the roar of generators. Laundry and prayer flags flapped from long lines strung between buildings. Everything smelled of sweat and smoke, of dust and damp and sweet bread baking. She watched the crowd’s movement as she approached the market, the bustle of vendors setting up displays, the luff of poorly tied awnings, the swirl of skirts, and wind charms’ discordant chimes—more life on these battered streets than could be seen from on high.

  Home, Xhea thought, and smiled.

  Yet hard on the heels of that thought came a wave of uneasiness; something was different. She looked around more carefully, trying to identify the difference—the danger—that had alerted her instincts. Movement and people and things, faint rustling from shadows, a figure moving behind a boarded window—

  There. In a stall at the edge of the market, an older man sitting on a sack of grain caught her eye. He was eating nuts, cracking their shells with blackened teeth. He did not look at her, but pointedly so, watching only from the corner of his eye. As she stared he turned aside and spat on the ground, spraying bits of phlegm and crunched shell.

  That was it, she realized; she was being noticed. Not often, and not quickly, but she could no longer pass through the crowd unobserved. People glanced down as she slipped by, heads turned at the chime of the coins in her hair—and turned just as quickly away. Perhaps the attention was only the effect of her long absence, or sudden return. She wouldn’t have been the first to vanish, never to reappear.

  Trying to ignore the prickling on the back of her neck, Xhea made her way to Iya’s stall. Iya rose from unpacking wares beneath her table, long locks swinging—and stiffened as she caught sight of Xhea’s approach.

  Xhea forgot all thoughts of bartering soap. “Something’s wrong,” she whispered to Shai. Still she pushed forward to the stall’s front and placed her hands on the edge of the table. She stared at the trays of charms as if shopping, watching as the magic in each shape shifted restlessly against its bonds. Iya turned again, seemingly oblivious to Xhea’s presence, and began to sort through a box just beneath the front table.

  “Xhea,” Iya murmured without looking up. “What are you doing here? It’s not safe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re looking for you, child.” Iya freed a long, twisted charm from the box, and hooked it to her stall’s top bar. It hung limply, a curious thing of knotted rope and rough beads, trailing uneven fringe. “Days now they’ve been looking—asking questions too.”

  “Who has?”

  Iya began sorting necklace charms on the counter without glancing up. “City folks. Real nice until you don’t give them answers. One bought some charms from me—wind flutes. Said they were for his wife. You think they have balconies for those in the City?” Her long fingers turned one charm this way and that, settling its large glass bead where it lay in a band of daylight.

  Allenai, Xhea thought, and felt cold.

  “What did they want?”

  “You, child. Or word of where you might be.”

  “Did you tell them anything?”

  “Nothing that they hadn’t heard a hundred times over.”

  Just the facts then: scrawny girl who lives underground. No mag
ic, sees ghosts. Even that was more than she wanted her pursuers to know—not that she could do anything to keep such details from them. Iya may have been as cautious as she implied, but there would be those all too happy to tell what they knew, especially for a good price—and the Lower City definition of “good” would be bare sparks of renai for anyone from the City.

  Xhea had to assume that her pursuers now knew everything: her entrances to the underground, the artifacts she scavenged, the places that she waited for customers—sweetness, her customers themselves. Even if her customers kept their mouths shut out of self-interest, her business would be in tatters for months.

  “Iya, could you—”

  “No.” Iya sounded sad but firm. “Please, I don’t want trouble. No more than this.”

  “But if—”

  Iya looked up and met her eyes. “Xhea,” she said slowly, clearly. “You should go now.” Then quieter, lips barely moving, voice more imagined than heard: “They’re here, looking for you. I’ve heard tell they’ve given Rown hunters your name. Hide while you still can.”

  Xhea realized she was gripping the display table so hard her knuckles were white, while around her the glittering charms began to flicker and go dark. Control, she thought, but didn’t know what she was doing or how to stop the magic’s seeping flow. She backed away.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She wanted to shout at Iya—a child’s reaction, she knew. There was risk in what the charm-seller had just done, with good City magic flowing for word of Xhea or her whereabouts.

  “Shai,” she whispered in sudden inspiration. “Keep an eye out for anyone watching or following.” Shai nodded and rose, no longer mimicking a living girl’s walk, but floating bubble-light into the air.

  No running now, no matter that her heart sped at the thought of Rown’s bounty hunters on her trail. Running would only attract attention. Instead, she drew her hair across her shoulder to quiet it, and kept her steps steady and even. Nothing to see, she said with eyes and hands and an easy gait. No problem here, no need to pay attention; just some girl on a quiet, confident, get-me-the-hell-out-of-here stroll.

  Rown, she thought. Oh, it would be Rown. Orren might own a person’s life with their carefully crafted indenture, but Rown knew how to possess someone, body, heart, and spirit. They took the addicts and wanderers, the hunters and little lost orphans, the gang rejects and crazies; they even took the scarred combatants rejected from Edren’s arena, people with no skill or use but what they could carve from the world with fists and strength and speed. Rown took them, and bound them, and made them all whole—or the strange semblance of wholeness here, where no floor was without its worn board, no roof impervious to rain.

  Once she’d considered joining their ranks, but the light in their eyes had scared her, that too-bright devotion to their skyscraper, its strange rituals, markings, and demands. Yet Xhea knew that if their pursuers had contracted Rown hunters, evasion would not be easy. More than a few Rown citizens were magic-weak; if the pay were high enough, they might just brave the discomfort and pain of moving underground to seek her. Going below was a risk, yes—but less, she figured, than remaining above. Even if they followed, there were levels upon levels of underground passages, most of which were marked only by her footprints in the dust. She’d smashed or removed the mall maps, every one.

  She’d nearly made it out of the market and was angling toward the nearest open subway entrance when Shai returned.

  “We’re being followed. Two people, approaching from opposite sides of the market.”

  “How close?”

  “One’s halfway through the stalls, the other’s farther back. They came out of the mall . . . building . . . thing.”

  Xhea snorted, but hurried her pace. Whoever had stationed a hunter inside the main market structure didn’t know as much about her as they thought; she could count the number of times she’d managed to make her way into the inner market on her fingers. She slipped from the crowd into the ancient roadway and around the corner before breaking into a run, heading straight for the subway entrance.

  She was nearly at the top of the rubble-strewn stairs when Shai cried out. “No—stop!”

  Xhea skidded to a halt, arms wide for balance. “What—?”

  Then she blinked, shifted her eyes’ focus, and saw the huge spell that hovered a hand’s length from her face. Xhea gasped and stepped back, staring. The spell was strangely beautiful, structured almost like an opened flower with long stamen that hung down to drift in an unfelt breeze. It was questing, but in a slow and sleepy way; its lines were dim, all but inert.

  “It would activate if it touched you.” Shai stared at the thing, reading the spell’s lines of intent with an ease Xhea could only envy. Xhea squinted. The spell was so dim and finely woven that she struggled to make out its purpose—but what little she saw made her shrink back further. It reminded her of a spell rich hunters used to capture animals: something to catch and hold, leaving its prey helpless.

  “It’s a trap,” Xhea whispered, shocked. “For me?”

  “Yes,” Shai said. Only that.

  Xhea took a deep breath, spun, and ran in the opposite direction, leaving escape route and trap alike behind her. This was the only obvious tunnel entrance in the area—but far from the only entrance. Farther down the road was the boarded-over façade of an ancient bank, its plate glass windows long since stolen or smashed, the elaborate curlicues of its faux-pillared front worn away by years of wind and rain. Empty, now; abandoned for someplace with a more defensible exterior.

  The nails had always been rusty; the boards were a random collection of wood and scrap metal, ill fitting even when newly placed. It wasn’t difficult for Xhea to push a section aside and slip through a gap that would give a grown man pause. She didn’t look behind her, only hoped that her disappearing boot heels hadn’t been noticed by her pursuers—or any sharp-eyed passer-by looking to earn a few extra renai.

  It wasn’t a difficult entrance, she thought as she picked herself up off the grimy, chipped marble floor of the bank’s interior—but it wasn’t a clean one, either. She grimaced at the new stains on her jacket’s sleeves, and tried to brush the thick dust from her recently cleaned pants.

  Shai hadn’t attempted to slip through the gap, but walked directly though the boards and thick window frame. Arms wrapped around herself, she stared back at the layered materials through which she’d walked unscathed. “I don’t know that I liked that,” she said.

  “You’ll get used to it.” Xhea gave a last, halfhearted brush at the dirt on her knees. “Cleaner than the alternative, anyway.”

  She made her way across the empty floor, then down a narrow escalator, metal treads clanking beneath her feet. There was little light in the underground complex, only the occasional mud-coated skylight allowing daylight to filter into the stillness beneath the roadways. The stores here were mostly empty, clothing racks and electronics displays just visible in the backs of the dark rooms. The mall’s hallways split and split again, and Xhea chose her path without thinking; she’d traveled these routes more often than the streets above.

  It wasn’t until they’d walked for some minutes that Xhea found the mark she both sought and dreaded: there, amidst the crisscrossed tracks from years of her passage, was the shape of another’s shoe. The tread was newer, clearer, and far larger than her familiar boot-scuffs.

  “They’ve been here,” she whispered. Even that slight sound seemed to echo. She crept closer, tentative, as if the mark might harm her. It was made by a man’s shoe—and from the clear treads, she felt certain the shoe was no ill-fitting hand-me-down.

  Turning, she spotted another mark, and another. The trail was uneven and scuffed, as if someone had stumbled half-drunk through these darkened passages. Yet their direction was clear: they came from the doors that she’d passed through on her last morning in the Lower City and made their stumbling way toward the nearest subway station. Suddenly, she knew with perfect clarity where that trail l
ed, and what she would find upon her arrival.

  She did not run; there was no need. Only an ache, the heavy weight of dread. She made her way to the subway station as if in a dream, ghosting by the empty toll-takers’ booths and through a broken turnstile, Shai at her side. In silence she slipped down to track level and into the tunnel, the gravel laid between the rails crunching beneath her feet.

  It was not deep here; this line, the Green Line, ran closest to the surface—even rising above the ground in one place out to the east. Shallow enough, perhaps, that some magic-weak hunter could walk these tracks, fortified by sheer will and the goal of some City-paid reward.

  Between stations, she came to the subway maintenance room where she’d spent that long, terrible night when her magic had first risen. The metal door to the room, which she kept closed with a twist of wire, stood open, and the door’s surface was dimpled as if from pounding. She crept closer. There, on the concrete stairs leading up from the train tunnel, were those too-large footsteps in the dirt.

  “Why here?” she asked. The sense of invasion was overwhelming. “No one knows this place.” Of everywhere she stayed in the warren of underground tunnels—the dozens of rooms and corners and hidden passages in which she kept a pillow, a tattered blanket, or the few things she dared name hers—why had those footsteps walked so unerringly here? No false turns, no backtracking.

  “They’re tracking me,” Xhea whispered.

  “No,” Shai said. “They’re tracking me.”

  “Your signature?”

  Shai shrugged helplessly. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Look where they walked. You’ve gone everywhere underground, but they only walked the route that I followed with you.”

  Xhea crept up the stairs carefully, trying to leave no new footsteps. She pushed the door open with a toe and peered inside. Shai’s faint light was the only illumination, but darkness didn’t veil what had been done. Her blankets had been torn to ribbons and scattered, her bucket was overturned and cracked, and her water supply had been knocked over, bottles open to spill across the floor. Her novels—that small pile of carefully preserved books, their ancient pages darkened and crumbling and all the more valued for their frailty—had been scattered to lie in the wide puddle, wicking up water.