Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One by Karina Sumner-Smith Read Free Book Online

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.
    Sighing, she picked her way across the expanse of mud, past the lone tree, and sat on a bench. Its ancient cast concrete supports were now spanned with boards from packing crates that creaked beneath her weight as she drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees. After a moment, Shai attempted to sit beside her.
    Only then did Xhea look at the building that loomed beyond the park’s farthest edge like a tombstone marking a muddy plot. Orren: the Lower City’s rotten tooth, jagged-edged and leaning. In the times before memory it had been an office building, sixty-five stories of gleaming black glass—a skyscraper in truth. Now it was called “skyscraper” only because it was one of the five tallest buildings left standing. Sometime during the fall of the city that had come before, Orren had been broken, nearly a full thirty stories toppled or ripped away, leaving the shortened building topped with jutting beams and broken concrete supports. Now only the buttons on its elevator banks stood as testament to its lost height.
    Though the upper levels were still in the process of being reclaimed—Lower City code for “totally uninhabitable”—Orren’s first twenty or more levels were in use, some packed almost to overflowing. As Xhea knew all too well. Usually she stayed as far from Orren as possible within the Lower City’s boundaries, avoiding even the streets near its base as if she could feel its shadow heavy in the air like fog.
    Xhea tugged on the ghost’s tether to get her attention, and pointed. “See that? That’s Orren.”
    “What . . . ?” Shai looked around slowly, as if unable to decide on which of the strange and incomprehensible things her gaze should rest.
    “A skyscraper. It’s about as close to a Tower as we get here on the ground.” So much so that the five skyscrapers had names, mimicking those above—and a sad and sorry mimicry, at that. The airborne Towers were everything to their people: not just a home, but life and livelihood, business and family, community. Whatever spare magic citizens