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

generated went into the Tower itself, fueling not only its ability to stay aloft but also its internal systems and spells, its businesses and industries, its coffers. In return those citizens lived in the communal glow of their Tower’s magic, the gifts of health and happiness and long life inherent in every breath, every bite, every drop of captured rain.
    The skyscrapers were just . . . buildings. Old and crumbling structures kept from collapse by years of hard work and, some said, the preserving effect of the City’s magical runoff. Yet the power that resided in the Lower City—magical, political, and otherwise—belonged to one or other of the skyscrapers, as did most of its inhabitants. Only they had enough resources to garner attention from even the weakest Towers out on the City’s fringes. Those few Towers that deigned to do business with the skyscrapers kept the Lower City alive: selling food and seeds, tools that worked, supplies to repair what little they had. And if the quality was but a fraction of that known to those in the City proper—well, who were they to complain?
    “People live there?” Shai asked. She stared at Orren’s crown of twisted girders.
    “I lived there,” Xhea said, and managed to keep her voice steady. “Once.” It had been four years since her escape. At times it seemed but a moment ago, her fear little abated with the distance of time.
    Joining Orren had been a mistake from the beginning. She’d known within days—hours—that she’d made the wrong choice. Had lain awake watching the snow swirl outside the window of the girls’ dorm, wishing she’d chosen the very real possibility of freezing to death instead of the relative comfort of Orren’s reclaimed glass and steel walls. But the indenture had been signed, and even the signature of a ten-year-old child was binding.
    Orren’s industry—for every skyscraper had one—was people. They could make it sound so safe, so promising, for it was only through a skyscraper that a Lower City dweller had even a chance at living in a Tower. Orren trained them; and while some few held respectable positions or learned skilled trades, most jobs were of the type that no City citizen would want, no matter how desperate. There were many uses that a young girl could be put to—yet Orren’s recruiters had made a mistake when Xhea signed her contract: they hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t even tried.
    She’d wondered since what might have happened had someone brushed her shoulder that fateful morning she signed away her life; how her future might have changed had someone tried to shake her hand and felt the crawling discomfort of her touch. The sensation had been described to her as an unending static shock, or pins-and-needles—even once as the ache of a new bruise. A localized version of the feeling that everyone else experienced underground.
    “But . . .” Shai stared at Orren with her brows lowered. Mottled light shone dully from the skyscraper’s metal and glass sides, darkened and pitted by the dirt of untold years. Xhea watched her judge the worth of those walls—even broken, even twisted—and deem them preferable to dank subway tunnels and forgotten shopping concourses.
    “But . . . you don’t live there anymore.”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    Xhea’s quick reply caught in her throat. Oh, she didn’t want to talk about this—didn’t even want to think of it. Yet memories rose, and with them came fear. Xhea swallowed, choking on both. Remembering the only other ghost she’d ever seen who glowed and glimmered with magic when the light was right. Remembering his screams, and the whine of magic storage coils as they overloaded, flickered, and died. Remembering the feel of her knife, sticky with dark blood—and a man’s soul.
    “Something happened there,” she managed. “Something very bad.”
    “And you just . . . left?”
    Xhea nodded, wanting to laugh at the simplicity of that word. Left. As if anything could be so