Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One Read Online Free PDF

fell asleep, watching the colors fade and darken, blue and green and yellow.
    Gray. Gray.
    Black.
    Hours later, the headache’s promise had been made good. Xhea lay curled in a miserable ball in the midst of her blankets, sweating and trembling as she clutched her stomach. She wished she could blame the meat skewers, but coming down off a payment was like this sometimes, as if her body were trying to purge every last spark of magic.
    Realizing she was about to be sick, Xhea rushed for her waste bucket and sat clutching it in the darkness. Her eyes still hadn’t adjusted. The dark pressed in from all sides, making the room seem small and frightening. Beside her, the flashlight had grown strangely dim, as if seen through a bank of fog, and cast only a weak, flickering beam across the floor.
    Xhea clutched her stomach as she heaved, gagging and choking on the taste of bile. Tears ran down her cheeks, hot and fast; her nose dripped, and sweat seemed to run from every pore as she was violently ill, again and again. Yet despite the taste, she heard no liquid hitting the bucket. She felt the tears run, and sweat; raised her hand to her face and felt only hot, dry skin.
    Shaking, she fell back into her nest of blankets, lost to fevered dreams.
    When Xhea woke sometime that felt like morning, the worst of the illness had passed. Her normal eyesight had returned, casting the room around her in shades of gray—good thing, as the flashlight appeared to have died entirely—and when she lifted her hands, she managed to keep them from shaking. Yet the strange feeling in the pit of her stomach remained, not nausea but a feeling so intense that she knew not what to name it if not pain.
    She struggled out of the damp mess of her blankets, twisted and knotted from her long night. She fetched a bottle of rainwater from the side of the room, and sat sipping it in the hope it might ease the hurt. It was only as she finished the water, tipping back her head to drain the last drops, that she realized she was alone in the small room.
    The ghost was gone.
    Xhea’s hands flew to her chest where she’d anchored the tether, even as she looked around—as if the ghost might have simply slipped behind the heap of spare clothes or hidden herself beneath the blankets. But the tether was still there, bonded to her breastbone and vibrating softly in time with her heartbeat. Carefully, she followed the length of slippery air with her fingertips. Close to her body it was as wide around as a clenched fist and as strong; yet it thinned quickly, so that at the extent of her arms’ reach it was no wider around than a thread.
    Had the ghost found some way to break the tether? Perhaps she’d fought the bond so hard that it snapped. In her state, it wasn’t as if Xhea would have noticed. Except that the tether didn’t seem to be broken, only thinned almost to non-existence.
    Perhaps it was only stretched, the ghost girl wandering in the tunnels just beyond the room’s concrete walls. Yet it hadn’t allowed her such freedom the day before—she’d barely been able to get more than a body length from Xhea, and that only with effort. New ghosts, as this one seemed to be, rarely thought about walking through walls, too bound by the habits of their former lives.
    Besides, what little tether remained didn’t point outward, but up .
    “Sweetness,” Xhea said. “I need a cigarette.”
    Fine , she thought; if the tether wasn’t broken, she could use it to drag the ghost back. She grasped her end of the line and hauled back; yet no matter how she pulled, Xhea remained alone.
    “Blight it,” she muttered, pacing. She rubbed sweaty palms on her thighs. There had to be some way to make the girl return—or say bye-bye to the promise of a few weeks’ steady income.
    If she couldn’t pull the ghost back physically, perhaps there was some way to call her. What was her name? Xhea struggled to remember. Callous indeed , she thought.
    “Shai?” she said at last,