Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One Read Online Free PDF Page B

tentatively, and the name sounded right. Her voice echoed from the bare walls. Gods, if she had actually lost the ghost . . . She didn’t know how to finish the thought.
    Slowly, she built a mental picture of the ghost—no, she reminded herself, of Shai . Her youth. Her soft, hesitant way of speaking; her confusion. Pale hair and paler eyes. Her slender build and narrow hands; her plum-colored dress, seeming all the more expensive for its simplicity. Her fear. Her tentative questioning, answered curtly or turned aside. Her insistence that she was still alive.
    With each detail, Xhea’s mental image of the ghost intensified—as did the pain in her stomach. Focus on Shai , she told herself. Just breathe. But with a sudden lurch, she realized she was going to be sick. She grabbed the bucket.
    Lips pressed tight against her stomach’s renewed rebellion, it was her eyes that first betrayed her, leaking tears that felt cold against her cheek. Before she could wipe them away, they began to lift from her skin, up and away—tears that weren’t water at all but something dark that curled and coiled in midair like smoke.
    Xhea whimpered, and as her mouth opened more darkness rushed out, fast as breath. She watched as the darkness slipped from between her lips and up through the air. Not good , she thought, not good, not good —too shocked to manage anything more coherent.
    As the darkness rose toward the ceiling, it began to twist together into a single line, almost like a finger pointing. No, she realized; it was following the line of the tether, up and out, in response to her call. Xhea was burning, freezing, as if she’d been dipped in alcohol and lit ablaze—and still the darkness poured from her, rising from her whole body as if from every pore, moving like fog, coiling up through the Lower City in search of the ghost.
    Stranger still, Xhea could feel the darkness like a phantom limb. It was as if a part of her consciousness eased up through the reinforced concrete, steel, and tile of the subway tunnels, up through gravel and earth, up through asphalt and weeds, and higher still, questing into the air above. And oh, how she wished it would stop—wished she knew some way to lock the creeping fog back inside of her, in the depths of her belly where it had always slept. Not because it hurt, but because this terrible flowing darkness that rushed from her felt . . . good. Strange and frightening, but right . That was the most terrifying thing of all.
    “ Shai! ” Xhea cried, and the ghost returned with an air-rending crack. She hung at the end of her tether, arms spread wide and head thrown back, hair flying around her face as if in a storm wind. Xhea staggered as the darkness contracted, condensing around them like a veil of night. As she watched, the strange smoke-like substance dissipated as if it were smoke in truth, vanishing into the air.
    Xhea all but collapsed onto her nest of blankets, limp and exhausted, the clatter of the coins and charms in her hair the only sound in the suddenly silent room. She stared at the ghost, watching as Shai slowly curled in upon herself until she was as Xhea had first seen her: calm and serene, eyes closed and legs crossed beneath her, hands resting palm-up on her knees.
    Xhea rose and crept, shaking, across the cold floor. She could only stand by holding the concrete wall, and even then her knees quivered, weak as a creature newly born.
    “Shai?” Xhea whispered, and the ghost opened her eyes.
    “I’m only dreaming.” She sounded too heartbroken to cry.
    Oh, would that this were a dream , Xhea thought; all of it a dream, and she would wake to simple darkness, none of it flowing from her like living smoke. She had always felt something dark inside her, a feeling she suppressed with the bright hit of payment, but she had likened it to absence—only a hole where magic should have been. Not this. Even now she felt it curl and coil within her like slow fog; felt the contentment, the