Read Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One for Free Online Page A

scream—anything to relieve the pressure that seemed to come from all sides, as if the walls were closing in. Anything to keep from thinking about Shai, those glints of bright magic, and the horror that they represented.
    Anything to keep from thinking of that darkness.
    “Okay,” Xhea whispered, trying to think. “Okay, okay . . .” Except it wasn’t. She would wear her boot soles to nothing pretending otherwise.
    Fine, then: a distraction. She grabbed a crazed plastic basin from the corner and filled it with water from one of her reservoirs, pouring carefully to avoid disturbing the thick sludge that had settled in the bottom. She threw off her jacket and the sweaty shirt beneath, dropping each to the floor. Her hands shook as she wet a cleaning rag, and she watched waves flutter across the water’s surface, each heavy with a weight of meaning that she could not translate. She lifted the rag and rung it out, fighting for calm. Suppressing the desire to scream.
    It’s just fear , she told herself. Uncertainty and adrenaline.
    Felt the lie, and tasted it; closed her eyes and made herself breathe.
    She washed her face and neck and arms, rivulets running down her chest and dripping from chin and elbows. The water was cold and it was just this, she told herself, that made her gasp. Only the chill that caught the breath in her throat and twisted it into a sob.
    Xhea scrubbed until her skin felt raw and her fingers tingled from the cold, washing away the sweat—if not the memory of the shadow that lingered beneath. She stopped only when her shivers turned violent, then dressed in cleaner clothes. Her jacket came last, its weight a comfort across hunched shoulders.
    “Xhea?” That quiet, hesitant voice.
    Xhea didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to meet those strange pale eyes and all the unanswered questions in their depths. Even so, she could feel the ghost. She had always been aware of ghosts, sensing them as it seemed they sensed her; yet never before had she felt a ghost’s presence like a bruise in midair. Though she willed it to stillness or oblivion, the darkness woken inside her reached for Shai, as if by yearning it could ease through the boundaries of her flesh toward the imbalance of a ghost lit with bright magic. Perhaps it could.
    She should stand, she knew. Leave. Outside, this would soon be a morning like any other. On the edge of the Lower City core, small groups would gather: hunting parties with weapons and survival gear, planning their trips out to the badlands; scrounging teams going to search the ruins for anything usable; a few misguided souls with handfuls of seeds and fertilizer and more hope than sense. The rising sound of voices, the low roar of generators with their stinking plumes of dark smoke, the sizzle and smell of food frying. Breakfast.
    It all seemed so far away.
    Xhea turned to the ghost and found Shai watching from on high, legs curled beneath her, head cradled in one hand. There was no trace of her earlier pain and fear, only a slight wariness in the eyes Xhea knew to be blue. That was the thing with ghosts. They were terrified one moment, back to normal the next. Fears were strange and fickle when you no longer had a life to lose.
    “Can you get down here?” Xhea asked. “You’re cricking my neck something fierce.”
    “Can you put the knife away?”
    Xhea glanced at her hand, surprised to find her fingers flipping the opened knife over and over in a familiar nervous gesture. There were no traces of blood on the blade, ghostly or otherwise. Years of obsessive polishing had worn the silver clean.
    “It’s not like I’m going to cut you,” she said, thinking: Probably. Not yet, anyway .
    “Still.”
    Xhea shrugged and folded the blade but kept the knife in hand, fingers restlessly rubbing the mother of pearl handle, its weight a comfort she little wished to banish to a pocket. Even closed, it held her attention. It was, she knew, the simplest answer to this problem; cutting