Free Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One by Karina Sumner-Smith Page B

did not rise, only pressed her hand harder to her chest as if she could ease the ache that had settled there. Before her the ground was black and gray, the cracked roadway darkened by the shadow of her bowed head and slumped shoulders. She stared at the image she cast—no face, no will, only a puppet to the sun’s slow fall. Just the shape of a girl where no light fell.
    She looked up to meet Shai’s gaze, level with her own. In silence the ghost had descended, her luminous dress pooling around her as she attempted to sit on the curb. Shai waited, all the things that she didn’t voice written in the lines of her face.
    Xhea breathed deeply, and when she exhaled it was only air. “Are you okay?” she asked. Shai nodded slowly; the same nod that Xhea would have given. She was okay. Nothing more.
    “Where are we?”
    “The ruins.” Whatever names these streets and neighborhoods had once borne were long since lost, and with them had vanished the need to know such places as anything other than ruin. “And your body,” Xhea continued, “is somewhere up there.”
    Shai looked past Xhea’s pointing hand toward the cluster of Towers hung low in the sky. They were small, their shapes static and poorly defensible. Shai frowned. “I don’t know them. I don’t remember being . . .” She turned away, frustration and sorrow warring across her features.
    “But it’s something,” Xhea said. Some bit of hope, a direction to travel. Ignoring her muscles’ protests, she forced herself to her feet and dug in her pockets until she found a bit of dried fruit, its surface caked with lint. Emergency rations—and never as fresh or as plentiful as she’d have liked. It had been a long winter, she thought as she shoved the piece into her mouth.
    “Xhea?” Shai’s voice was soft.
    Xhea paused in her chewing, grimacing at the leather-hard stuff between her teeth. Not fruit, but some sort of jerky. Very old jerky.
    “Yeah?” she managed around her mouthful.
    “Thank you.”
    Xhea stopped. Turned. Shai was staring at her hands, fingers twisting nervously, but looked up to meet Xhea’s eyes. “For doing this,” she said, a gesture taking in the desolation around them, the cluster of Towers above. “For helping me.”
    Xhea’s mouth was suddenly dry, and it had nothing to do with the jerky’s salt. She tried to swallow; failed. Tried to speak, and failed at that too. At last she nodded and turned away.
    The lengthening light was all the distraction she needed. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to get back before dark.” Straightening her shoulders, Xhea started for the distant huddle of structures of the Lower City, the ghost trailing silently after.

By angling her approach to intersect with the Green Line subway, Xhea figured she could make it home—or at least to shelter—before sunset, even tired, hungry, and parched from her long run. Yet an hour into her walk home, a sound made her freeze mid-stride: a rustle of movement in dead weeds, a falling-rock rattle of shifting rubble. To her right stood the remains of a brick building, just a corner still standing, its window gaps like black eyes. To her left was a hill, only a protruding tangle of electrical wire betraying that it had been a building, not a burial mound.
    Nothing should have been moving, she knew. Not yet, not before nightfall.
    “What is it?” Shai asked. Xhea ignored her, attempting to pinpoint the sound. It had been close, but not immediately so; sound carried farther in the ruins. Ahead, she thought, and somewhat to her right—directly between her and the way home.
    Again it came: a rustle, a scrape of stone on stone.
    Xhea crept forward a single step. Then another step, and another—each placed with only a whisper of boot soles against the rocky asphalt. It took forever to reach the end of the brick wall that shielded her; forever again to gather the courage to peer around the corner.
    She saw a stretch of empty road with collapsed houses to