Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One Read Online Free Page B

There were animals out in the badlands—dogs and raccoons and things that might once have been cats—all of which she knew more as meat than living things. Even plants struggled to grow in the core. But so close to the Lower City? The only creatures that moved through the ruins of the city that had come before were human.
    Or had once been human.
    Xhea had never seen them, the night walkers, and gave thanks that there were some horrors of dirt-bound life she’d been spared. Yet she had heard them: their slow footsteps and the sounds of their movement, fingers brushing against door handles and window panes; the pauses as if they were listening, always listening. She’d heard, too, what they did to those they caught outside, heard the pleas and the screams, and seen what little remained of those unlucky few come morning.
    Xhea ran left, right, three blocks straight ahead and then down the sweeping curve of a street that eased to the west—it was routine now, a path she could follow with eyes closed. But familiarity made the journey no shorter. At last she reached a stretch of road blocked by a fallen building, the passage piled with decaying timber and twisted siding. She slowed not for the blockage but the grate in the sidewalk before it. Quickly she knelt, hooked her fingers through the rusty rungs, and heaved, struggling against seized hinges. Winter had been hard on more than her food stores, it seemed.
    The grate lifted to reveal a square hole with metal rungs embedded in the side of the concrete, leading down. She let her legs dangle, turned back to reach for the tether—and froze.
    For there, just behind the ghost, hovered an elevator. The device was no bigger than her palm, and held within it tightly coiled spells that could unfurl and wrap around a passenger to bear them aloft. She hadn’t called it—had no way of calling it. She could only assume that it was sweeping the ruins for straggling City adventurers, come to wander and hike through the ruins as some crazy few were wont to do, and had found her instead.
    As she watched, its status light flashed yellow, yellow, yellow . . . green, its indecision giving way to a grudging willingness to bear her aloft. Xhea stared in shock. Never before had an elevator so much as registered her existence, never mind offered to take her to the City, no matter how high she was on renai. With no magical signature, she had no way to prove that she was anything other than a living, breathing bit of furniture. But there it was.
    She stared, breath caught, as the small device blinked impatiently. She had never been to a Tower, never even come close. Yet she dreamed of them: of walking through one of the great organic structures, or standing on a lacework balcony perched in the sky; of visiting the terraced gardens at the peak of the Central Spire and staring out at all the City stretched below.
    Never mind how she’d get home again without bright magic to pay for the passage. No magic to pay for food or shelter or citizenship. They had no use for her above; and whatever gave her the ability to see and speak to ghosts, the darkness that tainted her vision and seemed to pool inside her like a black and silent lake, would be of no more use there than in the Lower City. She would only ever imagine what the world looked like from so high.
    “Why now?” she whispered to it. After so many years of hoping and trying to reach the City, why would it only come to her when she knew too much to take the risk?
    There were tears on her cheeks, and angrily she brushed them away.
    Turning away, Xhea looked down into the darkness, and stretched with her toes until her feet hit the first rung. She pulled the grate closed above her as she descended into the subway service tunnel, leaving temptation to fade with the last glimmers of daylight.
    The ghost’s voice followed her into the darkness, soft and hesitant. “Where are we?”
    “In the tunnels. It’s not safe to be outside.” Not safe