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

breath, shuddering. “But there was nowhere to cut that didn’t touch either his body or his ghost. And he was screaming and fighting to be free—and I was screaming too, cutting and flailing and nearly blind from so much magic.”
    “Did you hurt him?” Shai asked.
    “Hurt him?” Xhea laughed bitterly. “I killed him.”
    “But . . .”
    “He was already dead, I know. His body. It wasn’t that.” Even though blood had coated the blade and her hands, dark and thick and shining. Even though she’d slashed the failing ruin of his body, destroyed the plastic lines and wires that connected the body to the machines, shredded his clothes. No, not that.
    “It was . . . him,” Xhea managed. “His ghost. I cut him with the knife, sliced and shredded the ghost himself as surely as I had his body.” When she had realized what was happening, she’d stumbled back, looking from the ravaged ghost and his hemorrhaging body to the bloody knife in her hand. She’d watched in horror as the ghost faded, slipping from existence like blood from a wound until only the echo of his screams remained.
    “I killed him—his ghost, his soul, whatever you want to call it. That was the day I left Orren.” Ignoring her contract, her debt, her fear, she’d run—and hadn’t stopped running since.
    Head bowed, trembling, Xhea tried to get control of herself. She’d never told that story to anyone. Never. One strange and frightening night, and she was baring her soul to some dead girl she’d just met? She hated remembering that time; she woke enough nights seeing what they—what she—had done without needing to conjure the images in daylight.
    The silence stretched.
    “You’re shivering,” Shai said.
    Xhea nodded. What was there to say?
    Opening her eyes, she turned to the ghost, and saw that Shai attempted what Xhea had not: she had raised a single hand to Xhea’s shoulder in comfort. The touch of Shai’s fingers was barely a touch—just a chill breath like a cool wind passing, the slightest hint of pressure. But the suddenness, the strangeness of the action almost made Xhea recoil. It was the first time anyone had touched her voluntarily for more years than she could remember. Stranger still was the feeling that followed: the desire to lean in to that touch, however insubstantial.
    “You think that’s what’s happening to me,” the ghost said. It wasn’t, in the end, a question.
    In silence Xhea looked at Shai’s face, her pale eyes and narrow nose, the gentle sweep of her cheekbones. Shai looked nothing like him, the nameless ghost she had killed. Yet even were it not for the spirit that Xhea felt still stained her hands, she found that she did not want Shai to suffer. Despite her helplessness, her ghostly hands soft from a life of ease, Xhea knew that this girl had carried much in her short life. She looked at Xhea with not pity, not sympathy, but empathy. She, too, knew pain.
    It would be easiest to cut the tether that joined them, that much seemed certain. Yet even as she reached for her silver blade, Xhea knew she could not. Even if she were wrong in her suspicions, even if Shai had never been hurt or used, she couldn’t just let the ghost go to her fate. Not alone , she thought, without any way to fight back .
    Not alone.
    She took a deep breath. “Yes,” Xhea said. Only that.
    “Resurrection,” Shai said slowly. She seemed to roll the word in her mouth as if feeling its shape with her tongue. “Yes. Yes, but . . .”
    “But?”
    “I think you’re right. But there’s . . . there’s something . . .”
    “Else?”
    “Yes. No . . . I don’t remember. It sounds right. Familiar, somehow.” Each slow word sounded solid as a foundation newly laid. “Except . . . the one thing I know for certain is that I’m not dead. They wouldn’t let me die.”
    Xhea’s eyebrows rose. “How do you resurrect someone who’s not dead?”
    Shai didn’t seem to hear. Instead, she stared at the City above them, the