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

Towers moving in their slow dance-like battles for altitude. Xhea followed her gaze, but whatever Shai saw in the Towers’ patterns was lost to her. They were only Towers, unreachable as stars.
    Everyone died, whether others willed it or no. Xhea tried to imagine who Shai thought had the power to keep her from death—her family? Her Tower? Yet it was her father who had brought her to Xhea, separating the ghost from the body into which she would be forced to return. Perhaps, she thought slowly, that was why he had come to her: a last attempt to stop the resurrection.
    “Well,” Xhea said, “if you’re not dead, you’re certainly not alive, either. So what does that make you?”
    The ghost turned to her, the silver of her eyes shadowed thundercloud gray, hazy like distant rain falling. She did not cry. She did not blink. Only whispered, “I don’t know.”
    Xhea looked up again, following the near-invisible line of Shai’s second tether toward the Towers, the most influential so far distant that they were no more than bright pinpoints, like stars radiant in daylight.
    “That leaves me with two problems. When I left Orren, I swore I would never let anything like that happen again. Not ever—yet here you are.” Xhea gestured to the great floating Towers, their sculptural shapes like spinning tops balanced on cloud. “But where’s your body, Shai? And how can I possibly find it?”
    “I don’t know,” Shai said softly. “I don’t know why I can’t remember.”
    Silence grew between them. At last Shai asked, “What’s the second problem?”
    Xhea snorted. “Breakfast.”

“No,” the vendor said, and passed the chit back. It scraped across the surface of the wooden table he used as a counter, the sound nearly lost beneath the clamor of early morning bargaining.
    “But—”
    “It’s empty,” he said, turning away. “No.”
    Xhea swore. She wished the man had left the sandwich roll she’d ordered within reach; she’d have been gone long before he could maneuver his way out from the packing crate fortress of his stall.
    “So much for breakfast,” she muttered, weaving her way through the early morning crowd. “Your payment’s for junk,” she added to Shai over her shoulder. That had been the third stall she’d tried, using a different chit each time with identical results. Four days of food chits dead as stone, and her stomach empty besides. It was one thing to be bargained down; another thing entirely to be cheated. Lucky for Shai she’d already decided not to cut the tether.
    Shai scrambled to keep up. “But didn’t you use one of those yesterday?”
    Xhea frowned, remembering the skewer. She couldn’t have been so lucky as to choose the one chit that was actually imbued—or had the vendor simply not verified payment before handing over her meal? As if. But chits didn’t just lose their magic. Shaking her head, she stuffed the dead chit back in her pocket. She still had the chip-spelled payment from Brend, but she couldn’t access the chip’s stored renai herself; she needed someone who could transfer the money—and would actually give her change. Xhea sighed.
    There was a rhythm to the market and her movement through it, and she slipped into its patterns with the grace of long practice. She had to be careful here, where the press of bodies left little room for even one so slight as she. What space she might have earned by the discomfort of her touch was too quickly lost in the crowd’s ebb and flow. Even the ever-present chime of the coins and charms bound into her hair was drowned beneath the sound of voices, the clatter of wares being stacked and arranged, and the roar of a generator burning yesterday’s garbage for fuel.
    She didn’t so much look at the stalls and their varied wares as let them flow around her, all shade and shadow, hoping for inspiration. Xhea had felt the hair-fine tether that joined Shai to her body, its length taunt, its angle so steep that she shied from