Wordless (10 page)

I knew we would need energy so I tried to get some sleep, dozing on and off for a few hours. The lights on the shore dwindled to sparsely scattered clusters, while foothills rose into dark mountains looming above the shimmering black lake. I was so tired, but too scared to really close my eyes for more than a few minutes at a time.

“Why would they do this?” I muttered at one point. “The Athenaeum already has so much power.”

“They want more,” Khaya said simply—awake, like I was. “Just like anyone else in the history of humankind. The City Council isn’t content to rule only Eden City, even though they already run the show, behind the scenes, on the world stage. They want it all outright. They want to rule the world as if they were the Gods themselves.”

“Drey always said no one should have the power of the Gods.”

Khaya hunched forward, hugging herself as if she were cold. There was a breeze playing over the lake, but it was warm. “He must have been wise. Whether or not the Words should have these powers, at least we’re still human. It could be much worse. We were about to be the last generation of free-thinking Words. We weren’t going to have children this time; we were going to pass the Words on to automatons, killing ourselves to do it. And they weren’t going to wait for us to turn forty. They were going to do it as soon as they could. Then the Words truly would have become tools, no longer sustained on the breath of true life.” She paused. “I’m the only Word, aside from Cruithear, who knows their plan, since we were the only two necessary to implement it. The Godspeakers didn’t want the others to rebel. But a will—saying no—is what makes us alive. Even if I’m a tool, I’m also human.”

“So you said no.”

Khaya smiled at me, and it was so surprising I almost jumped in shock. But then I saw strange lights reflected on the water behind her, off the port side of the barge where it had been dark a second before, and I jumped because of that. Flashes of yellow and green were flickering over the waves.

Keeping low, I scrambled over plastic jugs, cardboard boxes, and other, slimier things to the gunwale, where I lifted my head enough to peek over.

The lake behind us had come alive with several speedboats. Their green and yellow lights identified them as law enforcement. While they were too far away to tell, I guessed there were gold pyramids emblazoned on their sides.

Khaya scooted up behind me, her sharp intake of breath a hiss in my ear.

“Even if you say no,” I said without turning to look at her, “I think they’re telling you otherwise.”

“They’re only double-checking because of the barge’s suspicious route. If they’d seen us board, they wouldn’t have let us motor for thirty miles,” she said, her voice low and tense. “Tavin, do you know how to swim?”

“Yeah.” My voice came out choked, and my stare dropped from the speedboats to the wide black water, swirling and rippling around us. Drey had taught me, but I hadn’t done it often. “Sort of.”

Right then, the barge banked, turning slowly north from its eastern course and toward the center of the lake. For a horrible moment, I thought Jacques had decided to double back and turn us in. Then Khaya said, “He’s giving us the chance to slip off the starboard side. We’ll be out of sight, and the water’s so dark. He’ll lead them away from us.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Take off your pants.”

“What?” I spun around. Khaya already had her shoes off and was tugging her pants down over her smooth thighs, her skin looking luminous in the night.

“Your pants and shoes,” she hissed, “so you can swim. It’s going to be hard enough with the backpack.”

I looked away, my face burning. I kicked off my shoes and shoved down my pants, leaving only my T-shirt and boxers. She stuffed her clothes and shoes into my pack, wearing only her black tank top and underwear. With my pants and boots soon piled on top, I could barely zip the bag closed, and it felt like a lead weight when I tossed it over my shoulders.

“We can’t afford to lose the pack,” Khaya said, as if weighing the bag with her eyes. “Keep hold of it at all costs.”

“Even drowning?” I sounded less sarcastic and more terrified than I’d intended.

“Tavin, you’re not going to drown. Staying calm is the first step toward realizing that. Now follow me.” She slipped over the starboard side as lithely as a dancer, as dark as a shadow.

I hauled myself over. Luckily, we weren’t far off the water, and the gunwale provided a handhold that we could use to lower ourselves. I clung to it as Khaya slid herself into the lake. She let out a little gasp as she did. Somewhere in the back of my head the voice of reason was screaming. I ignored it and followed her into the black water.

My own gasp left me as if my chest had been squeezed. It was cold. Definitely cold. And the pack was already trying to sink me as it dipped in the water and caught the barge’s current, almost slamming me into the algae-slick hull.

“Shit,” I said, trying to kick myself away.

“It’s okay, Tavin, just breathe,” Khaya said in her calmest voice. She had to have been as cold as I was. “You’re going to take my hand, and we’re going to duck under at the same time, then swim toward shore, got it? We need to stay under as long as we can. Remember, deep breaths.”

The barge was almost past us—it was our only cover, hiding us from the speedboats. The high-pitched hums of their motors was growing louder. I nodded, a bone-deep shiver rattling up my spine and out through my teeth.

“Okay. Last deep breath. Here we go.” She took my hand firmly and inhaled, long and deep. I did the same, filling my lungs.

And then she ducked under. I went in after her, the water closing over my head.

The world became black and icy and muffled and pressing. With one hand I paddled like mad, while the other squeezed Khaya’s hand in what must have been a painful grip. It wasn’t difficult to sink with the backpack weighing me down, and soon we were well beneath the surface, hidden from anyone who could see us, kicking as hard as we could.

Thank the Gods Khaya seemed to know where she was going, because I couldn’t see a thing. We could have been paddling right toward the speedboats for all I knew. Not that we were getting much closer to land even if we were on the right track, not at this pace. I’d seen how far we were from the dark shore before we’d ducked under. We’d be lucky if we could make it that far without drowning, let alone getting caught.

Water whirled by my ears as I swam, whistling a background tune to the throbbing beat of my heart. My lungs soon started to feel tight, and eventually, they started to burn. I squeezed Khaya’s hand urgently in the suffocating darkness.

She squeezed it tighter, holding me down.

So I kept kicking for one second, two seconds, three seconds, four … then my chest convulsed without warning, announcing that time was up, and my hand wrenched involuntarily against hers.

This time she let me pull her, and I struggled upwards harder than I’d ever struggled for anything in my life. My chest was shivering and lurching, my lungs wanting to breathe even if they took in water, especially now that I was so close to air. I tried to keep my mouth closed, pressing my shaking lips together and clenching my jaw until I thought my teeth would crack. But my mouth opened anyway—right as my head broke the surface.

I only had time for a ragged gasp of air—the most beautiful substance on Earth—before the backpack dragged me back under. Hands seized my T-shirt and yanked me back up.

I tried to stay afloat, but my body was so heavy and numb. My hands were like rigid claws that sliced and didn’t catch the water, even though I moved them faster and faster. I didn’t even care that the speedboats were no longer nearby, the green and yellow lights moving after the spotlighted bulk of the barge in the distance.

“It’s okay, Tavin, I can hold you up for a second. Just breathe.” Khaya sounded out-of-breath herself, if not quite as bad as me. Her hand clamped around my arm, lifting me, her legs kicking in a strong, smooth rhythm. “But we need to swim for shore.”

The shore was a dark line of trees and looming mountains above a vast expanse of even darker water.

“I don’t think I can make it that far,” I gasped, almost wanting to laugh at the realization. Maybe my panic was making me hysterical.

“Yes, you can,” Khaya said, as calm as ever, and then she said something I didn’t understand. Her fingertips grew warm, almost hot against my cold skin. Heat and strength buzzed through the rest of my body, like I’d tossed back a double shot of Drey’s whisky but without the sloppiness. My stomach suddenly rumbled, so loud I was surprised the speedboats didn’t hear it and turn around.

“I gave you energy, but it comes from your own body—I only put it on overdrive,” Khaya told me. “I can’t do it again or you’ll be too tired and hungry to move when this is all over.”

“If I’m still alive.” I was able to hold my head above water more easily than a second ago. My legs and arms felt warm and invigorated, but the expanse of water was as cold and wide as before, the bag just as heavy. “If this pack doesn’t kill me. I won’t be able to do a crawl stroke like this.”

“How do otters swim when they’re carrying their young?” Khaya asked.

“How the hell should I know?”

“On their backs. Do you know the backstroke?”

My jerky nod was more like a spasm. She swam behind me, helping me slide the pack from my back to my chest, looping the straps back around my shoulders. My head only went under once during the entire reshuffle. And all the while, the speedboats were heading farther and farther away from us.

“Try that,” she said. “Aim for shore.”

I leaned back in the water, kicking and doing what I was sure was the lamest backstroke ever, the straps chafing my shoulders. But it worked. I kept myself and the pack afloat at a crawling pace, my breathing just short of hyperventilation. Little rolling waves washed over my face every ten seconds or so, making me sputter and blurring my view of the night sky like stinging tears.

My muscles kept working, pumping on and on in mechanical movements, and I let my brain slip into numbness with the rest of my body. I didn’t think about the fact that I might drown at any second, because I couldn’t think. The act of swimming became everything. I couldn’t even spare any consideration for Khaya. I didn’t even know where she was.

At first, I didn’t recognize what had happened when—maybe twenty minutes later, maybe twenty hours—my stretching, paddling hands came up with fingers loaded with dark goop and my shoulders pressed into something firmer and more slippery than water, halting my endless backward motion.

Mud. I had reached the shore. My arms and legs gave out then and I dropped like a rock, my back sinking into sludge, the pack on my chest speeding the process. Luckily I was only in a couple feet of water; a foot deeper and I would have drowned. The ripples were already lapping dangerously close to my gaping mouth, and then a slightly bigger wave splashed down my throat, making me cough.

Khaya had washed up next to me. The pace of her breathing matched mine, and all either of us could seem to do was listen to ourselves gasp for several long minutes.

“I think w
e rinsed,” I said eventually, my lungs heaving as I hauled myself up onto my elbows. My limbs felt like melted rubber.

“What?” Khaya gasped, dragging herself farther toward the rocks leading up to the line of dark trees. Her bare arms and legs were smeared in mud—marks on her skin that were no more comprehensible than the Words on her shoulders.

“You said we needed to rinse the smells off.”

There was a pause, and then Khaya collapsed on her stomach, laughing a full, breathy laugh. It was the first time I’d heard anything like that coming from her. A grin shaped my numb face in spite of the cold—in spite of everything. I was alive, and Khaya was laughing, and that felt pretty damned good.

ten

Khaya didn’t stay down for long. “We need to move,” she said—her new mantra. She got up on her hands and knees, then stood on wobbly legs on the night-soaked lakeshore. I couldn’t remember the world ever looking so dark; never, in the glittering spread of Eden City. “Not only will the Athenaeum be tracking us soon with all the resources available to them, but we’ll get hypothermic.”

She tugged the pack off my chest, helping me up as she did, even though I nearly pulled her back down.

“It’s cold,” I said, feeling the air on my skin for the first time. Shivers took hold of me, shaking my body like a pack of gremlins. “Weird. It wasn’t cold earlier.”

“We’re well out of the city. Our weather pattern will no longer be regulated by Luft, so we’ll have to contend with the natural climate of this area.” Khaya’s words wavered with her own sudden shudder.

“Luft?” I asked.

“The Word of Air.”

Right. I was sure I had more questions somewhere in my numb brain, but I was too tired to dig around and find them.

“So we’ll have to stay warm and keep ourselves strong—not that you’ll have a problem with that,” she said, turning to lurch toward the trees, hauling the pack with her. I let her carry it. It was her turn, after all. “Thank you, by the way. I’m a decent swimmer, but I couldn’t have made that distance with a load like this by myself.”

“At your service, my lady,” I panted, stumbling after her, slipping on the rocks. We had to dash across a two-lane country highway, deserted at this time of night, and my knees buckled twice before I made it to the edge of the forest, but I managed not to collapse. So much for my strength. “You must have had swimming lessons in the Athenaeum.”

“Among other lessons. All the Words are highly trained. I can also play the harp and ballroom dance … and kick a man’s nose up into his brain.” She shot a glance back at me as we stepped under the cover of the trees. “Still think I’m a lady?”

I thought she must be joking until I remembered that Khaya didn’t joke.

“Why the hell do you need my help, then, if you can do all that?” A twig stabbed me in the foot, which was already aching with cold, and I tripped with a curse. I couldn’t see a thing in the underbrush. “Never mind the whole Word of Life thing.”

“Because I would never actually kick a man’s nose into
his brain.” Khaya dropped the pack to the ground and
fished out our sopping wet clothes and shoes. “I’m the Word of Life, not Death. And I told you, I couldn’t have done any of this without you: disguising myself in trash—twice—securing passage on the barge, or swimming while holding this pack, which is our key to survival. I couldn’t even walk yesterday, remember?”

I wasn’t used to her compliments or thanks, so I only shook my wet pants out of the bundle and grimaced as I held them up. “These are going to be cold.”

“You’ll be colder without them. Your body will warm them up … eventually,” she said, tugging her black, long-sleeved shirt over her head without expression.

I alternately hissed and yelped as I forced my legs into my frozen pants, not bothering to hide it from Khaya. She had seen me half-naked, crying, and now drowning, so I didn’t care if she saw me whining like a baby over wet clothes. I could barely feel my toes as I crammed them into my shoes.

“Faster,” Khaya said, waiting fully dressed in her black pants and shirt. “We need to find a stream. We’ll be much harder to track that way. No footprints, no smell to follow.”

“Right,” I said, tying the final knot in my wet, gritty laces. Then I straightened and threw the backpack over my aching shoulders. More like the backpack nearly overthrew me.

“Eat this.” Khaya tossed me one of the food bars from the pack.

My stomach rumbled like a truck engine as I caught it. She hadn’t taken one for herself, but that didn’t stop me. I ripped open the wrapper with my teeth and chewed half of it off in one bite.

“How are we going to find a stream?” I asked with my mouth full. “Just stumble around in the dark until we fall into one?”

“Basically,” Khaya said, starting off through the underbrush. She moved roughly parallel to the lake, though keeping a straight line was difficult through the tangle of shrubs and fallen logs. “I can’t check the map right now, because the flashlight might draw unwanted attention. But there should be tons of streams feeding Lake Léman.”

Something with thorns snagged at my pants as I followed. “Ouch. Lake Le-what?”

I mostly just wanted to talk about something. Escaping on the barge had been surreal—frightening, sure—but now, on foot, this felt all too real. I couldn’t let myself think about the fact that I was leaving the only home I’d ever known like a thief in the dark. A clumsy thief.

“Watch out for the blackberry brambles,” Khaya said, not looking back at me. “Though I hope they stay plentiful. I can force them to grow berries, even when it’s too cold and they’re not in season, like now. And Lake Léman is what Lake Eden is called outside of Eden City, in both France and Switzerland. Just like the Nectar River is also known as the Rhone. We like to rename things, even change languages. Our own English-speaking Eden City was French-speaking Geneva before we took it over a couple hundred years ago, at the turn of the nineteenth century.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know too much about what existed beyond the borders of Eden City—or even Eden City’s history—aside from the fact that there were lots of other countries out there, and Captain Crunch came from one of them.

Gods, I wanted some Captain Crunch. I tried to stop thinking about all the things I’d rather be eating and stuffed the other half of the food bar in my mouth. It tasted too healthy. Drey had long ago tried to feed me stuff like this, but had soon abandoned all hope of succeeding.

“If my memory is correct,” Khaya continued, “we need to hike southeast through these foothills into the Chablais Alps, then make our way back across the Swiss border, which shouldn’t be too far. We’ll be in the Swiss Alps after that.”

The Swiss Alps. The location of the Matterhorn and Drey’s mysterious address—a place of exile for Khaya and perhaps answers for me.

“Sounds like you had lessons in geography, too.” I
stubbed my foot on a low, rotting log that was indistinguishable from the rest of the ground and I uttered a curse. “I can hardly point to Eden City on a map.” I could hardly have pointed to myself in this darkness.

“It’s in the southwestern corner of Switzerland, at the far end of Lake Ed—Léman,” Khaya said, her pace quickening ahead of me as if she had night vision. “It’s only a few miles from the French border—46.2 north by 6.15 east.”

“Way to make me feel like an ignoramus.” Drey had never wanted me to sound stupid, yet I realized he could have taught me a lot more than he had. He’d talked about faraway places, ancient legends, and distant histories. But anything recent, right next to me, was like a blank spot on a map in my brain.

Khaya actually sounded chastised. “I’m not bragging. I just know.”

Like she was
just
beautiful,
just
the Word of Life, and
just
knew how to kick someone’s head off—though I had yet to see that last one demonstrated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“At least one of us knows. And while being the Word of Life is cool and all,” I said with yet another shiver, “I wish you were the Word of Fire. I’m freezing my a—uh, I’m pretty cold.” I censored myself, not wanting to sound more lower class than I already did.

A light drizzle had begun working its way between tree branches, invisible in the dark and misting my face like someone’s lisping spit. It rarely rained in Eden City, only enough to give the city the occasional wash-down and water the planters and parks—thanks to the schedule maintained by the Word of Air, I now realized.

“Trust me, you don’t wish that,” Khaya said, vaulting over a log. I thought I heard a smile in her voice. “Agonya has a very short temper. She would likely have lit you on fire by now.”

“At least I would be warm,” I said, falling over the same log. “Okay, maybe I don’t want the Word of Fire. How about the Word of Electric Heaters? Or maybe the Word of Warm Coats?”

Khaya laughed again, really laughed, her voice ringing through the trees like a bell. The sound carried me up with it, making me feel like I was flying instead of crawling around in the bushes. But she swallowed her laughter nearly as soon as it had begun.

“Gods, I’m being too loud,” she said. “I must be tired.”

I hoped tiredness wasn’t the only thing letting her loosen up. “We could always stop—”

“No, we can’t,” she said, cool and businesslike once again. “Not until sunrise. We need to get as far away as possible and take advantage of the darkness to move. And we should probably quit talking. Whether or not they know how we got out of the city, they’ll soon realize we’re not there, and then they’ll be combing the countryside for us—especially the lakeshore along the barge’s route.”

We stopped speaking after that, trekking in a silence that was complete aside from the occasional snapping twig or whispered curse when I tripped. Or the low growls from my stomach. The food bar only helped for about a half hour before I was ravenous again. Khaya was right—the boost of energy she’d given me in the river had definitely come from my body, and now it was demanding repayment, with interest. I didn’t want to stop to unpack another bar, because I didn’t know how many we had. Even if they tasted bad, they were our only food. And I was pretty sure Khaya would leave me behind at the pace she was going. I’d never encountered such darkness or silence in my life, and didn’t exactly want to be lost in it.

About a half hour or so after we’d started walking, we still hadn’t come across a stream but we’d nearly stumbled into the backyards of a few country houses. I was about to ask Khaya if her knowledge of geography was all that sophisticated when the sound of running water rose through the trees.

“Finally,” Khaya said.

The stream appeared, a braid of shimmering darkness through the underbrush, about as wide as a street. I thought it would be easier going once we hit the stream, but when I saw Khaya go perfectly still as she stepped into the water, shoes and all, I knew I was in for some extreme discomfort. Khaya always seemed to act the calmest when things were the worst. Sure enough, when I trundled in after her, I swore loud enough to earn a glare and a finger held to her lips for silence.

“Sorry,” I hissed as she stepped behind me to unzip the backpack, “but it’s like ice water. Or fire. My feet are burning!”

She didn’t answer, just filled the water bottle, which had a filter in the cap, then shot several blasts of liquid into her mouth before handing it to me. I didn’t think I wanted any more water touching me until I sprayed some in my mouth and realized I was dying of thirst. Then I couldn’t get enough. All too soon, Khaya was repacking the bottle and starting upstream ahead of me.

My shoes kept rocks from jabbing my feet, but I still slipped and staggered, hurting other parts of my body. Even though I’d rolled up my pants, they ended up soaked to the mid-thigh. Between the splashes and the ever-constant drizzle, I was nearly as wet as I’d been after dragging myself out of the lake.

Soon I could no longer feel anything below the knees. As if Khaya knew, she picked up her feet and slogged faster against the current.

“Keep your blood flowing,” she said.

I was already huffing and puffing from exhaustion, so I didn’t think that was a concern. “Did you get marathon training in the Athenaeum, too?” I asked.

“Not quite,” Khaya said shortly.

“Was your donor parent a triathlon gold medalist, then?”

She didn’t answer. She must have known I was trying to dig for information, which wasn’t as subtle as I’d thought.

“Probably,” I said, when she remained silent. “All we need to test the theory is to get you on a bike, since we’ve got the swimming and the—”

“My donor mother was Israeli,” Khaya said with a backwards glance. I couldn’t read her expression in the dark. “A brilliant obstetrician. And of course she was beautiful—is beautiful. I’m sure she’s still alive. I don’t know much more about her than that.”

I still had plenty of other questions. Khaya seemed to have forgotten her ban on conversation, now that we’d reached the stream, and talking was distracting me from the fact that my feet felt like unfeeling bricks attached to the stubs of my ankles. “The Godspeakers don’t let you keep in touch?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Why would they? They’re not really our parents—only our genetics. Besides, they want to limit any foreign influence on us. See, even though Eden City is trying to look inclusive of the other world powers, it’s all for show.”

“So, Khaya means ‘life’ in Hebrew?”

“Well, that’s
khayim
.” She sounded eager to talk about something other than her donor mother, and gave the word a harsh, hocking accent. She must have learned Hebrew, too, along with everything else on the planet. “But ‘Khaya’ is an established girl’s name that essentially means the same thing, so the City Council went with that, since it’s more feminine. They’re not always so nice. The previous Word of Death, Herio’s mother, was named with the Italian word
morte
. We all called her Em, anyway.”

“So what’s Herio? It must mean ‘death,’ of course, but in what language?”

“Basque,” Khaya said quietly. I almost didn’t hear her over the burbling water, and I wondered if she didn’t like talking about him. “His donor father was French, but from the Basque region in the southwest.”

“What’s ‘death’ in French again?” I asked, for lack of something better to say. I didn’t want to talk about him either, really, but it was like prodding at a wound—I did it anyway.

“Similar to Italian:
mort.
”

“That’s not very nice, I guess.” My words began to come faster. “Not that Herio deserves a nice name. I wish I’d had the chance to shoot him with that gun before we—”

Khaya stopped short but didn’t turn. “How could you say that?”