Wordless (11 page)

I stopped too, the water parting around my shin as if I’d turned to stone. I felt colder than stone. “He killed Drey.”

“So that makes it right to kill him?”

“Someone needs to do something.” My voice rose. “Are you defending him? Why, because he’s a precious Word—”

“No!” Khaya spun on me with a splash. “I hate him, do you hear me? I hate him!” Her voice held more emotion than I’d ever heard. “The Word of Death shouldn’t exist—like that gun. But killing him would be a bit hypocritical, don’t you think?”

Maybe. But the thought of the gun was still … intoxicating, almost; heady. I’d never had something like that before, something that could kill at the twitch of a finger, like Herio could. I’d never held such power.

I shook the thought out of my head. The subject had obviously gotten too touchy for the both of us.

“Have you ever heard the name Drey Barnes?” I asked. “I mean, aside from when I’ve mentioned him.” It was the first time I could stand asking her about him. “Or a Dr. Swanson? Drey said he used to work for Swanson in the Athenaeum.”

The change in topic made her blink in the darkness, and some of the anger left her eyes. She had moved closer to me with her outburst, close enough for me to be able to lift a hand and touch her face—not that I did. As if she also noticed how near we were, she turned and continued trekking upstream.

“I never heard of Drey Barnes before I met you,” she said, “but I’ve definitely heard of Dr. Swanson. He’s the head of the Godspeakers.”

“Wait, what?” I almost stopped again. “I thought Swanson was just Herio’s assistant, part of the Athenaeum’s security team.”

“He might present himself as such. The Godspeakers like to lie low so the outside world doesn’t get wind of how much power they truly wield. Because the idea of the divine leadership of the Words—the Words of the Nameless Gods Made Flesh—is just too perfect, too potent an image.” Bitterness touched her voice. “If the world knew the truth, everyone might be less willing to cooperate with us. In actuality, Swanson is one of the most powerful people in Eden City.”

“Wow. And Drey worked for him.” I paused, embarrassed that I sounded like a pauper trying to make bogus claims to a higher stature or something—to raise myself to
her
level. But really, I just couldn’t believe it. I slipped on a smooth, slimy rock and almost didn’t catch myself before falling on my face. “It’s just … crazy.”

“Not really. Swanson has had many people working under him over the years.”

It was probably true. I let it drop, since I didn’t know what else to say. She’d likely been about to tell me to be quiet again anyway. Besides, how could I explain to her—a girl whose birth had been preordained and engineered at a precise time and location—what it was like to not know where you came from, or even know about the person who raised you?

I wanted to get to Drey’s address in the Alps even more now. That place had to be filled with clues to the puzzle Drey had left me—the puzzle of his life.

When my thoughts turned to Drey, I let my mind slip into silence. I was too exhausted to think about him, worried that doing so would take up my remaining strength as I trudged in Khaya’s wake, my body falling into the numb rhythm of struggling through water for the second time that night. I filled my head with the murmuring of the forest instead while the hours slipped past: the gurgle of the various streams we followed and the chilly gusts whispering through the tops of the otherwise silent trees, which stood over us like dark sentinels. We’d crossed a couple of dirt roads and hiking paths earlier in the evening, but now the forest was thick and imposing on either side of us, any other route barred by branches, the only way forward through the few icy cuts of water we managed to find. I’d thought some neighborhoods in Eden City were inhospitable, but this gave the word a new meaning. We didn’t belong here.

It was less of a thought and more of a feeling that took hold of my body, along with the cold, like an icy fist squeezing my heart. Or maybe I was freezing and on the verge of collapse. Right when I was about to say that maybe we shouldn’t—or that I couldn’t—go on, Khaya lurched to a stop and I stumbled into her from behind, almost pitching both of us into the water.

Her hand shot back, squeezing my side in a clawlike grip, steadying the both of us.

“The sky will start getting lighter in less than an hour,” she said, her voice gravelly from lack of use. She cleared her throat and released me. “And then they’ll have helicopters scouting from above for movement. And dogs on the ground, of course. So here is as good a spot as any.”

I rubbed my side. Squinting into the darkness over her shoulder, I saw a tangled blot marring the center of the stream, forcing the water to part around it. “An island,” I said, my voice sounding even rougher than hers. “So the dogs can’t track us.”

It looked as if all life in the forest had fought for purchase on the tiny patch of land. Two tall, ivy-covered trees stood on either side of the rocky strip, while a mass of bushes and fallen logs stretched between them.

“Exactly.” Khaya stumbled forward, falling to her knees as soon as she hit solid ground. She looked nearly as tired as I felt.

But she wasn’t resting. She flattened her palms against the earth of the island, wet like us from the misting rain, and muttered under her breath.

Immediately, the bushes and then the ivy on the trees stirred. Soon they were thrashing and twisting like the tentacles of some sea creature. The ground even shuddered beneath my feet, the trees groaning and creaking. But only thirty seconds passed, maybe, before Khaya stood and absently wiped her hands on her pants. Things had obviously been rearranged, but the bushes and ivy still looked like bushes and ivy to me.

“There,” she said, grabbing the pack I let fall from my shoulders. It felt heavier than the heaviest trash bag, even though I knew it wasn’t that bad. “I hope the tree will live through this. I’ll send its roots back down before we—”

“What did you do?” I interrupted, too drained for manners.

“Let’s go see.” Khaya shoved her way forward, the flashlight in her hand. I hadn’t even noticed her digging it out of the pack. The world seemed to be moving in bursts, while everything in between dragged in slow motion. Or maybe that was how my brain was working.

She turned on the flashlight as she ducked into the underbrush, but the light didn’t shine through the branches. It was almost like it was pointing into an enclosed space. I followed her into a seeming hallucination—a tent, disguised as foliage from the outside. The inside had walls of woven vines and leaves, tight enough to keep out rain. And the floor wasn’t covered in damp dirt, but lined like a mat made of reeds or bamboo. I realized it was the tree’s roots, unearthed and laid out at her command.

“This will insulate us from the ground,” Khaya said, crawling inside. She sat in the center of her small, living shelter and drew her knees up to her chest. “Don’t you want to come in?”

I dove in after her, my awe forgotten in my hurry to be somewhere dry and bright and filled with Khaya. As soon as I entered, she muttered another word and the flap of the “tent” closed behind me, the entwining vines locking us in.

“Give me your hands,” she said. I offered her one without hesitation and she chafed it between her own. “If I warm you, you’ll probably lapse into a coma.”

“Mmm, a coma sounds nice right about now,” I said, too tired to yawn. Nothing had ever felt as good as her warm hands, even if hers were probably only slightly less frozen than mine. My ass on the ground felt almost as good. I’d forgotten what it felt like to not be moving.

She didn’t hold my hand for long, though, letting it drop to pry off my shoes. My feet were white underneath my wet socks, my toes a pale bluish hue. Khaya frowned at them and began riffling through the pack at her side until she found the small package containing the strange silvery sheet, folded tight. I suddenly recognized it, even if I didn’t recognize the words on the label.

“It’s an emergency blanket,” she said, voicing my realization out loud. “The metallic coating will reflect our heat back at us.” Then she added softly, “Drey was well-prepared.”

I didn’t answer, still too tired to think about Drey. I only reached my stiff, frozen arms around my back, peeling my damp shirt off over my head. The air felt warmer than my shirt as it touched my bare skin.

Khaya stared at me for a second, then abruptly looked at the vine-woven wall of the tent.

I would have laughed if I’d had the energy. We were a lot closer and much better illuminated than we’d been over the last twenty-four hours, but she
had
either taken off my clothes or ordered me to take them off twice in that timespan.

“Take off your pants,” I said, giving her a taste of her own medicine—as Drey would have called it. Khaya’s eyes shot back to me before I added, “We can’t sleep in wet clothes, can we? It’s a basic survival lesson—even
I
know that.”

Her gaze softened, her honey-toned cheeks looking warmer. “I also know that. But I’m—I’m going to turn off the flashlight.”

“Okay,” I said, already starting on my pants. The button and zipper were giving my clumsy, unfeeling fingers far more trouble than usual. Even if I was too exhausted for embarrassment, I wasn’t about to ask her for help with that part—though I did stick out my foot. “Can you pull my pants over my ankle? It’s hard when they’re wet.”

She complied without comment, yanking the cuffs over my feet. She turned away after that, clicking off the flashlight and plunging us into total darkness without waiting for me to finish laying out my shirt and pants at the end of our shelter to dry.

She obviously didn’t want any help undressing. I listened to her stripping down in the dark, sitting in a shivering huddle waiting for her to finish. When I heard the crackling of plastic, I knew she was unfolding the emergency blanket. The edge of it fanned me with an unwelcome breeze as she shook it out.

“Here,” she said. “Take one side and get under. And you’re supposed to take everything off, Mr. Survival Expert.”

Even though I knew she couldn’t see, I slid off my boxers only when I had part of the blanket over me. Which was doubly stupid, because she was under the blanket too.

The blanket wasn’t big enough to avoid touching her. As I scooted farther under, my hand grazed what I hoped was her arm. I settled my shoulder near hers, lying on my back as far away from her as possible without edging my other shoulder out from under the cover, which was about the distance of an inch. I was too tall, as usual, my feet sticking out the bottom. I tried to tuck them under without brushing her. And failed.

She jumped next to me, rustling the blanket. “Gods, your feet are cold!” Then she sighed. “We’ll be warmer like this.” She sidled her shoulder against mine, her skin warm and soft. Even though our hips weren’t touching, hers were close enough for me to feel the warmth radiating from her body, hovering like a whisper of breath, making my skin prickle.

And that was when it hit me. I was naked under a blanket with an equally naked Word. Not that I could have done anything about it even if I’d wanted to, but there it was. At least it was enough of a distraction to keep me from thinking about Drey.

Or maybe it was too much of a distraction. As tired as I was, it took me a hell of a long time to fall asleep.

eleven

I woke up, disoriented and insanely thirsty, to spidery cracks of light working their way through the bizarre walls of my surroundings. It was daylight, whatever time it was, wherever I was. Lately, I’d been in strange enough places to not expect to see my cot in the back room of Drey’s garage as I glanced around, but I certainly didn’t expect to find what I did.

Khaya lay curled against me, her head buried in the crook of my arm, her wavy hair a wild, dark storm around her serene face. It was obvious by the bare curve of her shoulder—
patterned with indecipherable black script, visible above the edge of the silvery blanket over us—that she didn’t have a shirt on. I didn’t have one on either.

In my groggy daze, the previous night’s events came back to me slowly. Once again, remembering what had happened was like retracing a dream. But this time, I wasn’t as horrified by the fact that I couldn’t wake up. This was much less like a nightmare, with Khaya asleep next to me, warm and soft, even though Drey was still dead and I was still running for my life.

I’d never woken up next to a girl. It was both amazing and really damned weird, two things that made it hard to close my eyes on the situation, no matter how badly they wanted to close. Besides, I could very well get killed within the next day or two and might never see Khaya like this again.

Sleep relaxed her face in a way I’d never seen before, giving her a peaceful, carefree look unlike her forced calm. Her eyelashes brushed her silky cheek in a dark, perfect fan, her full lips slightly parted. I figured she would hate being seen in such a vulnerable state, so I studied the only other visible part of her—the top of her shoulder, peeking out from under the blanket and inked with dark shapes.

Even taking my time, I couldn’t make sense out of anything written there, and gradually my sight blurred, my eyelids drooping.

That half-asleep dream state crept over me, and the last thing I saw before my eyes closed was one of the Words melting down her shoulder, running along her arm and dripping like black ink from the tip of her fingers, which rested against the root-lined floor.

I saw them in my head then—the Words.

Reach, give, nurture, grow
… the
succession of thoughts blossomed in my mind, leaping one to the next, wild and uncontrollable, more like images than words. They all sprang from the same seed, linking them together like a golden string, streaming through my mind and body like blood, like sunlight:

Life.

My own muttering woke me up. My eyes flew wide.

Khaya’s eyes were open in front of mine, staring blankly. The Words felt like strings, stretching from where I touched her to the ground, running down her arm as if she were a puppet. On the floor, hairlike roots were sprouting, twisting and curling around her fingers.

I shouted wordlessly and wrenched my arm out from under her, breaking our contact. Khaya shot bolt upright, seeming to remember at the last moment to clutch the blanket to her chest and nearly pulling it off me entirely. She panted, looking from me down to the cluster of roots that had ceased growing in fast-motion now that she was no longer touching them—now that I was no longer speaking.

“How could you?” she gasped, her wide, dark eyes glistening with tears. “You just want to use me like everyone else!”

“No, Khaya, I promise, I—”

But she buried her face in her blanket-covered knees before I could finish, folding her arms over her head.

I scooted closer, both because I was reaching out to comfort her and because she was pulling that last, crucial corner of blanket from my lap. She jerked away when my hand brushed her shoulder, forcing me to do a seated hop even closer.

“Don’t touch me!” she cried.

“Khaya, I didn’t mean to! Gods, please believe me.” I hovered next to her, not daring to touch her again. She looked so small, her slim shoulders shaking above the blanket. “I’m so sorry. It just happened—”

“Don’t look at me—don’t read them! You wouldn’t if you knew how it felt, like someone slipping inside your skin,
using
your body.” Her voice grated from behind the shield of her arms and hair, rubbing me raw like sandpaper.

I wanted to hug her and apologize over and over again until she stopped crying. But my touch repulsed her. I knotted my hands into fists, folding my arms and hiding them away. I’d never intended to godspeak through her—that was what I’d done, I realized—but there I’d been, watching her without her knowing, drinking her in while she’d been asleep, and that was what my semi-conscious mind had led me to. The fact that I could do this while wordless, which everyone always said was impossible, didn’t even amaze me. I felt too sick.

I sat for a minute in dull, nauseated silence, Khaya crying to herself, both of us hunched and alone, until I realized I was acting like a moron.

“Khaya, come here.” I unfolded my arms and wrapped them around her shoulders. She tried to pull away, but her back had already met the woven wall of our shelter. Instead, she froze, stiff as a statue.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Khaya, or do anything like that ever again. I was just seeing what the Words would look like to someone wordless. I didn’t think anything would happen.” I bowed my head next to hers, her hair brushing my temple and tickling my nose. “See, my eyes aren’t even open. I’ll never look at the Words again if you don’t want me to. I don’t even want to. It’s not fair that people do that to you, and I want nothing to do with it. In fact, I want to hurt the Godspeakers even more now. I’m wordless and I’m happy that way. I’m sorry. Did I tell you how sorry I was?”

Somewhere amidst my babbling, Khaya’s shoulders relaxed. I let my final question fall into silence.

“I didn’t mean to get so upset,” she murmured, her face still hidden in her arms. Her voice was audible only because I was so close. “I was only shocked, that’s all. I’ve been free of the Godspeakers for a couple of days now, and this is the happiest I’ve ever been. So to be woken up like that … ”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, squeezing her tighter. If this was the happiest she’d ever been, things must have been pretty awful in the Athenaeum.

“Tavin, you’re crushing me.”

“Oh!” I released her. But I didn’t go far. I was still limited by the length of the silvery blanket, and my chest was already bare from the waist up.

“I’m fine,” she said, lifting her reddened, damp face. One hand rubbed her eyes while the other held the blanket nearly up to her neck. “I’m just—I’m tired.”

“Here, go back to sleep.” I gestured at the ground. “I can sleep outside if you want me to.”

“No, that’s stupid. You’ll freeze, and you might be seen.”

“Then I’ll give you some privacy,” I said, dropping onto my side, facing the opposite wall. “I’m sorry. I’ll shut up now. Good night.”

She was silent behind me, and I could almost feel her eyes on my back. Then she sighed and slid down next to me under the blanket, leaving at least a couple inches between us. “Sleep well, Tavin.”

I didn’t think I would be able to sleep again, but I did. My body seemed to have the useful ability to shut down when I didn’t want to feel anything anymore.
At least I took responsibility for what I did
, I thought right before I fell asleep … though Drey would have smacked me upside the head for doing something like that in the first place.

My subsequent dream didn’t help ease my guilt.

As I slept, I could have sworn I felt someone’s hands on my cheek, turning my head—then soft lips pressing against mine for a long, unbroken moment, like falling slowly and never hitting the ground. But then it ended, and a voice—Khaya’s voice—said:

“Now we’re even.”