Wordless (24 page)

Only Khaya’s freedom, not mine, coincided with the world’s. And as Toki, the Word of Time, had proved, death was a means of escape. The horrible decision I never thought I would have to face was staring me right in the eyes: Khaya or the world?

It was a choice I couldn’t make. I couldn’t shoot her
or
doom the world. But a nagging voice in the back of my head said that by doing nothing, by not pulling the trigger, I was making a choice.

I ignored the voice, because there was still a chance for both Khaya and the world … if I could trust Tu.
Hah.
Trust Tu.
I supposed it was fitting that the hope of the earth rested with the Word of Earth.

I was trying to decide what signal Tu would best understand when Herio took a step forward, away from Swanson.

“What are you doing?” Swanson asked.

“Calling his bluff,” Herio said simply, taking another step.

I realized it was the first time I’d ever heard Herio speak. His voice sounded sort of like mine did when I heard it played back at me as a recording—off, somehow, but frighteningly similar.

“Stop,” Swanson said. When Herio didn’t listen, taking another slow step, Swanson signaled the two men with guns.

They moved out from the helicopter and marched up behind Herio. I thought maybe this was all still part of Swanson’s plan, a way to get the guards closer to us … until Herio turned with a disarming smile on his face and put a hand on each man’s shoulder, like they were friends. He leaned forward to whisper something in their ears.

Then they collapsed at his feet, crumpling in the snow as if they had been deboned.

Swanson cried out in shock and the medic whipped out the tranquilizer gun I’d never doubted he had under his white jacket. But Herio’s boot was there to meet it. The Word of Death moved in a dark blur, kicking the gun in a spiraling arc into the field, where it vanished beneath a sheet of white.

Automatons had instincts, I remembered when the medic dodged fast enough to avoid Herio’s viperlike hand—and his sharply spoken Word. Otherwise, the medic would have hit the snow too, like the two guards. But he rolled out of Death’s way and came up in a sprint, heading toward his lost weapon.

Which left no one to stop Herio from reaching us except Swanson, and Swanson was staring at Herio as if he’d never seen the Word of Death before.

I froze, too. If I aimed at Herio instead of Khaya, my bluff would be called. They would know I couldn’t shoot her, and chances were Herio would death-touch me anyway even if I
could
shoot him—unless my aim was spot-on and I killed him instantly, which was unlikely because I’d never shot a gun before. And then the medic would be back to drop Khaya with the tranquilizer gun. The world would belong to Eden City. Unless I could make good on my threat and actually find it in me to kill her.

I didn’t know what to do.

But Khaya didn’t hesitate. She snatched the gun from me just as Herio lunged for us, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger. The shot exploded into the cold air.

As I’d feared, the bullet didn’t stop Herio’s forward momentum. He hit me around the knees, taking me down with him. I tried to lift a leg to kick him in the face, but he had my legs held tight, even though the snow turned red around where he lay, the stain spreading out from his stomach.

Khaya had shot him in the gut. Maybe it was poetic justice, since that was essentially what he had done to Drey. But I didn’t feel satisfied, only horrified.

“Move again,” Herio panted at me, “and you die.” He smiled at Khaya with bloody teeth as she kept the gun pointed at him. “You weren’t made for killing. Only I am.”

“I aim for your head next.” Khaya’s voice quavered but her hand was steady. “Even if I do nothing, you’re dead with a wound like that.” Her tone became pleading. “But if you let him go, I can heal you—”

“No!” I said, raising myself on my elbows to snarl at Herio. “Good riddance to a bad Word. Go for it,
brother
. Kill me.” For a crazy second, I meant it. I wanted to spite Swanson and foil his messed-up plan. It would all be for nothing if I died.

But I didn’t really want to die, nor did I want Khaya to become a killer. It would kill
her
.

Herio smiled his red smile. “For once I have something better than killing. A way to kill your soul. All of your souls.” He looked from me to Khaya to Dr. Swanson, where his eyes lingered. “Tavin was born for it, after all.”

“No!” Swanson cried, pulling his own gun out of his jacket. Not a tranquilizer gun.

I couldn’t believe it. Swanson was going to kill Herio—and lose the Word of Death forever. But I could believe what happened next even less.

Before either Swanson or Khaya had the chance to shoot, Herio spoke in what must have been Basque. The Words ran over his lips like ink, black mixing with his red blood. They poured out of his mouth and dribbled onto my legs, feeling like acid eating into my skin once they soaked through my pants. The burn spread, not only along my skin but as if it had entered my circulatory system and was now fire pumping through my veins. I howled, and kept howling as I thrashed, even kicking free of Herio’s now-loose grasp. But that didn’t help. He’d already set one of his fatal chain-reactions in motion. I was dying.

Except the pain faded—after seconds, maybe, but it felt like minutes. I didn’t die.

Herio was staring up into the darkening sky, a slight smile on his face, snow falling into his unblinking eyes. The gun dropped to Swanson’s side, unfired.

“No,” Swanson said. But he wasn’t looking at Herio, who was somehow dead, I realized. He was looking at me. So was Khaya. Both were wide-eyed.

Then a commotion drew both their gazes behind me, back toward the cabin. I now noticed that the ground was shaking, and there were screams. The gunshot had probably been enough of a signal for Tu.

I looked over my shoulder long enough to see Pavati raise a wall of solid ice, several feet thick, in front of her and Tu. Bullets cracked against it while Tu launched SUVs and men into the air with the bucking earth.

I turned back to Swanson just in time to see his hand signal … and then Luft, Agonya, and a pale girl—Mørke, the Word of Darkness—slip out of the helicopter with three Godspeakers behind them. They’d been there all along, hiding. I should have known. Swanson had probably been too shocked to remember them until now.

Mørke instantly cried out a Word, and blackness extended from her like tentacles, crawling over the field and covering everything in night.

The only light came from the Word of Fire.

Air and Fire worked together as well as Earth and Water. At a few muttered commands from Luft and Agonya, the air sparked into liquid flame that struck at Pavati’s ice wall like a giant snake, melting it within moments and burning everything else in its path—including several of the Chinese and Swiss delegates. Pavati and Tu dove for cover as an SUV exploded and the cabin went up like a bonfire. Then I could no longer see them, only flames in the darkness.

But a wave of snow and earth rose like a tsunami and came crashing down over Luft, burying him in an instant. Agonya managed to dive out of the way, sending up several geysers of fire, but she didn’t have as much precision without Luft. Not that her flames would burn any less.

My limbs weren’t responding normally. I tried to tell Khaya to go without me, to run, but
go
or
run
weren’t the words to come out of my mouth.

“Quit, depart!” I shouted at her. Even weirder, the strange words weren’t meant for her, but only a part of her—a vital part that was being told to leave her body behind.

The feeling of the words, their intention—as if they had a mind of their own—was so terrifying it froze my mind solid, far colder and darker than the field of snow I was lying in, than all the fields of snow in the world put together.

Khaya looked at me in what I could only imagine was horror, firelight flickering across her face. Then she ran, almost like she wasn’t running because I’d told her to but to get away from me. At least she was going.

Something was wrong with me. I tried to ignore the realization that was scratching at the back of my mind, trying to get in. No. That would be worse than being Swanson’s son, or the Word of Death’s brother. Because that would make me …

No.

The medic was finally sprinting forward with his retrieved tranquilizer gun. How he’d found it in the snowy darkness was beyond me. He slid to a halt nearby, taking careful aim at Khaya’s back. Maybe he didn’t realize how long my arms were, or maybe he figured I was down for the count.

My hand shot out and caught him around the ankle. But, like before, what came out of my mouth wasn’t
stop
, the word I meant to say.

“Falter, seize, cease!”

That stopped him. It also stopped something else.

His body went rigid. He fell to the ground without taking his shot, like a toppling tree, just as Khaya vanished, her dark hair trailing above her as she dropped into the earth. Tu had done it. He’d gotten Khaya away, and I hoped Pavati, too—I didn’t see her among the tossed, blackened earth and SUVs in front of the burning cabin, though it was hard to look anywhere other than right in front of me. I knew what I had done; I could feel it through the man’s ankle and in my hand, where the Words held him in a grip far more powerful than mine.

His heart had failed so suddenly, he hadn’t even had time to scream.

I screamed—louder when I met his staring eyes above the pillow of snow, glinting in the flickering light. It didn’t matter that he’d been an automaton. Herio was lying on the other side of me, the faint smile frozen on his face. He had died to do this to me. I was surrounded by death—death on either side, at my fingertips, in my mouth, in my head.

My screaming continued, but not for long after a tranquilizer dart hit me in the thigh. Swanson had shot me with the gun from the dead medic’s hand. I was almost glad, since I didn’t know what I might have eventually screamed—what Words. Swanson’s pale, sickly expression was the last thing I saw.

The sound of my own horror lingered in my ears even after my eyes closed, a dying howl in the darkness. A darkness I now belonged to.

twenty-six

The trip back to the Athenaeum passed unnoticed behind a thick veil of mental fog. The tranquilizer and additional drugs kept me under, for the most part, but I remembered screaming as they transferred me from the helicopter to an ambulance, on a gurney like Drey’s. His hadn’t had as many leather straps as mine did, though.

I didn’t see Drey again until a while later.

In the interim, I either babbled or shouted Words of Death at anyone in the vicinity of my hospital room, trying to grab them at the same time. I needed to touch them to kill them. And that was all I wanted to do.

Swanson tried to explain to me that this was what happened when a Word passed to someone later in life. “The body isn’t used to it,” he said, sitting at my bedside, the leather cuffs on my wrists keeping him safe from me. “Words have to be trained—both the person and the power. Right now, only the Words are controlling you—and to a lesser extent, the drugs. Nothing is controlling the Words. They’re like a speeding car without a driver.”

It was hard to hear him over my death threats. Yet even then he didn’t try to shut me up; it wasn’t until a nurse tried to give me an IV—to feed me, she said—and I nearly killed her when I lunged at her and brushed the skin of her arm with mine. She fell to the floor, but the Words didn’t fully take and the doctors were able to get her heart beating again. Shortly after that, I was injected with something strong and lost consciousness.

When I woke up, I noticed a few new additions to my outfit, which had previously only consisted of a hospital gown, padded leather cuffs on each arm, and numerous straps across my chest and legs. Now there was also a strap around my jaw, which kept my mouth closed and the Words inside, and familiar black bracelets on each wrist.

Monitors. Two of them.

There was no way I’d be able to chop off
both
thumbs to get rid of the monitors, as if I would ever in a million years be able to free myself from all the straps—never mind the drugs inside of me—and then go find an axe. Khaya’s escape route from the Athenaeum would be impossible for me to take.

No, I wasn’t going anywhere.

I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to. All I could see, over and over again, was not the white walls of my hospital room and the glowing machines and the doctors and nurses and other Godspeakers trying to talk to me; it was the look of horror on Khaya’s face before she’d run from me.

It had only been a week since I’d first met her. It had taken seven days for the two Nameless Gods to create the world with their Words, or so the stories said, and seven days for the Words to destroy my life. Maybe creation and destruction came in weekly doses.

Sure, I’d saved Khaya, and the world would be all right. But I wouldn’t be. Not ever again. I was Khaya’s opposite now. She strengthened and built; I weakened and destroyed. She was the Word of Life, and I was the Word of Death. I’d been searching so intently for who I was, but now I would have given anything not to know.

It was funny, and I laughed for a long time: since Dr. Swanson was born and raised in Eden City, and Words were named in the donor parent’s language, my name technically wasn’t Tavin anymore. Nor was it Herio from Basque or Morte from Italian, or whatever. Just Death, plain and simple. It didn’t really have a nice ring to it.

Most people still called me Tavin. Swanson did, during his regular visits, looking more and more haggard. But I ignored him, listening instead to the beeps of the machines, the dripping of the IVs, and the Words raging in my head.

And then …

“Tav.”

That was a voice I couldn’t ignore.

Drey sat, leaning forward in a chair next to my bedside, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front, head bowed. He looked a hell of a lot better than he had the last time I had seen him, though he was still too thin and his eyes had a hollow look they’d never had before.

He stared at his hands for a while before he spoke. “I’m sorry, Tavin. I’m sorry I never told you the truth. But I wanted to raise you with humility, not power. I wanted people to respect you, not out of fear but admiration. I tried to keep you from this life and I failed, Tavin. I failed.” For a second, his voice broke. He looked broken. But then he squared his shoulders and straightened in the chair.

He stared at me with eyes the color of a sky I would probably never see again—a wide, free sky.

“I took a risk, sending you back in here so your real father could see what you’d become—what wonderful adults could be made of all these children he treats as tools. Powerful tools, but disposable nonetheless. And they got you; they’ve tried to make you into a tool. But you’re still the man I raised.”

Drey stood, looking down at me as if I were lying on my cot in his garage, my arms folded lazily behind my head, not on a hospital bed with padded leather cuffs strapping down my straining hands.

Hands that would kill him, given the opportunity. How could I be anything but a tool? A gun? At best, an attack dog?

“I gave you a name and it doesn’t mean death, no matter what those marks on your back say—no matter what you say.” The tone of his voice left no room for argument, as if I could have argued instead of only making strangled noises or screaming ways for him to die. “I marked you, and they’ve marked you. So in a way you’re both my son and the Athenaeum’s. Mine and Swanson’s.”

Anger, disgust, and sadness warred on his grizzled face when he said that name, but he swallowed them all, his voice hardening once again. “But even more, you’re your own person. And now that you have both humility and power, I guess we’ll see what the result will be.”

He reached out to put his hand on my head, but pulled away at the last second. Then he moved toward the door and had to rap on it before it opened—it was locked, of course. His eyes held mine before he stepped through.

“Admiration or fear,” he said.

He left me in a fortress of a room with leather straps across my chest, cuffs on my arms, and unbreakable bracelets around my wrists, bound like a deadly animal being trained.

I was an animal. I was deadly. And they were trying to train me. But his words reminded me of something else.

I was still Tavin.