Wordless (22 page)

“Khaya,” Pavati said. “His arm is about to—”

There was a muffled snap, and Tu screamed. Both sounds were pretty awful.

“Too late.
”

Khaya leapt off him, a look of horror on her face. “Gods, I didn’t mean to! I was only … ”

Tu rolled onto his uninjured shoulder, gripping his arm and groaning. He must have been in too much pain to say anything biting.

Pavati sighed. “At least you can heal him. Come on, let’s get him into one of the rooms.”

Khaya tried to help him up, but Tu batted her hand away. “Bitch,” he wheezed.

Pavati hauled him upright, none-too-gently. “None of that now,” she said, then half-supported, half-dragged him down one of the hallways.

Khaya followed, looking more scared than ashamed. Not of Tu, I thought. Of herself.

twenty-three

When my breath came back fully, it had to fight for room in my throat with the blood. I rolled over on the packed dirt floor of our warren and spit out as much as I could, probing for damage as gently as possible with my index finger. Tu’s left hook had loosened one of my teeth on the right side, and where his first punch had nearly knocked me senseless, my cheek was puffy and excruciatingly tender. I would have a spectacular black eye in the morning. Maybe a pair.

“Gods,” I said to myself from my huddle on the ground. I wanted to find a warmer place to lie down, away from the stairs leading to the surface and the colder air outside, but I didn’t feel like moving yet.

“Yup,” Pavati said behind me, returning from the room where she’d taken Tu. “How are you?”

“Fine.” I grimaced, then winced when grimacing hurt. “How’s Tu?”

“Khaya dislocated his shoulder and fractured a few other odds and ends, but she’s patching him up. He’ll just need to sleep it off. Ah, well, he probably deserved it.”

So much for reaching Drey’s address in two hours. I could have punched myself a third time.

“Then I deserved this.” I reached up to touch my face, then thought better of it. “I set him off by getting him a smaller sweatshirt. I did it on purpose.”

Pavati retrieved the flashlight from where it had fallen and crouched next to me. “That’s mature of you to admit it, but you didn’t
quite
deserve to have your face mangled over a joke, even an irritating one.” She whistled after she brushed back my hair to look at my cheek. Her hand fell away and she sighed. “He’s not a bad guy, really. He’s just conflicted.”

She looked pretty conflicted herself as she glanced down the hallway where Tu and Khaya were.

“But why?” I said, embarking on the long climb to my feet. “I mean, I see why he’s pissed at Eden City, but then to want to go play the same role for some other country … ”

“He can’t imagine not using his power,” Pavati said, looping her arm through mine and helping me up. “But as powerful as he is, he’s only one guy. He wants to be a part of something. Which I can sympathize with, even if I’m too cynical to think I could ever really belong anywhere.”

I steadied myself against Pavati as a surge of dizziness threatened to knock me down again. “Well, like you said, China basically sold him into slavery before he was conceived. Why would he want to go to them, in particular?”

She sighed and started walking me toward the downward spiraling stairs like an invalid, scooping up the backpack for me and aiming the flashlight while she was at it. “It’s complicated. It has a lot to do with his mother.”

“The Japanese lady? I mean, the Word with a Japanese donor parent?” I said before Pavati could correct me.

“That’s the one. Also known as Tsuchi. She was the reason Tu looked toward his unknown donor father from China—and China itself—for a sense of belonging. It didn’t help that Japan already had such a shaky relationship with Eden City in the first place. In fact, you could say that started everything.”

I winced as my foot hit the first downward step, the motion vibrating up my leg and torso and into my head. At least the air was warmer the deeper we went. “What do you mean?”

“It has to do with the Words of Power and how, these days, only the Word of Shaping is left out of the original four,” Pavati said as we made our slow way down the staircase. “The Word of Movement was the first to go—
vanished, centuries ago. No one knows quite where he went missing, but it would have been pretty hard to keep track of an insanely powerful telekinetic without all the modern innovations they have for us now, like monitors. Then the Word of Naming—arguably the most powerful of the Words of Power—was assassinated by an agent of the Spanish crown in the mid–nineteenth century.”

We were in a hallway that would have been pitch-black without the flashlight. Pavati steered me toward the closest doorway, which opened up to reveal a smallish room with a raised dirt platform in the middle—a bed.

I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask her why the Word of Naming had been so powerful before she continued.

“That was what inspired Eden City to make other countries feel invested in the Words, with the whole donor-country scheme. It kept jealousy of Eden City’s power to a minimum, if the whole world was busy vying for their favor.”

She paused the story to let me drop onto the bed and busied herself pulling out the emergency blanket and water bottle for me. It was amazingly nice of her, and I didn’t have the energy to protest.

“That leaves the Word of Time,” she said, shaking out the silvery blanket. “Japan was a rising star after they opened their borders to the West and secured their country’s contribution to the Words near the turn of the century—the first non-European country to do so. The future Word of Time was born in 1895 as a little boy named Toki, and all seemed to be going pretty swell until … well, until Toki killed himself after the First World War, taking the Word of Time into oblivion with him.”

“Why’d he do that?” Running away was one thing, but suicide was a pretty extreme form of escape. I eased myself onto my back with more winces—or maybe it was one prolonged wince.

Pavati tossed the blanket over me. “My theory is that time is probably not a thing that many people can mess with and stay sane. The Words of Time had been notoriously nuts throughout history, and this was probably just another expression of that insanity. It’s amazing Time wasn’t lost sooner that way.”

She took a seat on the edge of the bed, her grim smile illuminated from below by the flashlight in her lap as if she was telling a spooky story. She must have noticed, because she said, “Sorry, this isn’t the most comforting bedtime story. Anyway, Eden City, of course, opted for the racist theory and blamed Japan, calling Japanese stock unstable and weak. Ritualistic suicide
does
have a history in their culture, with the
hara-kiri
and stuff like that. It’s still a problem today—but it’s not exactly weakness, and Toki wasn’t even raised within Japanese culture. He was born in Eden City like all of us. But the City Council didn’t care, and Japan was banned from contributing to the Words.

“That pissed the Japanese off big time. Some people think it encouraged them to act the way they did in World War II, making them go all imperialistic and invade anyone in the vicinity to try to prove their strength and save face.” Pavati shrugged. “Who knows—maybe it worked. Because Eden City accepted Japan back in ’65. But the Godspeakers were careful. First of all, they only allowed a girl to be born, thinking she might be less prone to suicidal samurai tendencies—which is sexist horseshit, but that’s another discussion. Secondly, they raised her to have ultimate control over her emotions. This woman—Tsuchi—was a stone. Fitting, I guess, for the Word of Earth. But not so good for a mother.”

Pavati hesitated, her eyes drifting to the floor. “We only have our one real parent until we’re five, but that’s more than enough time for them to help shape what we become before they die. And Tsuchi … well, she ignored Tu. Didn’t let any attachment form. With such a cold and unloving mother—never mind the stigma still surrounding the loss of Time—it’s no wonder Tu clung to his donor father’s heritage.”

“China,” I said. “So that’s why he wants to go wave their flag for them.”

Pavati nodded. “You know, Khaya and I were lucky to have at least one parent so caring. Tu and Herio … not so lucky. That’s probably why Herio turned out the way he did, too. Next to him, Tu’s not so bad.”

“What do you mean? Em didn’t love Herio?”

Pavati continued staring at the floor, twisting the flashlight in her hands and sending shadows skittering across her face. “Em had a premature stillborn the first go-around. She wasn’t ready to carry again so soon, and yet each generation of Words needs to be born within a short window. So the doctors used the same donor material from France, extracted some of Em’s, and used a surrogate mother. Herio didn’t come from Em’s body, and she never really tried to make that connection, you know? She never loved him like a son, even though he had her genes. So Herio basically had two donor parents, nothing more than genetics.”

I wasn’t quite sure how the conversation had switched from Tu to Herio. Neither topic was really comfortable, but together, they were enough to make my head start pounding like a drum.

Pavati must have noticed. “Go to sleep,” she said, and did something even nicer and more surprising than tucking me in. She bent over and kissed my forehead, right at the hairline. Then she stood, taking the flashlight with her. She paused before she walked through the doorway. “Try not to judge him too harshly.”

I wasn’t quite sure if she meant Tu or Herio. She probably meant the former, since no one seemed to feel too kindly toward the Word of Death.

I did sleep. And I slept pretty well, aside from the fact that whenever I rolled over, the sore parts of my face—which was basically all of it—came into contact with the unyielding surface of the bed and I woke up. At one such point I realized Khaya hadn’t joined me. A hollow pang of disappointment rang in the pit of my stomach like a gong, but I didn’t have the flashlight to go find her. I would probably walk face-first into a wall, which was the last thing I needed.

Then I woke up when I rolled over and my face
didn’t
ache.

Her voice came out of the darkness nearby: “I want to hurt people now, for you.”

I reached toward the sound of her voice, over the side of the bed, and my fingers encountered her sweatshirt-clad shoulder. She was sitting on the ground next to me.

“Khaya? Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“I’m frightened.”

It took me a sluggish second to process what she’d said before that. And then a few more seconds to remember everything that had happened: her attack on Tu to defend me; her recent, arguably violent, uses of the Word of Life; and, most shocking of all, her near-surrender in the supermarket to save Drey and give me my life back. Which, needless to say, would have hurt a lot of people, including herself. Honestly, I didn’t know how I felt about any of it. It wasn’t what I would call frightening, exactly, but it was certainly something.

If I couldn’t articulate the thought in my own head better than that, I didn’t have any business saying anything out loud.

But I was grateful, and probably would have done all those things for her if I’d had power like hers—maybe even something as foolish as condemning the world. At least I would never be faced with that kind of decision, because her well-being happened to coincide with everyone else’s.

Everyone’s except for Drey’s.

As if she knew what I was thinking, she said, “I’m sorry I lied about there being a cure. I didn’t want … I didn’t want you to … ”

“I know why you did it,” I said. “You were trying to give me hope and to keep me from turning myself in, or turning you in and messing up our lives and the whole rest of the world while I was at it. It’s okay.”

“Is it?” Her voice broke.

I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and buried my face into her neck. It was nice that it didn’t hurt. “Shh, don’t cry. It is okay. And thank you for healing me.” I took a deep breath and noticed something odd. “You smell good.”

“Pavati drew enough water for me to have a bath. It was chilly but worth it.”

“I need to do that tomorrow. Desperately.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a shower—it felt like years ago. I shouldn’t have been hugging Khaya with how I smelled, but I didn’t let her go.

“You still want to go to that address?” she asked.

“I need to know who Drey was
…
who I am.”

“I understand. I’ll follow you, if you’ll let me.”

It struck me, the sudden sense that we were both lost and following each other nowhere. Drey had always quoted that saying about the blind leading the blind. He’d been talking about Eden City and the rest of the world, but it applied equally well to me and Khaya.

I wasn’t even sure what I hoped to find—a recording from Drey, or maybe even a journal that Khaya could read to me, telling me the truth? Something.

“Then you’ll just have to follow me this one last time,” I said, speaking into her neck. “After that, whatever I find, I can forget about all of it and just … be with you. We can both be anonymous nobodies together and go wherever our feet take us.”

Like the cure for Drey, it sounded too good to be true. But I could always hope.

“Okay,” Khaya said softly.

Eventually she shifted and slid onto the bed next to me, and I tucked her under the blanket and re-wrapped my arms around her. I couldn’t wait for the day when we’d have real blankets and beds that were soft and not made of crackly plastic or dirt. In the meantime, I supposed these would have to do.

She fell asleep, and I must have followed shortly, because then Pavati was waking us up, shaking our shoulders, a faint, natural light illuminating the doorway behind her. I knew it must be morning.

“Tavin, Khaya.” Pavati sounded more distressed than I’d ever heard her. I understood why when she said, “Tu is gone.”

twenty-four

My drowsiness dropped away as if Pavati had slapped me awake. Tu was gone?

“Where’d he go?” I asked, sitting bolt-upright.

“I don’t know,” Pavati said, clutching her elbows through her sweatshirt and looking vulnerable for the first time.

We were all up and moving in about two seconds, searching through every hallway and room in the mazelike underground mansion Tu had built for us, calling for him and hearing our shouts fall dead, muffled between the earthen walls. The place was empty of everything but us, our few supplies, and the police cruiser. At least the car was still there. It wouldn’t do us a fat lot of good underground without Tu, but it meant he hadn’t gone far.

Hadn’t I wanted him to go away? But not leaving us stranded, not leaving Pavati looking as crushed as she did, not leaving Drey dying and me so far from his final answers. I’d been a short-sighted idiot, telling him to get lost when we all relied on him so much.

And maybe I felt bad for reasons beyond losing his usefulness. He was
more than a tool, after all. Maybe I felt bad for being a jerk. And maybe, just maybe, after everything Pavati had told me, I even felt bad for him.

So when Tu suddenly came walking down the stairs that dropped from the morning light up above, I felt overwhelming relief rather than disappointment that he wasn’t gone for good.

“Tu!” Pavati cried from where we’d been aimlessly standing in the center of the main room. “Where have you been?”

Tu looked taken off guard by her worried tone. He also seemed hesitant, as if he didn’t know if he was welcome or not. It must have made him forget to be sarcastic. “Getting gas.” He hefted two red jugs in either hand. “I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but we were low.”

I hadn’t noticed. I had been too busy trying to drive in a moving tunnel.

Pavati only stared, her mouth open.

“Where did you find gas?” Khaya sounded reserved—not exactly cool, suspicious, or timid, but somehow all three.

“A nearby town. I saw it on the GPS last night. After I brought us closer to the surface, it started working again. It was part of the reason I decided to stop here, aside from … you know.” Wanting to strangle me. “I didn’t want to wake anyone this morning. I was, uh, rested up sooner than you guys.” Probably from Khaya’s healing that had knocked him out before the rest of us went to sleep. He was being remarkably tactful for Tu.

“Did you steal those?” Pavati asked, finding her voice—and with it, her equilibrium. She arched a dark eyebrow at the jugs of gasoline. “If someone saw you, they could have followed you.”

Tu finally scoffed—he’d held out for a while. “Followed me underground? Please. And Khaya left the Swiss cash in the car last night. I used that.”

Pavati’s second eyebrow shot up with the first. “Huh. Amazing. I didn’t know you’d had it in you.” Her face broke into a grin. “I thought you’d abandoned me.”

Her cheerful expression seemed to be hiding something darker inside, but for now it was nice to see a smile back on her face.

“Never,” Tu said, so seriously that Pavati looked away from him.

“Shall we eat breakfast and get back on the subterranean highway?” She headed for the car and our store of food, but then she stopped. “First things first, Tavin. Good Gods, you need a bath.”

As if on cue, a fierce itch attacked my scalp. “Yeah, I agree.”

An hour later, we were back on the unnerving subterranean highway, as Pavati called it, and I felt more gloriously clean than I’d ever felt in my life. In one of Tu’s many rooms, there’d been an indentation in the earth, the surface hardened nearly to stone, which Pavati had filled with the warmest water she could find. It wasn’t very warm in this neck of the woods—she’d lamented not being near enough to any hot springs—but it had been good enough for me. Ice water, or maybe even acid, would have been good enough. I’d waged war on myself with the soap we’d taken from the market, and was now feeling more refreshed than I had in days.

We covered miles quickly, and even managed to pick up a crackling radio station for a few minutes, long enough for a song to make us feel like we were as carefree and happy as a bunch of kids on a road trip.

But I wasn’t carefree or particularly happy as we neared Drey’s address, and my disquiet increased when we actually arrived.

Resurfacing in the mountains was a blinding experience in the veiled late afternoon light, even though it wasn’t bright outside. It was cloudy, but the snow reflected what little light there was from every surface. The troubled sky lurked behind it all like a dark shadow.

We had to take a few seconds to blink and squint, waiting for our eyes to adjust. Especially me, since I was driving.

I hadn’t seen snow that often before. In Eden City, it only snowed on national holidays, thanks to Luft, when the city was already half closed-down and Drey and I didn’t have to go out in the truck. Snow was a special occasion, which only added to my sense of expectation.

When we reached a wide, pale clearing surrounded by trees, I stopped the cruiser. The road was buried in snow, and I didn’t know where it lay across the field. I didn’t want to get our only means of transportation stuck in this icy wonderland.

“This is it?” I asked, looking at the GPS. Tu nodded, unusually quiet.

A small cabin sat at the opposite end of the clearing, reminding me, absurdly, of a cupcake with white icing, the thin chimney sticking up like an unlit candle on top. The Matterhorn, the crooked peak I’d seen so often on the postcard, rose hazily in the distance through the clouds.

Everything was hushed as we opened the car doors, as if a blanket had not only settled on the ground but also overhead, muffling the world. The cold air felt like a held breath, like something was about to happen. Or like something was waiting. Before I got out, I slipped the gun and pocketknife into my pants, just in case.

Our voices fell quiet with everything else. Tu looked around, almost like he was expecting someone, too. But there were no tracks. That should have helped alleviate the—apparently shared—feeling that something was waiting, but it didn’t. Maybe the cabin itself was what was waiting.

There was nothing else to do but go check it out. We trekked across the clearing in silence, my feet growing numb in my boots. The sweatshirt was no longer enough to keep me warm, and my foggy breath drifted around my face with the light snowflakes that began to fall.

The tiny, sheltered porch creaked when we stepped on it. The door was locked. I had an inspiration, right when Tu was about to break a small window, and checked under a frosted, snow-filled pot, its previous contents long dead. That was where Drey had always kept a key next to the back door of the garage. I had to kick the pot to dislodge it from its frozen
resting place and ended up breaking it, but it was worth it. There was a key underneath, glinting gold under a thin sheet of ice. I used the pocketknife to chip it free.

The door creaked even louder than the porch when we opened it. We filed quietly inside, as if trying not to wake someone. Tu stood in the entryway, his formidable arms folded against the cold. Pavati crossed the room to a small iron stove with split wood stacked nearby, located some matches, and started building a fire. Khaya followed me as I looked around.

The only furniture next to a small kitchenette was a table with a single, rickety chair. A threadbare plaid couch sat beside the stove. There were no pictures on the walls, because the walls were lined with bookshelves. There were more books in that tiny cabin than I’d ever seen in my life.

A narrow staircase ran up the back wall, and I dashed up it when I didn’t see any immediate answers to my questions in the main room. I had to duck so I didn’t smack my head on the ceiling, now the floor, as I came up into a small loft with a low, slanting roof. There was a musty-looking bed and a single nightstand. A quick search yielded nothing under the bed, nothing in the drawer of the nightstand but another book.

No device with a recording. No letter. No pictures. No nothing.

I rushed back downstairs, scanning every nook and cranny, opening every cupboard and drawer. I found nothing except utensils, tools, dried and canned goods, and books, everywhere books, shelves and shelves of books. But not a word, not even a whisper, from Drey. Maybe the books could somehow tell me Drey’s secrets, but I couldn’t read them. I picked up one from a shelf, hoping to see handwriting—a journal of Drey’s—and then another and another as I found only typewriting, until I was tearing books off the shelves and hurling them in a pile on the ground—the dumb, infuriating things, keeping their damned secrets locked in their pages.

“Tavin,” Khaya said.

“This
was
only a place for me to escape to.” To escape even from the truth, apparently. All that hope, that anticipation, and yet … “There’s nothing here,” I said more loudly.

“I told you,” Tu said from the entryway. “This is the sticks. Just a place to hide under a rock.”

I spun on Tu with a rage I’d never felt before, and he took a step back.

I moved toward him and accidentally kicked up the edge of a ratty rug, uncovering a line in the floor: a trap door. My hope skyrocketed. I dropped to my knees and wrenched it aside as quickly as the rug. But all hope came crashing back down when it only revealed refrigerated packets of money and another gun, this one a six-shooter that looked too rusty to use.

A gun. All Drey seemed to have left me was guns.

Khaya put a hand on my shoulder. “What do you want to do now?”

I wanted to scream. But instead I stood and walked over to a window. I leaned my head against a freezing pane of glass, looking out into the world of tumbling white. The sky was falling.

Drey was dying. He might already be dead. And I would never know his secrets.

A tear splashed on the dusty wooden windowsill. Mine, I supposed.

Maybe this was for the best—not knowing. I took a deep breath. I’d said I would be satisfied to remain a wordless nobody, whatever I found here. And I had Khaya. She was enough—more than enough, more than I’d ever hoped for or deserved. I had an indefinite future with her to look forward to. I didn’t know who I really was, but we had each other, and that was okay. The world would be okay.

Drey … Drey wouldn’t be okay, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I could ruin my life just to say goodbye, but I knew Drey wouldn’t want that. This place was the proof. It held no cure, no answers … it was only a place to hide, to be safe. That was all Drey had wanted for me.

I would just have to accept the fact that I was powerless, keep the guns under the floorboards—just in case—and stop pretending I was something I wasn’t. I didn’t want power anyway, if all it meant was what Khaya had said: that I could hurt people. There had been enough pain already.

My hand found Khaya’s, where she had come up behind me. She was an anchor, grounding my thoughts, my emotions.

“Maybe we should rest here for a while,” I said. “Get warm, regroup.” I glanced up at Pavati and Tu. “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to, of course.”

That was when we heard a noise outside. The low hum of engines.

I spun toward the door, and all of us scrambled out onto the porch in a stampede. For a second, the cloud of our combined breath made it difficult to see across the snow-filled clearing. But the air cleared except for the snow, which wasn’t dense enough to hide the line of black SUVs approaching across the field.

“Tu,” Pavati said, realizing the truth before the rest of us. “You didn’t … ”

“They’ll help us!” Tu said, but he couldn’t say anything else before I tackled him, my anger resurging in a blinding wave. Both of us flew off the porch and into a deep drift of snow. The cold was shocking, the white powder in my eyes and down in my sweatshirt, but that didn’t keep me from hitting any and every part of him I could reach, as hard as I could. My knuckles split but I didn’t stop, not even when flecks of red began to stain the snow.

Pavati and Khaya dragged me off of him, and only then did I realize he hadn’t been fighting back, only holding up his arms to protect his head as best he could. Which hadn’t been very well, while lying on his back in a snowdrift. His nose and lip were bleeding profusely from both sides, and the white of his left eye was a vivid half-red.

The sight of his blood only made me want to see more, and Pavati and Khaya both had to use their full weight and strength to hold me back, the three of us slipping and staggering in the snow. My control was so far gone I didn’t know if it would ever return.

But it did, slowly. Especially after Khaya twisted my arm behind my back like she had Tu’s the night before, if not as far. The sharp pain brought me to my knees and pulled a gasp from my throat, cutting through the red haze and clearing my head rather remarkably.

“Okay, okay,” Tu said, his words thick through all the blood, holding up one hand in a gesture of truce while the other clutched his nose. I’d probably broken it.

The SUVs had parked in a loose semi-circle in front of the cabin.

“Not okay, Tu,” Pavati said, no longer holding me back now that Khaya had me subdued. Her tone was so dangerous I wondered if she would charge him next. “Not okay.”

“Look, you’re right, I called someone. When I did that publicity visit to China a year ago, the president slipped me this number when he shook my hand. I’ve called it twice now, once in each town, and gave them the address here. This is them—the Chinese, not Eden City!” Tu clarified as Pavati took a threatening step toward him. “They just want to help us.”

“
Use
us, you mean,” Pavati said, casting a narrowed, sideways glance at the surrounding vehicles. Doors were opening, people in black suits were getting out. “This is going to be bad, Tu. I’m not going without a fight.”

“Just hear them out! They’re not here to hurt us.”

“I have no doubt they’re here with our best interests at heart.” Pavati spat at his feet in disgust. “Grow up, Tu.”

Khaya released my arm and helped me to my feet as the men approached. About half of them looked Chinese, and the other half were white. All of them looked strong, trained, and armed, though I couldn’t exactly see any guns or muscles beneath the suits.