Whisper (9 page)

No pressure
. “In theory. But of course it will depend on time constraints and the quality you're aiming for, and other similar factors.”

“Well. Anything you can do will, in theory, make us better than what we are. So start there. See what you can do for us.”

“I don't suppose you have any Demon Horse models on hand?”

“I'm afraid not. The closest we have are some rowdy young soldiers.”

“If they don't breathe fire, I doubt they would be of much service.”

Just then, a bedraggled-looking member of the camp approached, but I couldn't remember seeing him before. All manner of grime was caked across his form, and I wondered what kind of training drill he had just been at. But when he spoke, his words were those of a wilderness-ravaged scout returning home.

“Lieutenant.”

“Private.”

“I come from Restoration.”

“Res–”

“It's the new face of the region that was once your home.”

“Official, now, is it?”

“They're moving on. Gabrial's armies are marching East from there.”

“East across the Shardscape from Restoration,” Sonya mused. “That's precisely what I don't want to hear.”

I did the math, recalling the few times I had seen a map of the United States how it used to be, before it was one big mash-pot of ruins. Colorado would be straight across from Missouri, with only Kansas in between.

“If he hems us in with the majority of the wreckage, it'll be his turf,” the Lieutenant said. “Our horses can't compensate for the rubble as their battlefield. We need to get to K.S. territory, where there's open ground.”

K.S. Kansas.

“We are to meet them?” asked the scout.

“Unless we plan to let him move into this half of our country, yes. Kansas is the middle ground, and our greatest potential battlefield. Let's seize it and hold it.”

He nodded and briskly departed, apparently knowing the drill. The Lieutenant turned to me.

“Does your whisper work on the move?”

“You want me to come with you?” I asked in surprise.

“This move is vital. We need an edge, Miss Wilde. You're all we've got in that department. Like I told you, we have a distinct lack of fire-breathing creatures among our ranks. No clawed ones either, coincidentally. Just one that whispers.”

I considered for a moment – as if I had the right to weigh my options and refuse. Did I even have that right in the face of war? Was she asking me along, or was it a condition?

Jay would not be happy.

He lost any measly scrap of authority he held over your head the moment he contrived to walk out on you,
I reminded myself. He had already done his part looking after me. All that time traveling cross-country, getting us into Tara's camp, pulling me out of that gulley, and then, that thing with Fly...

He had done his part. More than done his part.

“When do we leave?” I asked, pushing Jay from my mind. If he could contrive to walk out on me, I could do the same thing, couldn't I? And anyway, I would be back. It wasn't like I was leaving forever – it was just a job. Unless I died, but that was a concept much too radical to introduce on a day's notice. Surely I wouldn't be right out on the front lines, either. I was just the horse trainer in the camp.

“First thing in the morning,” the Lieutenant replied, already striding off to start seeing to preparations. The smell of bleach washed over me as she passed, and I caught my breath – but it was hard to say if it was from the acrid stimulus or the abrupt realization that I was going to war.

Nine –

A
crazy idea came to me later that day as I was casting about pretending I knew what went into preparing to march for war – but really it was just one in a pattern, of late, and this time it was sparked by another.

Lady Alejandra, the resident gypsy who crafted tents, found me as I was thinking: whispering to horses was well enough, but I was going to need to devise some semblance of actual lesson plan, because it would not simply be as easy as whispering into those fuzzy listening ears and imparting all of the sentiments required for a scenario I didn't actually have on hand. I couldn't just lecture them like a school teacher and tell them to do their homework, and to be ready for the test. It was a much greater art than that, a much more precarious line of communication. I could get them to do certain things, at a given time, but I couldn't ramble on about what something was going to look like and be like and how they ought to perform when and if they came up against said subject at some point in the future. I could really do very little without some sort of prop to make them understand, to condition them with.

“So you're off to war,” an unfamiliar voice broke into my thoughts, and I let the haze drain away to regard the speaker, like dirty soap water down the windshield of my mother's car back when she used to put me inside before washing it. While the hose blasted the windows I was in my own little underwater world, and then the gunk would wash away and the light would shine through and there would be my mother's face as the spray glided off, smiling in at me, looking like a beautiful watercolor painting. For a moment that's who I saw before me now, until I pulled myself together and shut that taboo memory of cars from my thoughts. Ironic, that some of my fondest memories of my mother involved cars.

The woman before me was thin, somewhere in her fifties or sixties, with beautiful wild gray hair and canny brown eyes. I thought I recognized something Native-American in her skin tone and bone structure, but there was something else as well.

“War is not for the faint of heart,” she continued, because I had yet to pull my act together enough to form words.

“War is never
for
anyone, is it?” I managed, not certain how to hold my own in any deep conversation brought on by a stranger. I stuck my foot upon the bottom rung of a pipe corral to redo the laces of one of my boots. They netted like a corset all up my shin.

“Yet there is a difference between a commodity and a liability.”

Right.
“All I know is war is not for the innocent, either, but they die in it all the time,” I said, not sure what she was getting at. She wasn't trying to imply I was faint of heart, was she? She didn't even know me.

“You do an amazing thing with the horses.”

I stole a glance at her, pursing my lips. But there was no need to not be polite. “I'm Alannis,” I said, sticking out a hand. Perhaps we could find our way back to the right foot in this impromptu introduction. Or, if she didn't want to shake my grimy hand, I would know for sure that she and I would never click.

To her credit, she took it. She had slender hands, but strong. I could feel the veins and knobby knuckles well, but also a good bit of meat in her palm. “Lady Alejandra,” she said.

“The tent-maker.”

“Hopefully you've found yours comfortable.”

“They're beautiful,” I raved, then blinked. “And yes – very comfortable.”

“It's a shame you have to run off so swiftly, without even settling in.”

“Is it really a time for being settled?”

“Funny,” she mused, “I was always one to prefer wandering until times got so bad. Now I see how valuable it is to have a sense of home.”

“They call you a gypsy.”

She laughed, and it was somehow the sound of coarse joy. “That's fair enough.”

“So you didn't find yourself...in your element, when the quakes took out society and encouraged a vagabond lifestyle?”

“Oh, it was well enough. I didn't struggle. But my joy was always in traveling to new places and seeing new things, and after the quakes hit... It's all the same, out there. And there's war, and disease, and I just came to realize I'm not a romantic sucker for dying alone.”

“Are you...
from
anywhere?” I inquired, curious. I had never met anyone who hadn't lost some sort of home in the quakes.

A mischievous grin came over her face, and she pushed her sleeve up, turning her arm in the light to show me the array of names tattooed around the limb.
Albion, Coopersville, Blue Springs, Indialantic, Bethune, Rhode Island...

She was from everywhere.

That was when the idea came to me. A crazy notion, almost too farfetched to mention, but there was an intriguing spark of possibility. “Would you know of any circuses, or circus personnel around these parts, by chance?”

“What on earth do you want with a circus? I know they're famous as a pick-me-up in hard times, but...
Now?
These are more than hard times, love. They couldn't travel efficiently enough to make it worth their while.”

“I just... I'm working with the horses on Demon-proofing, and it would help to have some fire drills. But they'd need to be controlled, and it would be perfect if there was someone who could play creature at the same time. I was having idealistic visions of a fire-breathing assistant.”

“A fire-breather. Well, there is Toby.”

“Who's Toby?”

“Not a circus performer, but he did audition, once. He breathes fire at carnivals and on street corners instead. Or, he did. Before there were no more street corners. Before carnivals dissolved like so much cotton candy. He came with me here. Not
here
, but to the Mo.”

I could only assume she meant Missouri. The M.O.

“We really were like gypsies, for awhile after the quakes. Me with a lot of other misfits. We formed a caravan, of sorts, I suppose. Just while we traveled, though. Then they settled in the ruins of Union Station in St. Louis, but I felt smothered without the open country. I couldn't stow myself away in those collapsed halls, finding some little nook to call my own. I needed the land. It's in my blood.”

That was the Native-American that I had seen.

“So I wandered down this way – had to survive, so I made myself a tent out of the only canvas I could find. It became a fun little hobby to keep myself busy, and then I wandered into Mark Twain's little National Forest, here, and found myself at the doorstep of Sonya's camp.”

“Is that where we are?” It seemed funny, to me, that a forest would be named after someone whose life work turned trees into books.

“Yes-sir-ree. Does that mean anything to you? You know your geography?”

“I've studied some maps. Just to try to grasp how things used to be. How things have changed.” Having been only seven when the quakes hit, I hadn't gotten any regular education. Jay's parents had home-schooled us in those precious moments of free time between rebuilding and surviving, but they were stretched thin, and there were a great many things we had never had the chance to study in full.

“We're in what used to be the Eleven Point Ranger District,” Lady Alejandra said, clearly more informed than I was. “This place is called Irish Wilderness.”

“Why Irish?”

“Some Catholic Priest settled about forty Irish families here in the 1850's. They were wiped out in the Civil War.”

That struck a chord with me, and I felt a grimace come over my face as I searched for why it nagged at me. Lady Alejandra fleshed the thought out even as it came to me, though;

“And here we are with civil war on our hands again,” she observed wryly, but in a decidedly amiable manner. “Settlers in the Irish Wilderness all over again.”

“Well,” I said, smoothing the irrational flutter inside my gut. “I'm not superstitious.”

“But are you Irish?” she asked with a devilish twinkle in her eyes.

It was a good time to change the subject, superstitious or not. And suddenly I realized I had been distracted from the point anyway. There we were, talking like there was time to chat. But it was hard to get my head in the game of war, and the exchange was settling. Maybe just what I needed.
But now you can move on,
I told myself, focusing once again on my budding plan of action.

“Is there a way you could get Toby for me?” I asked.

“Clear it with Sonya, and I'm sure she'll get one of her men to do it. Maybe two.”

“We're leaving first thing in the morning.” I'm not sure what I intended to gain with that, but it seemed a relevant obstacle to voice.

“Well, love, the men can ride a lot faster than I can. I've always been more about my own two feet, though horses are beautiful animals.”

“Fine. I'll ask her,” I gave in, turning on my heel to see to it. If I was any judge pertaining to how matters of war played out, we didn't have a moment to waste. “It was nice meeting you.”

“You too, girlie. Oh, and Alannis?”

I turned briefly back to face her.