Wordless (13 page)

“It likely had a tracking device,” she said, turning back to me. “They can’t know where we killed it or they’ll know which fork in the stream we took.”

“They’ll know by this.” I hauled myself to my knees and gestured drunkenly at the dog’s corpse. My chest and arms were covered in scratches, my shirt torn in several places and looking black, not blue, through the blood and darkness. My hands were shaking violently.

Khaya shook her head and dropped down to the dog again. “No, they won’t.” She twined her fingers in the bloodied fur, and her sickened expression vanished as she began murmuring. She spoke in such a rush that I only caught part of the sequence:

“Richness, fertility, abundance, replication … ”

The words sounded big, not in actual length but in concept—general, expansive, and inviting. I could hear the power in her voice—the Words. But I paid more attention to what she was doing, rather than what she was saying, when grass began to sprout all over the dog like new fur, and moss rose between the grass blades like downy fluff. Suddenly, the whole chest of the dog caved in under the new weight, sending out a wave of rot-filled air that almost made me gag again.

In less than a minute, there was only a mound of mossy soil and plants where the corpse had been. A trail of grass even grew toward and around me, drinking up the spilled blood, tickling against the hand that held me upright.

Now I felt cold rather than hot, and I was shaking more than ever.

Khaya was already kneeling at my side. She put a hand on my forehead, smoothing the hair out of my eyes. “Decay is part of the cycle of life, not death, contrary to what everyone says. Death is sterile.”

I shied away, irrationally afraid she would turn me into a pile of fertilizer like the dog, hiding any evidence I had ever been there.

“I need to stop your bleeding,” she said. “Unfortunately, I can’t heal either of us more than that, or we won’t have the stamina to cover the distance we need to go tonight.”

Then she was speaking Words again, so low and quick I heard only scattered things like
stimulate, metabolize, mobilize,
congeal
. She sounded less encouraging, more commanding than she’d been with the dog—directed, sharp as a doctor’s scalpel. After all, she was filling in narrow scratches and bites in specific locations, not dissolving a body into the earth.

“Hmm,” she said. “You were in shock too. But you should feel better. And your bleeding has stopped.”

“Why can I understand you, now, when you speak the Words?” I asked. The world looked sharper around me, the bushes and pines dark and defined in the light of the moon. The sound of the stream rose behind me again, after it had gotten lost in the chaos. “I couldn’t before.”

“I usually speak them in Hebrew, but it seems fair to include you.” Khaya helped me up, directing me into the stream.

Unfortunately, I felt the cold on my feet quite clearly, and even all the way up in my aching arm. It was as if my nerves were connected like a spider web—if one area was touched, I felt it everywhere else. I wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the wound in my arm was deep and angry, a collection of jagged, red holes in my swollen skin.

“Why didn’t you shoot the dog?” I asked.

“The noise would have been much louder than the barking,” Khaya said.

“That wasn’t why you didn’t do it. You said you couldn’t.”

“I’m sorry.” She stopped in the stream when we were submerged up to our knees. She sounded truly apologetic, but I didn’t know if it was because of her inability to kill or what she said next. “We need to rinse off.”

I knelt in the stream without hesitating, pressing my face in the water before I could change my mind and run. It was worse than dropping into the lake. My skin burned as if the Word of Fire had set me alight, and my lungs refused to work altogether. Even after I brought my head up and crouched on my knees, shuddering and gasping, it took me a few seconds to be able to see or hear again, or notice Khaya grabbing handfuls of sand and mud with her unbitten hand and scrubbing me everywhere she could reach. I hardly felt it. The pain was just another drop in the Tavin-sized bucket.

And then she was taking me by the hand and leading me on. Hurting all over as I did, her hand was the only one I would have let touch me. I wasn’t even sure why, but I welcomed it. Anyone else’s hand I would have bitten like a dog.

thirteen

We followed the steep creek higher into the mountains, and then I had exhaustion to compete with the pain and cold. I didn’t know which one felt worse, but waiting to see which would win out in the end was the only thing keeping me going.

We didn’t stop once that night, not even when we heard more barking in the distance and saw helicopters passing overhead, their enormous spotlights cutting great white swathes through the starry sky. None of them came near enough for us to need to hide, even though I began to wish they would, just for a rest. Every time I slipped, instinctively catching myself with my right arm, I felt like I was shattering. The only improvement came when we left the creek after it finally disappeared, but even that was hardly noticeable; by then, my feet had long gone numb.

The air grew so cold, I thought my sweat would freeze on my skin. Snow glowed on the treeless, moonlit peaks looming on either side of us. All that kept me from collapsing was a combination of forward momentum and, ironically, gravity—the land had started to tip downhill. And then I saw it stretching down below us: a valley, threaded by a ribbon of moving lights in the darkness. Cars on a road.

It was funny to think I could simply flag down one of the cars heading west, get in, and be back in Eden City after a short, smooth ride. Or, not really funny at all.

After dashing across an open, brush-filled stretch of the mountain pass, we paused when we regained the tree line, stopping for a drink from the water bottle that Khaya had filled before we left the creek. Only crisp, stinging air had passed through my mouth all night—no food—so the filtered water felt like a balm on my raw throat, even if it was too cold.

“Gods,” I croaked, which was about all I could say.

“We’ve hiked about fifteen miles through creeks and mountains,” Khaya said, breathing hard. “Well done.”

I didn’t feel very accomplished. More like defeated.

“Here,” she said, thrusting her good hand—now her right hand—into the backpack. She still had a white scar looping around the base of her thumb, but her left hand was looking as ugly as my arm. She pulled out a food bar. “Eat.”

I ate mechanically, tasting it about as much as an engine tastes fuel. I barely remembered to stop halfway through and offer her the rest.

She only took a bite and said, “That’s enough for me. But could you carry the backpack now?” She gave me a doubtful look.

I nodded dumbly, swallowing the rest of the food bar. I swung the bag on my back using my left arm, and Khaya helped me loop the straps over the right. Together, we seemed to make one whole, functional person, with her right hand and my left. The straps settled into my shoulder like tires in the grooves of a well-abused road, and the old aches from yesterday rose to join the general outcry.

Khaya started down the mountainside, looking a little wobbly. I tried to follow her, but I couldn’t get my feet to move. It was as if they had put down roots with the trees.

“Talk to me,” I said, pulling her up short. “Tell me a story or something.” Only Drey had ever told me stories, but I imagined Khaya could do the same.

“I don’t know any stories,” Khaya said, glancing back at me, then at the ground. “I was never told any. My father … well, he didn’t have much opportunity.”

“I’m sure you know all sorts of crap about the Gods—no, wait, I don’t want to hear about them. So tell me about your father. You knew him, right?”

“Yes,” Khaya said cautiously. “He died twelve years ago, but I knew him. He was born in the Athenaeum’s hospital, like me, and lived in the Athenaeum his entire life—only forty years. When I turned five, he passed the Word on to me, like he was supposed to.”

She started walking again and I followed her. My rubbery legs kept trying to fold on the downhill, but at least my feet moved when I told them to.

“You’re seventeen, then,” I said, doing some simple mental math. “So what was your father like?” We were about the same age, but somehow I doubted that Khaya’s childhood had been anything like mine. Even if she’d had a real father and I’d had a strange adoptive one, growing up in the Athenaeum had probably been a lot weirder than the garage.

“His name was Hayat—‘life’ in Arabic,” she said, weaving through the trees. “His donor mother was from Saudi Arabia. His father, my grandfather, had a French donor parent.”

“Like Herio.”

“Yes, but the French lost their place with the Words during my father’s time. They’d showed too much weakness in the Second World War—or so Eden City thought. The Saudis had just discovered they held the world’s largest reserves of oil, attracting enough attention to replace the French among the Words. But soon after my father turned five and succeeded his father, the Saudis felt confident enough to take part in the ’73 oil crisis, refusing to sell oil to the West unless support was withdrawn from Israel. So what did Eden City do with the next generation of Words? They gave Israel the Word of Life.”

“That’s interesting,” I lied, ducking under a branch, “but that’s not really telling me anything about your father.”

Khaya’s steps faltered. “You’re right. I’m not used to
really
talking about him. Most people don’t ask about him as a person—only about the politics and power.” She was quiet for a minute as she picked her way through a particularly bushy stretch of underbrush. “He was a nice man. We never lived together, but he was allowed to visit me from time to time. He always called me his little flower, even as he died to give me the Word.”

Her voice was perfectly flat … a cover for her pain.

“That’s so messed up,” I muttered. Taking real families, kids who actually had parents, and then twisting and destroying them—that was almost as bad as all the world domination.

“What?” Khaya asked.

“Nothing,” I said. But it wasn’t nothing. What I’d said to Khaya in our ivy tent had been true: I really did want to hurt the Godspeakers now, and keep Khaya safe. Which was laughable, because what could I do to them? We were running and Khaya was the one protecting me. Though I supposed I’d done a decent job protecting her from the dog, even if I’d trashed myself in the process—and horrified her because I could kill when she couldn’t.

Somebody had to do something against the Athenaeum. They seemed to do whatever they wanted, to whomever they wanted. They’d made Khaya into the embodiment of a battleground, by the sound of it, with an Israeli mother and a father of Saudi descent. Sure, she’d explained the political motivations behind the arrangement, but all I’d really understood was that the Athenaeum’s harmful manipulations affected everything from the individual lives of the Words all the way up to the affairs of the greater world—even more so now that they were trying to replace the Words with automatons and take over the world. The thought would have made my stomach churn even if I hadn’t known they were after me.

No wonder Drey no longer trusted them. Whatever he’d been doing for them, he had quit. And then the Word of Death punched a hole in his guts.

I wanted Khaya to keep talking, but I couldn’t ask her to carry on about her father when thinking about Drey hurt me so much. I opened my mouth to tell her to talk about something else, anything she wanted, but she was already speaking.

“My father didn’t tell me any stories, but he sometimes sang me a song, one without words. Which is nice, sometimes, when you’re a Word.”

She began to hum. Her voice was soft and light among the dense trees, surprisingly different from when she spoke—like when she laughed. The sound buoyed me, almost making me feel like I was floating along behind her.

It was the sweet carrot on the end of the string that kept me trotting after her in the dark, down the rest of the mountain. I wasn’t even concerned we would be heard. The forest, which grew greener and warmer as the eastern sky began to lighten, felt like a magical world containing only the two of us, and her song was like a spell keeping the illusion alive.

I almost wished the mountain was taller so we could keep winding our way down. I didn’t want the song to end.

But Khaya’s voice cut off when the ground leveled out. We found ourselves standing at the edge of the trees, staring through the predawn light at a wide strip of highway lined with bramble-filled ditches.

“Those look thorny,” I whispered, eyeing the snarled brambles.

“They’re good cover,” Khaya responded. Her voice was rough, ragged. She must have been singing for over an hour. “We won’t have darkness for much longer.”

It seemed like we’d had darkness forever. The last few nights had stretched ages longer than I was used to in Eden City, where it lasted for precisely eight hours. There, dawn and dusk were quick affairs, bringing on full light or dark at the exact same time every day, with a relative suddenness and completeness that I hadn’t seen mirrored in the outside world.

Of course, I thought. Because the outside world didn’t have the Word of Darkness or Light.

Even at this early hour, cars rushed by every so often in a blur of headlights, and while we watched, no fewer than three vehicles with flashing red and blue lights streaked through the fleeing night.

“French police,” Khaya said under her breath. “Their red and blue is like our green and yellow. Who knows how much the City Council has told the French government, so watch out for those colors.”

After she seemed sure the highway held no other surprises, she walked alongside it in a parallel line, moving in a low crouch behind the wall of brambles until she found whatever she was looking for.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was a stream, more like a rivulet, trickling down the foot of the mountain and into the mud of the ditch, twisting its way through the brambles until it eventually met the road.

“Water always makes a path,” Khaya murmured, then began stepping along the watery ribbon as if walking a tightrope, keeping her head down. But eventually the tangle of branches closed in on all sides, forcing us lower and lower until we were inching along our elbows and stomachs in a muddy trough, stopping to hold our breath and nearly push our faces into the mud every time a car whistled by overhead.

I was so close behind Khaya that I didn’t see the incline of the highway’s shoulder until we’d reached it. And there, punching through the gravelly hill, crossing underneath the asphalt, was a culvert for the water to pass.

It looked about as wide as my shoulders—a narrow, dark, dank tunnel.

Khaya didn’t hesitate, of course, as she wormed her way into the corrugated pipe. When I inched in after her, the sleeves of my T-shirt brushed the sides and the backpack scraped along the top. I wasn’t claustrophobic, but even so, my breathing increased to a pant, sounding loud in the enclosed space. Barely into the pipe, with the highway vibrating over our heads, I lurched forward too quickly and lodged myself tight.

“Khaya,” I whispered, my hand shooting out to grab her ankle—I couldn’t even unfold my arm all the way. “I’m stuck!”

In place of her response, a car door slammed. The road was overhead, but the sound had come through the pipe. I craned my neck, turning from Khaya and the light ahead to the light behind, where the brambles at the pipe’s mouth—just beyond my boots—were now flickering with hues of red and blue.

Another door slammed, and then footsteps crunched through the gravel of the highway shoulder, getting louder as they went.

Then a voice: “Je ne vois toujours pas pourquoi on fait ça.”

“Ils ont dit de chercher dans les caniveaux, alors on cherche dans les caniveaux,” said another gruff voice, both of them male.

“Ce n’est qu’un garçon.”

I didn’t know much French, but I knew the word
gar
ç
on
, since it had always been shouted at me by anyone who did speak French in Eden City.
Boy.

They were looking for me.

I tried to wrench my arm around to reach the backpack. To reach what was inside.

“No!” Khaya hissed, as if she knew what I was doing. She started whispering, almost inaudibly at first, then louder and louder. I quit squirming to squeeze her ankle in warning, but she didn’t stop. And then I heard scratching and squeaking behind us, as if something was moving in the culvert—something other than us. But it couldn’t be the men; they were still too far away. I craned my neck again, but the light was too dim to make out anything—like it had been partially blotted out.

The steps froze. “Tu as entendu quelque chose?” one of them said.

The footsteps rushed closer, and falling gravel echoed from the mouth of the pipe. I jerked in panic, but I was wedged so tightly I couldn’t flee
or
go for the gun.

Then a blinding beam of a flashlight illuminated the culvert. But it was broken now, blocked—Khaya had grown the brambles over the pipe to hide us.

There was rustling by my feet and a curse from one of the cops. The bushes were
thorny, but not thorny enough.

“Eh!” There was a shout of surprise as a hand caught my ankle. I thrust backward with all my strength, kicking, and dislodged myself in the process. When my boot connected with something solid, a gruff voice shouted, “Arrêtez! Stop!”

I scrabbled at the zipper of the backpack. But Khaya was faster.

Her Words were more commanding than I’d ever heard them, echoing in the pipe and forcing me to cover my ears. The bushes responded—how could they not?—thrashing like an angry creature. I only had time to see the look of astonishment on one of the officer’s faces before the branches caught him around the throat, dragging him to the ground and filling his mouth before he could shout.

“That will hold them,” Khaya called. “Come on!”

It wasn’t exactly a fast flight through the culvert—we were more like inchworms on the run. Khaya slid gracefully out of the other end, but I dragged myself free so quickly I scratched my dog-bitten arm, ripping off one of the fresh scabs, and then took a tumble into the thorny brambles filling the ditch along the opposite shoulder, adding yet another tear to my tattered, muddy shirt. But I didn’t care.

After untangling ourselves from the hedge, we ran in a crouch, making it into the forest on the other side of the highway as the sun lit the sky a buttery blue. We slowed to a trot only after the highway had long vanished behind us, hidden behind layers of trees and hills.