Wordless (21 page)

twenty-two

Underground, the cruiser’s radio fizzled out after we’d heard enough to know that the entire Swiss police force was in utter chaos. But I didn’t need the frantic communications to tell me that. I’d seen enough.

The GPS still worked somehow. Tu claimed he didn’t need it, but it helped me to at least know where we’d be if we were driving above-ground. Maybe it was only a mental comfort, but careening down a dark earthen tunnel, the end of which was always within sight of the bright headlights but never arrived, was pretty disorienting. Not that we were really careening. Tu could only open the tunnels at maybe twenty miles per hour.

Tu insisted on staying up front to “see,” as he said. He kept his eyes mostly ahead, staring through the windshield at the tunnel he was opening with his Words, directing the churning and widening walls with his continual focus. Or semi-continual. He had plenty of spare brainpower to crow about the awesomeness of what he’d just done and to critique my driving, which was rich considering he didn’t know how to drive. I guessed the Godspeakers didn’t want to teach the Words anything that could increase their independence or ability to escape.

“If you’re going to backseat drive, you should be in the backseat,” Pavati said about five minutes into our joyride.

Her irritation was understandable. I sort of felt like punching something until my fist broke, and wouldn’t have minded if that something was Tu. Not that any of this was his fault.

I tried to catch Khaya’s expression in the rearview mirror, but all I could make out was the shadowy top of her head. And I didn’t look for long, in case the tunnel changed direction without warning.

Pavati and Tu, of course, didn’t know that Khaya had basically offered to save Drey instead of the world, just so I could get him back. She’d lied to me about a cure—seriously lied to me—so I appreciated her offer and the apology within it. But the apology was the only part of it I could accept.

Because I couldn’t trade the world for Drey’s life. Nor could I trade Khaya’s life. I just couldn’t do it.

Tears blinded me almost too much to drive. Drey was going to die, and I was driving away from him. This was like watching him bleed to death all over again, except worse, because I knew the exact thing I could do to save him. And I wouldn’t do it.

Once again, all I had to say to him was goodbye. I couldn’t tell him how much he meant to me. And he couldn’t tell me who he really was, or who I really was.

But maybe I could still find out. I hoped the address at least held some answers, even though it didn’t hold a cure. Because soon—in one day—that would be all of Drey I had left. Whatever information I found there would be like his last words. And I desperately wanted to hear them.

On the upside, we were moving faster through Tu’s tunnel on wheels than we would have on foot. We were already in the Swiss Alps, or under them. Whenever we next stopped for a break, I planned on asking Tu to enter Drey’s address into the GPS. We’d probably reach it in a few hours—most destinations within the Alps were about that far away. And then Tu would have to decide what he wanted to do with himself, and I hoped it wouldn’t involve prolonging his presence. For that matter, I would have to decide what I wanted to do with myself.

Pavati rattled the metal barrier behind Tu’s head, startling me. I quickly wiped my eyes on the back of my hand.

“If I didn’t know any better—and I don’t—I would say there’s some sexist discrimination going on here with the ladies stuffed back here with the groceries,” Pavati announced. A wrapper crackled. “Though I guess that does mean we have access to all the food.”

“Hey, give me something.” Tu scratched at the screen.

“Sorry, won’t fit through. More for us second-class citizens!”

Tu growled. Hunger didn’t seem to improve his mood.

“Hey, check this out,” he said a few minutes later as he punched buttons on the GPS, only half-watching the extending tunnel. “I entered that address of yours. The GPS actually isn’t working—it’s only making an educated guess about where we are now, based on our direction and speed when the satellite signal was lost—but it’s probably not too far off, since my tunnel is accurate. Look, it can give us the time to the destination. We’re going as the crow flies, or as the gopher digs, so in about two hours—”

I glanced down at the glowing screen and the line that stretched from our current position into the mountains. “How did you know the address?”

“It was on that cheesy postcard you left in the backpack when you decided to go get yourself held up at gunpoint.”

“How about you stay out of my shit next time?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. I’d wanted him to enter the address, but not if he had to go through my few remaining belongings to do it.

“I just saved your ass, ass,” Tu said in a murderous tone.

Pavati spoke up from the backseat. “There you go again, taking all the credit. Did you somehow miss Khaya’s contribution back there?”

Khaya’s silence was so noticeable it was almost loud.

Pavati added quickly, “Or my mad skills?”

Tu scoffed. “Your little tricks were nice and all, but if I hadn’t gone into town like you all tried to keep me from doing, this punk would probably be dead”—he jerked his head at me— “and Khaya would be on a one-way flight back to the Athenaeum.”

“Why did you go in by yoursel
f
?” Pavati asked in her dead-serious tone. “One minute you were there in the trees with me, the next—poof.”

I glanced at Tu. I hadn’t known he’d left before Pavati. I’d assumed they’d come together. She must have been baiting him by bragging, so she could pounce once he touted his own actions. The entire backseat was now heavily silent, like a dark shadow where a predator crouched, ready to strike. Tu was probably grateful now for the screen separating them.

“You came too,” he said, his words braced with defensiveness.

“I only made it in time because I ran my ass off, and that was only because I heard sirens and knew something was going down. I almost didn’t find your tunnel in the first place, it was so well-hidden in the bushes.”

“I left the tunnel open for you to follow me! Trust me, you wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t wanted you to. I only went without you because I knew you’d try to stop me.”

“You know what I think?” Pavati asked in a casual tone that was more frightening than an angry one. “I think you left your tunnel in place so you could come back to exactly where you’d left me and pretend you hadn’t done anything.”

“Done what? What would I have done?” There was an edge of nervousness under Tu’s bluster. “I was only making sure these guys weren’t getting themselves in trouble. I was going to help—”

“They didn’t need help … yet. You were going to
make
trouble, to cause a disturbance like you’d wanted to, as a sign of defiance to Eden City. Tavin and Khaya beat you to it—accidentally—but still, you managed to capitalize on the situation pretty well.”

“So what?” Tu said. “Someone has to take some action, if none of you will.” His tone was snide, but again, there was something else in it. Maybe it was my imagination, but he almost sounded relieved. Maybe Pavati had guessed wrong. “And I saved the day, so how about I get some appreciation instead of accusations?”

“You’re appreciating yourself enough for all of us,” I said. “We can leave you alone, you know, if you’d like some more privacy while you—Gods!”

The end of the tunnel had stopped moving forward, and I mashed on the brakes. We all pitched forward in our seats as the car screeched to a halt, the front bumper resting only a couple feet from a wall of solid earth.

Tu kicked open his door without a word, got out, and slammed it. I shot out of the car after him, into the dead-end tunnel lit by the headlights.

“Are you trying to wreck the car?” I shouted over the top of the cruiser, slamming my own door.

“I’m sick of your shit, Barnes,” Tu said, facing me over the hood. He looked ready to leap over it, his bare shoulders tense, his hands balled into fists at his side.

There was a rapping on one of the back windows. Apparently the rear doors wouldn’t open from the inside. It made sense, since the people who were usually back there had been arrested.

Neither Tu nor I moved.

“And I’m sick of yours,” I said. “It won’t be long before your drama queen antics get one of us killed.”

Tu snarled. “Like I said, it’s better to be doing something than nothing at all, you chickenshit waste of space. I don’t know who you think you are, and I don’t know why Pavati and Khaya are playing along with you like you’re worth something—worth even sharing our air—but I know the truth. You’re nobody. Not only are you nobody, but you’re trying to drag us down with you. And I’m not going to let that happen.”

Pavati smacked the back window with her palm, her muffled, angry cry barely reaching us through the glass.

“You don’t have to be here!” I yelled. “Why are you?”

Tu glanced at the car—toward Pavati. We both knew why he was still here. Not even I wanted to point out the obvious, though Pavati probably couldn’t hear me. Mocking him for that would be too low a blow even to give Tu.

“In fact,” I said instead, “I’d rather you left me the hell alone. Go be China’s boy toy for all I care. Just don’t expect these two to be as eager as you are to go be tools for the rich and powerful.”

Tu really looked like he was about to come at me when a sharp crack made him pause. It had come from Khaya’s side of the backseat. She hadn’t broken the window, but it sounded like she’d full-on kicked it.

Tu and I could fight it out without interference with Khaya and Pavati trapped—maybe they hadn’t resorted to using their Words yet, or maybe they were having trouble behind all the steel and bulletproof glass. But then Tu could try to kill me without interference, as he would likely do given the opportunity. And he would likely succeed. Never mind the whole Word of Earth thing; he had the Athenaeum’s training on his side, which most certainly had covered hand-to-hand combat. I still felt like fighting him, I was so angry, but it wouldn’t do me any good.

I took a deep breath, then opened the nearest back door. Khaya came flying out like an angry cat, looking too infuriated to speak, followed by Pavati, whose outburst reached us before she did.

“What the hell is the matter with you two? Can we cease and desist with the peacock display? Or else the next one to leave me locked in a car will get his balls removed by yours truly.” Pavati raised a hand and wiggled her fingers. “The old-fashioned way.”

Tu took a step back from her. “No need to get your panties in a twist. We were just having a chat. You know—”

“If you say ‘man-to-man,’ you’d better be pinching those legs together as tight as you can.”

Tu swallowed and shifted his feet closer together.

Khaya squeezed her eyes closed and exhaled, long and slow, her beautiful face steely. When she opened them, she seemed calmer. “Look, everyone is hungry, tired, and probably freezing now that we’re out of the car. Let’s take a quick break.”

She held out a sweatshirt for me without meeting my eyes. Still, it was more than I’d expected after I’d taken so long to let her out of the backseat.

While Khaya doled out the rest of the sweatshirts, Pavati tossed energy bars at everyone. Tu left his sweatshirt on the hood and let his energy bar bounce off his back as he raised his hand to the dirt wall and started speaking to it.

No small burrow formed around us this time. The walls kept expanding, more passageways branching off, spiraling staircases of earth rising and dropping to other levels. Fresh night air seeped in through hidden openings in the ceiling, which was near enough to the surface to reveal dangling roots. Tu was showing off, of course. At least building an underground mansion was a better use of his testosterone than pounding my face in.

After pulling out the backpack and clicking the flashlight on, I shut off the car, which was now parked in our spacious underground living room of packed dirt. I shined the light at Khaya’s feet, about to apologize quietly to her, when she burst out laughing.

The sound was amazing, but shocking. Pavati looked at her with her eyebrows raised.

Khaya covered her mouth, still giggling—Khaya,
giggling
, as if we’d thought we couldn’t be more surprised and she was proving otherwise. Maybe she’d been more affected by the battle than I’d estimated.

“Sorry,” she said, tugging at the front of her black sweatshirt. She gestured at me and Pavati. “It’s these.”

“Why?” I asked, looking down at my own chest. The only thing on the sweatshirt that I could understand was a symbol—a red heart. The rest was thick blue lettering.

“They say
I Heart Martigny
in French.”

Our souvenirs from the town we’d just shaken up—
literally and figuratively. Pavati started chuckling, then burst out laughing along with Khaya. Maybe the hilarity was half due to relief over the dissipating tension. As I’d discovered under the lake during my first almost-fight with Tu, some things could be side-splitting when everything else was so serious.

Tu finally picked up his sweatshirt, as if all this time he’d wanted to prove he wasn’t cold, even shirtless. He frowned at it and pulled it over his head. His frown deepened. “What the—? This barely fits!”

It was probably my laughter that did it. Or maybe when I said, “Don’t worry, we can replace it with an
I Heart China
sweatshirt.”

He leapt straight over the hood of the car and onto me. I hit the floor with his weight on my chest, the breath leaving my lungs like a compressed bellows. One of his fists knocked stars across my vision before I knew what was happening. Another made me taste blood.

Someone tore him off me, slammed him facedown into the ground, and twisted his arm behind his back, hard enough to make him cry out. When I could focus again—but not yet breathe—I figured I would see Pavati with her knee in his back, since she’d been the one threatening him. But no. It was Khaya. She was snarling down at him, her hair a wild mane around her savage face.