Wordless (8 page)

“Now?” she asked, leaping up from the chair. She sucked air through her teeth as her ankle hit the ground, then put her weight on it more slowly and was able to stand on two feet. Apparently she’d
only needed sleep to heal—and maybe a shit-ton of cookies. One day’s rest had been far more recuperative for her than it had been for me.

“Good. You can walk, at least,” I said. “You can tell me your story about the world on the way. It sounds important, but that means leaving is more important.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” She snatched her shirt from the table and turned away—shyly?—to pull it over her head. “Where are we going?” she asked, her voice muffled.

The incomprehensible letters shifted over her shoulders before they were covered. They looked almost alive in her skin. Guess that made sense, for the Word of Life.

I smiled, but it felt hollow. “I hope you liked your trip in the garbage bag.”

“Why?” She jerked her shirt all the way down.

“Because you’re about to take a ride on a garbage barge.”

eight

Before we left the old utility room under the bridge, Khaya pulled a crumpled ivy leaf out of her pocket.

“What’s that for?” I asked, cracking the door to peek out into the dusk. A couple ladies had arrived to start their “day,” but luckily they hadn’t yet noticed us in their usual space. They were too busy standing around outside, chatting in the brazen tones I always admired, bejeweled hands on their hips.

“A diversion. Both for the women outside and for anyone hunting us. I picked it up while you were gone.” She crouched down in front of the cracked door, careful of her ankle, and set the leaf just outside. “Which way are we headed?”

“West, downriver. We need to get to the dock.”

“Isn’t the dock all the way upriver, on the lakeshore?”

“The one for yachts is. We’re trying to catch a
trash
barge, remember? You think rich people want to share their dock with garbage?”

“Oh, right,” she said, sounding embarrassed. And then she started whispering to the leaf.

I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but the leaf sure as hell must have. It sprouted a vine that went snaking out of her hand, and then—zip!—it took off out of sight, racing as fast as a lit fuse. Except this fuse was growing, not shrinking. Which made me wonder what would happen when it reached wherever it was headed.

I didn’t have to wonder for long, maybe a minute. One of the ladies outside gasped, and then they all were crying out in amazement.

Khaya and I slipped out of the utility room, crossing behind the ladies, hugging the river. Their backs were to us as they pointed and stared at a group of buildings to the southeast.

Even in the twilight, it was pretty obvious that the buildings had turned green. They’d been stone a minute before, but now they were completely covered in ivy.

I was tempted to point and stare too, until Khaya’s fingers clamped around my wrist and gave me a tug in the opposite direction.

“You …
grew that
?” I hissed, starting down the cobbled waterfront road, still eyeing the explosion of green over my shoulder. “From a lea
f
?”

“Yes,” Khaya said simply, limping alongside me, keeping her head down. She could
walk, but her pace was pretty slow.

“That’s thousands, hundreds of thousands of square feet of ivy! It didn’t make you tired?”

“I told you, I only get exhausted when I heal myself. Making other things live and grow is no problem.”

“Oh,” I said, casting one last glance behind. Without the shelter of the bridge over us, the hissing echo of the Nectar River had become just a murmur on the evening breeze, which smelled like algae and piss in this neighborhood. I felt exposed.

And that reminded me why I was running. Of the life—and death—I was leaving behind. I was still numb to it all, and I didn’t want that to change. If I thawed, I might fall apart again.
Focus
, I told myself.
Get to Jacques. Fast.

Without thinking about the consequences, I put my arm around Khaya’s shoulder as if to support myself, but then brought it down around her back, gripping her side and hoisting her up. She gave me a startled look and opened her mouth—maybe to ask what the hell I was doing—and then closed it. She’d realized that walking was easier this way.

“It might help if you slouched more,” I said, trying not to think about how good her perfect posture looked. “Act drunk, even. No one searching for you will expect to find you stumbling around down by the river with some lowlife.” I scanned the darkening frontage, not on the lookout for the usual crooks and creeps, but people in uniforms instead. Or a young man wearing all black.

Khaya’s cool voice made itself heard this time, as if she was offended at the thought of even pretending to be drunk. “You know, they won’t want to publicize the fact that I’m missing. I doubt it’s widely known
within
the Athenaeum, let alone out in the rest of Eden City. So if people are searching for anyone, it will be you.”

A tremor of fear rose underneath my frozen calm, like an earthquake deep underground, but I ignored it. “Huh, and acting drunk by the river won’t disguise who
I
am. To do that, I would need a tuxedo and … well, someone like you, I guess, so this helps.”

“You’re not often down here with a … lady?” Her tone sounded more casual than cool.

I halted mid-step, making us stumble, before I continued walking and speaking in a rush. “You mean—you don’t mean, one of
those
ladies? No! No, Drey and Chantelle never let me—I mean, not that I wanted—I mean, I
have
had girlfriends before, but not—”

I abandoned wherever I’d been going with that, using the slightly more populated street we’d come to as an excuse to shut up. A two-lane road rose perpendicularly from the waterfront lane, where a few small convenience shops and a Chinese restaurant were, then met up with the much wider, busier street at the top of the hill above the Nectar River, where a giant video screen perched above a corner supermarket. I couldn’t hear what was being broadcast from so far away, but I could make out the face currently on the TV, filling the whole screen, glowing against the near-dark sky.

Mine. The white jacket was visible on my shoulders, so the image must have been taken from one of the Athenaeum’s security cameras.

“Shit,” I said.

“I don’t care,” Khaya said, probably thinking I was still talking about the ladies under the bridge. Then she followed my stare to the bright screen on the hill. “Oh, shit.”

At any other time, I would have been surprised to hear a Word curse. Instead, I turned my face away from the street, suddenly interested in the inky ripples of the river. My fear spiked, becoming much harder to contain, sort of like a panicking beast in my chest. It didn’t help that helicopters were now hovering around the ivy-covered buildings, spotlights shining through the night sky. At least they were distracted.

“We have to walk faster,” I said. “The barge leaves after nightfall on Wednesdays and Sundays. We should make it in time, but the earlier the better.”

“And they’ll let us on?” Khaya asked, her voice particularly low and husky as we passed a guy walking the other direction, his hands in his pockets and his head down. Luckily, he looked like he wanted to be noticed as much as we did.

“I know the captain. Well, Drey did, mostly.” I had to swallow. “We dumped off our garbage at his barge. His name is Jacques, and Drey said he’d help us. But if he’s seen my face on TV … ” I swallowed again. “Can you finally tell me why I’ve let myself become a wanted fugitive? Gods.”

“I can,” Khaya said. “It’s complicated, though.”

“Remember, I’m not a brainless idiot. Not totally. Or maybe I am. But go on.”

She ignored my rambling, limping faster alongside me, probably at maximum speed and discomfort. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that her face was a smooth mask. It was only what she murmured that betrayed anything of significance:

“You know that Eden City is a highly influential force within the rest of the world, and the Athenaeum is the hub of that power, housing not only the Words and the City Council but the Godspeakers?”
Godspeaker
was the word I didn’t understand, but she didn’t pause for a question. “Eden City is the ‘peacekeeper’—a bully, in actuality, who strong-arms the rest of the world into cooperation with us. It’s for our own benefit, of course. We use trade agreements, embargoes, and the threat of retribution from the Words. Still, we let the other world powers feel included, which makes their compliance easier for them to swallow. We let them contribute to the creation of the Words, to the very power that manipulates them.”

“How can they contribute?” I already knew some of what she’d told me, about all the bowing and scraping from the heads of other countries, but nothing much about the Words’ role in all that. And especially not their “creation,” which made them sound like they were manufactured in a factory. Drey had told me a lot of stories, but those were only legends, never involving recent generations of Words. And yet, if he’d worked with Swanson … he must have known about them.

I ignored the twisting pain in my chest at the thought of Drey. It felt like my heart was getting wrung out like a rag.

“All Words have one parent who was the Word before them, whether a mother or father. As for the other parent, the Athenaeum considers bids from other countries, accepting only their brightest and most beautiful individuals—
basically, their best stock—otherwise known as the donor parent. They’re chosen from particular countries for political reasons too, of course.”

“Wait,” I said, halting on the sidewalk before Khaya tugged me back into forward motion. “People are sent here from all over the world to be bred like animals, and they
compete
for this? What if the Word doesn’t like the person, and they have to—they have to—”

“It’s not like that,” she interrupted, shooting me a chilly glare as if it were my perverted idea. “They use a process of artificial insemination, extracting genetic material from the father—whether he’s the Word or the donor parent—and inserting it into the mother.”

“How romantic.” I nearly tripped over a stray cat that hissed at me and bolted into an alley, which made Khaya stagger. She gave me another glare, but probably not because I’d tripped her; she must have been born as a result of such a “union.” She’d said her father was the Word of Life before her, so that meant her mother had been one of these donor parents. I wondered which country donated her, but figured now probably wasn’t the best time to ask.

“It’s not about romance,” Khaya said. “It’s about power. So, the Council and the Godspeakers arrange for the creation of a new generation of Words, every thirty-five years. All the births occur within a year of each other. This keeps the Words isolated in a single age group, and also always keeps them young—easier to control.”

“So the Words
don’t
run the city!” I lowered my voice with another glance around the waterfront. This was yet another way my entire world had been turned upside-down in a day: the almighty Words, the smiling face of our government, were just … puppets? “You aren’t the ones in charge, even though you have the power?”

“And you call yourself a brainless idiot.” I couldn’t tell if she was complimenting me or making fun of me for stating something that probably would have been obvious to anyone else.

“How do they make you obey, other than those bracelets?” I asked. “I’ve heard only a little about godspeaking, which I guess has to do with someone reading those words on your back … ”

Khaya stiffened, leaning away from me as we walked.

“Don’t worry,” I said hurriedly. “Even if you didn’t have your shirt on, I wouldn’t be able to read them. I’m wordless.”

My clumsy—and probably crude-sounding—attempts to put her at ease seemed to work.

“I wondered what you would see,” she said, sounding thoughtful. “The Words are always changing. The language even changes, depending on who’s looking, but if you can’t read … ”

The Words seemed even more like living things to me—the breath of the Nameless Gods, kept alive in her body like a parasite—and I pictured them crawling around under her shirt, in her skin. I almost leaned away from her like she had from me. At least we were nearly to the dock. I could see the lights only a few blocks away, the glow rippling on the Nectar. Boat masts and exhaust stacks painted a dark silhouette of a geometrical forest against the night sky.

“I’m sorry,” Khaya said, somehow sensing my discomfort. “I don’t mean to trivialize the fact that you’re wordless. Keeping the lower classes illiterate is a tradition the Words started when they took over this city several centuries ago, to create a safe environment. How ironic, since it was the upper class who took control away from us anyway.”

I was relieved she hadn’t guessed what I’d really been thinking about. “I don’t care,” I said. “I mean, I’m used to being wordless. But you’re the one with all these people trying to read your back. Now
that’s
uncool.”

This time, she didn’t shy away at the mention of her back. I even caught a flicker of a smile under the first streetlamp leading up to the dock, which made me way happier than I had any right to feel.

Encouraged, I asked, “So the Words used to be in charge?”

“Yes. Before we all came together in one place—Eden City—we ruled as kings and queen in other parts of the world for millennia. We thought joining together would make us stronger, but it actually made it easier for the Godspeakers to take control of all of us soon after. They like us to believe the change was for our own good, that we’re better with their
guidance
, but for one group to have so much power … ” She trailed off, her eyes on the sidewalk.

“How does that even work? Godspeaking, I mean.”

“It’s like reading a book out loud,” she said. “When someone reads the Words in my skin, those Words temporarily become their words. It gives their voice strength that it could never have on its own—the strength of the Gods. Hence, they’re Godspeakers.”

I imagined it was sort of like putting on brass knuckles to punch someone, but I didn’t say that. Khaya didn’t need any more reminders that I was raised on the back of a garbage truck. Not that Drey had raised me poorly. He’d tried, with what he had … and apparently he’d had a lot more than I’d realized.

… Drey. I didn’t even know who he’d really been.

“So,” I said, to think about something other than the fact that Drey was dead and I was running—walking—for my life, “anyone can read your back and make things come alive?”

She shook her head. “It’s not that easy. I’m a Word, which sounds simple—singular. But a Word from the Gods carries so much potential, like a seed, or that ivy leaf, and you saw what came from that. All the facets of the Word of Life are written into me, and each idea builds on the last, leading to more and more complicated possibilities. I use my power intuitively, but Godspeakers have to do it the hard way, navigating the path from my back. They have to know what they want to do before they try, almost like they need to know what they’re reading before they read. They devote their entire lives to studying the Words, and they still don’t understand us well. So we’re not that easy to control.”