I woke up the next morning, disoriented. With sunlight filtering through the gauzy green curtains around the bed, I briefly thought I had awoken from my nap in Khaya’s leafy garden. Then I remembered everything that had led me to this apartment yesterday.
I stumbled out of bed, tripping over the fallen TV, and discovered that, in addition to the absurd claw-foot tub, the bathroom was equipped with the basic necessities: a toilet and a shower, soap and shampoo, and a toothbrush and toothpaste.
My bedroom also had a walk-in closet bigger than my old room in Drey’s garage, all of it lined with clothes. The clothes were my size and mostly black. I briefly considered wearing a gray undershirt, sweatpants and sneakers for the day, since they were about the only things in the closet that weren’t black and fitted, but I reconsidered when I pictured Ryse’s reaction. It was best not to make things worse than they already would be, so I cursed my way back into another Necron suit.
Before leaving, I checked the glossy, spaceship-like fridge and rosewood cupboards in the kitchen. To my disproportionate delight, I found milk and Captain Crunch cereal, my all-time favorite import from America. After I had a giant bowl-full in my stomach, I almost felt like I could handle whatever was to come. Almost.
In my jiu-jitsu class later that morning, I asked my trainer to show me how to twist out of the armlock Ryse had forced me into the day before. I didn’t explain why, of course, and he showed me without hesitation, happy that I was exhibiting more interest in having him beat the crap out of me—or in my self-defense, as he saw it. Words had to be able to protect themselves from abductors or assassins, after all. He wouldn’t think I was trying to protect myself from my Godspeaker. We practiced several times before I was sure I could get out of the hold if Ryse tried it again. Not that I knew what I would do at that point.
Run? I couldn’t run.
My stomach felt too jittery for lunch, so after my jiu-jitsu lesson, I went to Khaya’s garden instead of the mess hall. Anything I ate would probably come right back up after my lesson with Ryse, anyway.
Swanson had left the door unlocked, so I let myself in with the push of a button. Even standing in the sunlight and trees for a few minutes, smelling the rich scent of leaves and earth all around me, I felt stronger. Maybe I could do this. Maybe I could face Ryse and not lose the remnants of my breakfast … or another part of my soul.
Or so I hoped. When I heard the sudden hum of the door opening behind me, I expected to see Brehan again, or maybe even Swanson.
Not her.
The sight of Ryse ahead of schedule nearly made me shout in alarm. She stood in the entryway to Khaya’s garden, her usual lab coat not yet draped around her shoulders. But her Necron bodysuit, made for the purpose of dealing with me, was tightly in place. She smiled, her pale face framed by the severe cut of her straight black hair, her dark eyes as cruel as ever. She took a step inside, and the sunlight around me seemed to freeze.
“No, no, no,” she said in a tone meant for scolding a five-year-old. “We can’t have this, now can we?”
five
Ryse’s gaze flickered around Khaya’s garden, as sharp as a knife—or a machete, mentally slicing and chopping—before cutting back to me. “It’s not appropriate for you to be here,” she said. “As your Godspeaker, I can’t allow this.”
“We can leave,” I whispered, choked. Every muscle in my body was tense, frozen like a deer’s at the sight of a predator. Gods, I was the Word of Death, and yet this woman terrified me.
Oddly, the Words were silent. Usually they started speaking up whenever Ryse was around. Maybe it was Khaya’s vibrant greenery or Brehan’s light suppressing them. Or maybe it was my willpower, because I didn’t want to hear them whispering anywhere near even a single blade of grass in this garden.
At least I knew for sure now that Ryse had nothing to do with giving me these places that had belonged to Khaya. Maybe they really had been given to me for solace, not bribery. But now that Ryse knew about them …
“We’ll leave,” she said, and I relaxed a fraction of a millimeter. “But first you must do something for me, so this never happens again.”
The word left my throat as if wrenched out. “No.”
“No?” Ryse echoed coldly. She never liked it when I said that.
I took a step back, but then corrected, forcing myself toward her. I had to get her out.
The challenge in my movement didn’t escape her, and she looked me up and down, assessing the weight of it. Her eyes glittered with anger and something else, like excitement. Gods, she really was sick if breaking my resistance excited her.
“You think that’s a smart move?” she asked, her voice low and dangerous.
I didn’t answer. She bit her bottom lip as if she couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into me and moved forward to meet me. I had height and muscle mass on her, but she had years of training. If I could avoid some of her trickier moves and block the rest, maybe I could shove her aside and get out the door. She would catch up with me, of course, and there would be hell to pay, but at least Khaya’s garden wouldn’t bear the brunt of it.
We were ten feet away from each other when she pulled out a black, plastic-looking gun and aimed it at my chest. I should have known Ryse wouldn’t fight fair.
For a split second, I was relieved. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d dropped me with tranquilizers. I wouldn’t have to deal with this situation, and I’d likely still be knocked out for our lesson in the lab. I’d wake up groggy and with a killer headache later this evening, but it would be a small price to pay.
When the two darts thudded into me with thin cables attached, I realized she wasn’t going to let me off so easy. Those weren’t tranquilizers darts.
I hit the ground a split second later, every muscle in my body screaming. I couldn’t scream, though, because my jaw was wired closed from the electric current running through it.
“This is an EMD,” Ryse said, standing above me, “an Electro-Muscular Disruption device. You should find your muscular and nervous functions … disrupted.”
It only lasted about five seconds, but those five second could have been a half an hour. My mind went numb with that same buzzing pain as when I smashed my knee or elbow, that “funny” bone pain that wasn’t so funny, except it was as if every square inch of me had a funny bone with a hammer hitting it over and over again.
When it stopped, my entire body tingled like mad, burning and itching. I tried to tug the darts out of my chest, but my hand flopped like a fish on a line with no coordination whatsoever, my arms more cramped and exhausted than if I had pumped iron for ten hours straight. My brain wasn’t even functioning enough for me to curse at Ryse. I just stared at her, stunned, as she crouched down beside me.
She set a black leather bag on the grass nearby, in which she calmly and efficiently stowed the gun after pulling the darts out of my chest for me. Then she slipped a syringe out of a side pocket, popped off the cap, and ejected a few droplets of clear liquid into the air.
“Wait,” I managed to say drunkenly, regaining some control of my mouth.
But she didn’t wait. She jammed the syringe into my thigh.
I couldn’t stop her in time. My numb hand moved to intercept her about two seconds too late. She let me rip the syringe out, only smiling down at me as the tube came up with the plunger depressed: empty. I hadn’t even felt the sting with all the pins and needles assaulting my muscles, but I felt what came after.
My body went from hot and prickly to warm and fuzzy, the cramped tension draining out of me as if a plug had been pulled. While it didn’t leave me more functional, it was decidedly more relaxing—a feeling I’d experienced regularly when I’d first arrived at the hospital. My arms now felt like they were made out of jelly instead of static electricity, falling to my sides. The syringe rolled from my limp grasp.
“Feels better, doesn’t it?” Ryse
said as I tried to lift my head and failed. She brushed the hair out of my eyes and I had the vague inclination, if not the ability, to recoil. “See, it’s not my goal to cause you pain. Not too much, anyway.”
That was horseshit, in my humble, drugged-out opinion. I tried to tell her so but only groaned incoherently.
She shushed me. “Don’t try to talk. You don’t need to. Let me.”
My eyes couldn’t focus on anything but one of Brehan’s lights drifting in the treetops near the ceiling. I wanted to ask it for help as I felt Ryse peeling off my gloves. I’d never been able to speak the Words while sedated, but then, no one had ever tried to use me to godspeak while I was drugged. I’d accidentally godspoken through Khaya once when she was asleep, though, so maybe Ryse could use me now.
Her hands gripped my arm, rolling me over onto my stomach, and then the zipper of my shirt parted near the back of my neck and down my spine. I tried to say no, but it came out more like “Ngh.” My fingers flexed, making a weak fist in the grass. I attempted to push myself to my knees but she knocked me flat with a gentle shove.
“We’re going to try something new for today,” she said, above me. “Now, I also prefer it when you’re able to conduct yourself with more dignity than this, but if you’re going to be uncooperative, then dignity must be sacrificed.”
No, Ryse definitely wasn’t behind me getting my own apartment. She would prefer me drugged into obedience, not bribed, and locked in my hospital room until the day I died.
“I hope the dosage is correct,” she continued, her fingers brushing the skin of my shoulders. “Not so much that you lose all motor functions, but not so little that you can resist. Now let’s see.”
At the sound of her voice reading from my back, I hoped my muscles wouldn’t respond, that they were too drowsy to hear even the call of the Words.
No such luck. Even after I’d been electrocuted and doped, the Words stirred inside. Her voice flowed into me, filling my body like water in a hose. At her urging, I hauled myself to my feet. Even so, I couldn’t move all that well, only well enough to stumble to the nearest tree and flatten my palm against the trunk. It was actually three trees—the three Khaya had braided together.
Ryse’s voice spoke behind me, through me: “Wither, desiccate … ”
The trees shuddered, leaves dropping in a rustling rain of death, bark wrinkling under my fingertips.
And then I lurched to the next tree. We went on like that, through the entire garden, touching every trunk, shrub, and flower. It took hours. At the end she let me drop to my knees on my patch of lawn, but not to rest, not yet. The hands that had so recently run their fingers through the grass, savoring the life, thrust downward now until they touched roots. Ryse whispered over my shoulder until every blade had curled in on itself, shrinking into brown, brittle knots.
By the time she stopped godspeaking and I looked up on my own, the late-afternoon sunlight seemed less warm, leeching color from the world. Maybe that was because the trunks of all the trees looked like bleached bones, their rasping leaves as dry and crumbled as sand on the ground, their naked branches and the gnarled twigs of bushes straining skyward like skeletal fingers, never reaching the release they sought. The garden was now devoid of life.
The sound I made wasn’t intelligible, but I hadn’t meant it to be. Still on my knees, I fell forward, not wanting to see anymore. I rested my face on my forearms to keep from touching my hands, which I held as far away from my body as I could. Even my eyes felt like a desert, too hot and dusty for tears to trickle out. But my shoulders shook.
“You’re crying?” Ryse asked, behind me. “Nothing you’ve killed has made you cry, but this? Hmm.” She sounded thoughtful, not concerned. “Well, we’ll see how you feel today in the lab.”
I raised my wobbling head enough to look up at her. I tried to form the words on my tongue, but they wouldn’t come. My body was still too sedated.
“Yes, we’re still going to the lab,” she said, staring down at me with her pitiless eyes. “Don’t think you can use this as an excuse to miss our session. Really, the harder it is right now, the sooner you’ll get used to it.”
six
Ryse turned for the exit of the now-dead garden, her boots crunching through the dry grass, sending up puffs of dust. If she expected me to follow on legs that felt like half-peeled string cheese, she was in for disappointment. But then she motioned for the guards who’d been standing outside the garden’s entrance.
They entered hesitantly, and Ryse said, “Don’t worry, he’s immobilized. Even if he touches you he can’t speak, so don’t bother with his gloves. Just bring him.”
Only then did they shoulder their dart guns.
I wouldn’t have hurt the guards even if I was capable of speaking, but maybe she didn’t want them to know that. Perhaps the Godspeakers were trying to keep the fact that I was defective from getting out, pretending I was still a tool to be feared.
And maybe I was, in the hands of Ryse.
The guards were definitely wary as they gripped my arms, careful to touch only my Necron sleeves. They lifted me to my feet, then half-helped, half-dragged me to the doorway. I wanted to look back at the garden, search for some shred of green that I hadn’t withered and destroyed, but my head hung forward, too heavy to lift. I was pretty sure I’d left nothing alive anyway.
And I was pretty sure I hated myself.
Lucky for the guards, they didn’t have to drag me all the way to the lab. A wheelchair sat in the hallway, where they deposited me like a sack of trash. Unlucky for me, they buckled me in with a seat belt so I couldn’t fall out. I would have happily thrown myself through the windows and plummeted the ten or so stories to the pavement outside than ride down to the lab with Ryse. But it was likely that my legs wouldn’t have worked long enough to close the short distance, and that the windows were shatterproof. At least a dart in the back would have knocked me out completely.
As if sensing my thoughts, Ryse wheeled me away from the windows and ordered the guards to go back to their other duties. She didn’t head for the main set of elevators but down a long hallway that ran deeper into the building, apparently taking a back way down to the lab. She probably didn’t want anyone to see me like this, for the same reason she’d put on a show for the guards.
I certainly didn’t feel very fearsome or intimidating, and I doubted I looked it with my head lolling, my eyes either on the light fixtures flashing past on the ceiling or on my repulsive hands in my lap. I vaguely wondered if I was drooling.
We entered a more functional, white-walled elevator that required a swipe of Ryse’s keycard to open. At least I wouldn’t have any of the Godspeakers’ trainees or other underlings gawking at me.
Or so I thought. But then the elevator slowed, halting on the fourth floor. We were headed down to the second floor of the basement, so it was someone else who was stopping it.
Ryse wheeled me back and stepped partially in front of the chair, as if to block me from view. She looked irritated, even more so when the doors opened and she saw who was waiting.
Luft, the Word of Air, stood before us: tall, blond and athletic in a loose pair of pants and nothing else, his jaw square enough to measure other men’s. His bright blue eyes looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, glancing up at Ryse then back down at me. His hand shot out to keep the elevator doors from closing.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Gods, I wished I could have spoken to Ryse like that without getting my ass kicked. Ryse looked like she wanted to kick Luft’s, but she refrained.
“What are you doing in here?” she demanded. “This elevator is for Godspeaker use only. Does Carlin know you’re—”
Luft held up a keycard in one hand. “Carlin gave this to me. And,” he added when she opened her mouth, cutting her off again, “whether or not you think he should have isn’t your prerogativ
e. He’s my Godspeaker, Ryse, not you.”
“You will address me as Dr. Winters,” Ryse snapped. “But I am the Word of Death’s, so none of this is your—”
“No, Dr. Winters, technically Eli is Tavin’s Godspeaker, and you’re Eli’s assistant.”
It took my foggy mind a second to realize he meant Swanson. Luft was on a first-name basis with my father. Not many people were. Not even me.
Ryse’s eyes went wide and her tone dropped to icy depths of fury. “I will not be put in place by—”
“Not even by Eli? Does he know about this?” Luft glanced down at me again, and my head fell forward so I could peer blearily up at him. My disheveled hair was partially in my face, but it was better than gaping at him with my head back and my mouth hanging open.
Luft’s eyes didn’t betray anything other than distaste for Ryse. That alone shouldn’t have been enough for him to stick his neck out for me. I doubted he was doing it for my sake, since we’d only seen each other a few times and at least one of those times he’d definitely tried to suffocate me. Or steal my air at the bottom of a lake to drown me, but same difference.
“He looks like hell,” Luft pronounced, then turned back to Ryse. “And he can’t speak for himself. What did you do to him? Where are you taking him?”
In response, Ryse jabbed the button to close the elevator. Instead of blocking the doors again, Luft sidestepped into the elevator with us, keeping his back turned away from Ryse.
“Tread carefully, Word of Air,” Ryse said softly as the elevator started to descend again. “If you think you can regulate my actions like you do the temperature, you have another thing coming. I am far more dangerous than the weather. In fact, why don’t I send you off to play … ” She lifted her hand as if to brush Luft’s shoulder, where the dark lettering began to curve around his muscled back.
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