“Tangible and Intangible, hah,” Tu said. “More like Substantial and Insubstantial, or Material and Immaterial.” He leaned forward, as if letting me in on a secret. “Immaterial means unimportant.”
“I know what it means!” I snapped. “Just because I’m wordless doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”
Tu leaned back and said under his breath, “Could’ve fooled me.”
“Not that I think Life is unimportant,” I said hastily, glancing at Khaya to see if she’d reacted to being relegated to the “immaterial” Words. “I can see why Darkness and Light would be less earthshaking”—I weighted the word with the appropriate amount of sarcasm—“but—”
“Tu’s actually right,” Khaya interrupted. “Life and Death are two of the most amazing, but least practical, Words to have around. The City Council likes to show us off, but aside from the occasional assassination or miraculous recall from death, neither Herio nor I are very useful on a larger scale. Well, until Dr. Swanson found a use for me,” she added.
“I still have a hard time believing they want to replace us with these golems of yours,” Tu said, sounding like he was trying to convince himself it wasn’t true. “No one has ever even hinted at these bodies Cruithear can supposedly make. Even if Pavati’s giving you the benefit of the doubt—”
“Which brings us to the Word of Shaping,” Pavati interrupted, continuing with a theatrical flourish as though Tu had just introduced Cruithear, “who used to be part of another group of four: the Words of Power.”
“Which, in the old days, used to be called the Storytellers,” Khaya said in a soft, far-away voice.
“Why?” I asked.
“If the other eight Words are the pieces that the two Nameless Gods used to make the world, the Words of Power are how they made it,” Khaya said. “These are the Words that gave the world shape, order, meaning, momentum. They can manipulate the world like we can do only with our individual Words. Hence, they’re the Storytellers, playing with all the Words on a higher level. Shaping, Movement, Naming, Time—that’s who they are. Well, were.”
“What happened to them?”
“A story for another day,” Pavati said, breaking the spell of quiet awe that had fallen over everyone, even Tu. “So, to answer your question, Agonya, Luft, Herio, Brehan, Mørke, and Cruithear are still in the Athenaeum. Agonya and Luft, you met in the forest. They’re the two other Elem—Tangibles,” she amended, glaring at Tu.
“The Blond Brigade,” Tu scoffed. Apparently even his fellow Tangibles weren’t exempt from his scorn. “That pansy, Luft, drives me nuts. Agonya is manlier than he is.”
I remembered the tall, square-jawed blond guy that was pretty much the cookie-cutter of manliness. “What?”
Pavati rolled her eyes. “Tu is giving Luft shit ’cause he’s gay. And Agonya is, well, tough as hell. Tu likes to call her the Red Menace. You know, because her donor father was Russian. And the whole fire thing. The fact that Air and Fire are our opposites, elementally speaking, might also have something to do with the childish name-calling.”
“Not that Agonya looks manly,” Tu continued in a reflective tone, ignoring Pavati. “Gods, that girl is hot. But like an explosion is hot.” He fanned his fingers as if he’d burned himself, then hurried on at the unamused look on Pavati’s face. “At least she matches her element well enough, which is more than I can say for some. You should see the Word of Darkness and the Word of Light! Right?” He nudged Pavati, as if trying to stir up the smile that inevitably appeared.
“It is sort of funny,” she said in a grudging tone. “Mørke, the Word of Darkness, had a donor mother from Norway. She’s so pale she’s nearly translucent. White hair.” Her fingers grazed her braids. “And if you think I’m dark, you should see Brehan, the Word of Light, whose donor father was Ethiopian. But it makes sense if you consider the effect of regional climate on human evo—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Tu interrupted. “Still, that man is black.”
Pavati’s eyes narrowed. “No one’s talking about how yellow you are.”
“I’m yellow like Chinese soil and proud of it! The Chinese even named a river after the yellow earth. How do you like that, water-girl?”
“People name rivers all sorts of random things.” Pavati nudged him back. “Are you sure it isn’t named after that other yellow liquid?”
Now it was Tu’s turn to look unamused. “Don’t insult my fatherland.”
“Fatherland.” Pavati snorted thunderously. “Your nationalism is about as laughable as your machismo, since you have as little experience living in China as being a man.”
“What—?” Tu exploded, but then Pavati threw a dirt clod at him. He was too indignant to block it with either hands or Words before it hit his chest.
“There’s a good use for your earth.” Pavati turned her laughing eyes on me, making my poor, abused heart skip a couple beats. “Sorry. You probably imagined we were more mature than this, huh?”
I had, but I couldn’t help laughing.
Khaya glanced between the two of us, then back into her hands. I’d thought she’d been quieter lately because Tu was so loud, but she seemed abnormally quiet even taking that into account.
“Doesn’t the city only accept ‘donations’ from the rich and powerful?” I asked, to change the subject in case all the bickering was what was bothering her. “And yet the Word of Light is Ethiopian?”
“You mean Edenian?” Pavati corrected with a slight smile. “Because Eden City is the only place any of us come from.” She gave Tu a pointed look. He glared back at her. “But, yes, Brehan’s genetics are Ethiopian, which was Eden City making the point that they don’t have to favor the highest bidder for any of the Words—that they’re more powerful than the powerful.”
“They did the same thing with Hayat—Khaya’s dad,” Tu said with almost a malicious grin. Or maybe I only imagined it was malicious because I knew how carefully Khaya guarded the memories of her father. “Even with the oil, Saudi Arabia wasn’t really powerful. The City Council just likes to stir things up, which they did even more when they added Israel to the pot. Khaya isn’t only a Word Made Flesh; she’s the Middle East conflict made flesh.”
Eden City definitely seemed to thrive on conflict. And now it made more sense that they’d want to destabilize the world—it would fall to them even more easily. I wondered how many other world events had the hands of the City Council behind them. Eden City always tried to portray itself as a bastion of culture, technology, and peacekeeping, but how many of their actions had a darker side? Probably all.
Khaya’s stony expression distracted me from the bigger picture.
Pavati noticed it too. “Like you’re any different, Tu. Your mother, Tsuchi—the previous Word of Earth,” she clarified for me, “had a donor parent from Japan, and we all know how much China and Japan love each other.”
Actually, I didn’t, but I didn’t say anything. The Words might be prisoners, but they had far more access to knowledge than I’d ever had. There were prisons other than those of concrete and metal bars: some were made of glass walls and indestructible bracelets, others of ignorance and wordlessness. Eden City had all three.
“Forget the Japanese,” Tu said in disgust, dismissing his mother in the same breath. “The father carries on the line, anyway.” He struck a seated pose. “I’m Chinese.”
“Right,” Pavati said sarcastically. “I’m sure you’ll be singing the same tune when your kid is named after the next country in line for the Word of Earth. That’s all your male ‘line’ amounts to.”
“I’m sure China will win the spot again—well, if the Words aren’t turned into mindless automatons built in a lab,” Tu added. “But hey, I’m free now! I’m going to do things the old-fashioned way, with the girl of my choice.”
He so pointedly did not look at Pavati that I nearly snickered. His insecurity almost made me disli
ke him a little less. Almost, but not quite.
Then Tu brightened. “That’s what our plan should be! We should go home, support our home countries in the fight against Eden—”
“China is not your home.” Pavati turned on him with a fierceness I hadn’t yet seen. “Don’t you get it? We have no homes!”
“Maybe that’s how you feel,” Tu shot back. “You just don’t have any connection to the earth, like me. You’re water, drifting.”
She rolled her eyes. “And you’re as thick as the earth’s mantle. I don’t have a home because my dad’s ancestors were sent as slaves to America. Even my donor mom’s people—Native Americans—were made prisoners on their own land. And now America has made me a slave, like the both of them, to Eden City. Like China did to you. Like you.”
Tu’s face reddened and his fists clenched at his sides. “So you don’t want to do anything? Just sink into anonymity and watch the world go by without you, never mind that you’re a Word ?”
“Sounds pretty enjoyable.” Pavati leaned back on her hands and crossed her legs. “To complete the picture, I only need a sofa, a cup of tea, and a good book.” She inhaled, as if breathing in the aroma of her imaginary tea. “Ah, freedom.”
“Fine!” Tu rose to his feet in a storm of muscle. “If that’s how you insist on seeing things, you can go hide in a hole like Khaya. But we were made for more than that! We have power, and whole nations that support us—us, not Eden City.”
He stomped away from the ring of light into one of the side rooms. If there had been a door, he would have slammed it. As it was, the earthen threshold collapsed, sealing him off from the rest of us.
Pavati sighed and stayed where she was. “Let him sulk. He’ll snap out of it.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen him ‘out of it’ yet,” I said, staring at the smooth wall where a doorway had just been. I hoped Tu wouldn’t sulk for too long. Khaya and I needed to move—which would be difficult, seeing as we were currently stuck underground.
“Yeah, Tu’s like that. About as chill as a volcano.” Pavati made a face. “Here I go, now, relating him to the earth. Gods, next I’ll be talking about how I’m as laid-back as a river.” She met my eyes in total seriousness. “I’m not.”
I suppressed a shiver. “I believe you. So your donor mother was from America?”
“Both mine and my father’s,” she said, relaxing somewhat. “My donor mother was Hopi, in honor of her people—
America’s attempt at an apology for genocide.”
That was why Tu had mentioned a powwow and a peace pipe. I vaguely recalled that those were Native American symbols.
“It’s where the name Pavati comes from. You can guess what it means.” She grinned. “My father’s donor mother was African American. She was selected near the end of the Civil Rights Movement, so it was political like everything else. My father’s name was Water. He hated it.” Her grin softened to a smile, but it was somehow stronger, more real. “He called himself Walter, and it eventually caught on, like Em’s name. Herio’s mom.”
“Yeah, Khaya told me about her,” I said quickly, not wanting to talk about Herio. “So they let you do that? Change your names?”
“Not on paper. But even then, we have a microscopic amount of control … for example, Agonya demanded that her name be written how it sounds.” Pavati bent forward, scratching some letters in the dirt with her fingernail. “It’s typically written without the YA, like this—AGON. The soft Russian N by itself has that Y-sound already built in. But then she complained that people called her ‘Ah-gone,’ see?”
“Uh,” I said. “I can’t read.”
Pavati looked startled for a second. “Right. I forgot.” She sounded embarrassed; but then, as always, she grinned and beckoned to me. “Come here, I can show you. See? A-G-O-N. But if you add only a Y after the N, it spells agony.” She snickered. “Tu likes calling her that, along with ‘Red Menace.’ Okay, maybe I like calling her that too.”
Leaning over the letters with her, I realized it was the first time anybody had ever tried to teach me to read. It didn’t matter than I couldn’t understand a thing. Something loosened inside of me, some frozen bit of resentment melting away.
I looked up at her. “Thank you,” I said in all honesty.
But then I looked around. Pavati and I were sitting alone in the main room with the flashlight between us. Khaya had slipped away in the dark.
nineteen
Pavati must have read the anxiety in my expression as I looked around for Khaya.
“Go talk to her,” she said, eyeing me. “You two have probably been through a lot in the past few days. I’ll, uh, plug my ears. Seriously, I have this trick with water, and Tu shouldn’t be able to hear through the wall.”
I trusted Pavati and didn’t hesitate, leaping up. I took the flashlight with me since Pavati had natural light, albeit only a little, shining from the holes up above.
It didn’t take me long to find Khaya—there weren’t many places to go in our burrow. I checked one room, didn’t see her, then wandered down a short hallway into another. She was sitting in a corner, hidden from even the weak reach of the light, deep in shadow.
I pointed the flashlight at the ground so I wouldn’t blind her. “Khaya?”
She blinked and looked up at me, showing nothing in her expression. “Tavin.”
Her distant tone made me hesitant. “Uh, I was looking for you. You disappeared.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Do for me? Khaya, I want to talk to you. I’ve wanted to talk to you since the lake—”
“About what Swanson said.”
“No. Well, yeah, but not just about that.” I stepped closer, but not too close. I didn’t want her to feel like I was cornering her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. And I have no idea if Swanson is your father, but if I had to guess, I’d say he was lying to manipulate you.”
I’d hoped she would say that, but I still had nagging doubts. “But Drey said something when he … when I saw him last … that he’d always thought of me as his son, instead of something else. Maybe someone else’s, which makes sense when I think about Swanson.” A sick, horrible kind of sense. “Drey told me he used to work for Swanson, but then went against him. Even Swanson confirmed that. What if they both meant that Drey had kidnapped me or something, to get me away from Swanson? I don’t know.”
It sounded absurd, like one of Drey’s stories, not something he would actually do. And, of course, why would he have gotten me that job and sent me into the Athenaeum if he’d taken me away from Swanson in the first place?
Khaya wore a slight, dubious frown. “Maybe. Maybe Swanson was telling the truth; I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t want you to be his son.”
“Is that what’s bothering you?” I said, crouching down nearby. “Thinking of me as a Godspeaker’s son? Even if I am, I’m—I’m not! I told you, I could never be like that. And besides, I’m wordless. I grew up collecting trash. Even if Swanson and I share the same blood, that doesn’t make me anything like him.”
At least, I fervently hoped it didn’t. I still remembered how easily I’d used Khaya to godspeak. As a Godspeaker’s son, would that make me like a Godspeaker? I suppressed a shudder.
Khaya sighed. “This isn’t about me, Tavin. I’m not bothered by the possibility. I was worried about how it would make you feel. Swanson isn’t a good person, and from what little I’ve heard, Andre—Drey—sounds like he is. So I’m glad to hear your perspective on who your real father is wouldn’t change.”
It was a little more complicated than that—quite a bit, seeing as I felt nauseous just thinking about it. Or maybe I was only really, really hungry. I didn’t like it, in any case, but I liked how Khaya was acting even less.
“So what is bothering you? I don’t care about you drowning me or anything el
se that happened at the lake, if that’s what this is about.”
Too late, I realized she would think I didn’t care about her kiss—not that I wasn’t weirded out by it. I would happily do it again and again, even drown again if that meant I could kiss her afterwards.
“Good, me either,” she said in a clipped voice. “I’m just glad you’re not dead.”
Now I knew I was in trouble. But I was never one to fess up and beg for forgiveness when I hadn’t really done anything. And even when I had …
“You mean still dead, don’t you?” I said, reminding her that she’d officially killed me.
“Not exactly. What I mean is, I’m glad you’re not half-alive. If I’d been too late, the Words would still have woken you up, only …”
“With a lobotomy?”
She swallowed. “You wouldn’t have been you anymore.” She looked at the wall and her curt tone softened, her words running together. “Your being dead would have been preferable. Because I would have tried, no matter what. I would have brought you back even if it wasn’t you, and then—”
She looked so scared, suddenly, and she was speaking too fast. I reached across the short distance between us and took her hand. Her mouth snapped closed.
“Well, I’m also glad I’m not dead or brain-dead,” I said.
She looked down at our hands, then pulled hers away. “You and Pavati seem to get along well.”
Earlier in the conversation, I’d felt like I was careening around narrow, curving streets in the garbage truck at night, but now it was as if I’d turned off the headlights.
“I like her,” I said with caution—apparently not enough, because Khaya’s expression went blank. “Gods, not like that!”
“It’s fine,” she said, her voice small and cool, her words like little ice cubes. “You don’t have to lie. I’ve seen how you two look at each other.”
“Come on,” I said, exasperated. “Pavati laughs and smiles at everyone. If you’ve seen me looking at her, well … yeah, okay, she’s pretty. Really pretty, but that doesn’t mean I feel anything other than friendly toward her. Khaya!” I grabbed her arm as she tried to look away again. She glared as if she might punch me, but I didn’t let go. “Listen, there’s sometimes a hell of a big difference between what my body wants and what my mind wants. If I look at Pavati, that’s just … that’s just biology, Khaya, something animal, nothing else.” I grimaced at how bad that sounded and scrubbed a hand over my face. “I’m sure you’ve noticed I’ve been gaping at you since I met you. Gods, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever—”
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