Wordless

by Adrianne Strickland

  “I can tell the truth: I’m not leaving you.”

  “Stockholm Syndrome,” I said to Pierre, thinking of anything and everything as fast as I could, pulling up phrases from Drey’s scarier stories. Drey, I thought. No, don’t think about Drey. Khaya needs to run. Focus. “She’s just some girl. Please let her go.”

  “You’re just a boy,” Khaya said, “who didn’t deserve to be dragged into this. If anything happens to you, it’s all my fault. Hear that?” She met the shopkeeper’s eyes. “This is all my doing. Your forest is burning because of me, that man on the screen is dying because of me, and anything Tavin has done is because of me.”

  Pierre glanced back and forth between us, as if he couldn’t decide which one of us was crazier.

  “You should know, Tavin,” Khaya said quietly, “Swanson is right. There’s only one way to save someone from the Word of Death. Andre Bernstein worked with my father, but it wasn’t on a cure. Modern medicine can try to slow Death down, but the end will come no matter what. Nobody, not even Herio, can stop Death.”

  Khaya didn’t meet my eyes at first, even though I was staring at her, everything else forgotten. There was no cure? There was no cure. Except for …

  “Except for me.” She finally looked at me, her eyes glazed with tears.“I made that up about the cure because I knew the only way to save Drey was for me to go back. And I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let you go back, either, not by yourself. They would imprison you, and for what? Just so you could watch Drey die?” She nodded at the TV screen. “They’re hoping you’ll give me up, to save Drey. Maybe you should give me up. I’ll … I’ll let you. You could get your life back that way.”

  And doom the world to a hostile takeover, she’d forgotten to add. Never mind dooming all the Words. Khaya’s offer stunned me even more than her lie about the cure. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “What are you saying?” the shopkeeper demanded. “Did you say Herio?”

  “Yes. The Word of Death,” Khaya said, and Pierre blanched. “And I’m the Word of Life.”

  “What?” His voice dropped in fear.

  I shook my head, trying to focus on the here and now. “Khaya, you’ve got to leave! You’re more important than me or … or Drey,” I said, forcing the words out. “We don’t even know if he’s really alive. This could still be a setup.” I turned frantically to Pierre. “She’s lying. I mean, come on, does she look like the Word of Life?”

  Khaya turned, lifting up her ragged shirt as she did. Not all the way, but enough for us to see the Words streaking her back like black blood. They were moving, altering, as both Pierre and I stared at them. She dropped her shirt and turned back around. “See?”

  “Mother of the Gods,” he whispered, taking a step backward.

  We all stared at each other, barely breathing. It wasn’t much longer before I heard sirens approaching, then tires screeching as vehicles slid to a halt outside. They had gotten here quickly. It was a small town; they must not have had far to come.

  And then everything started shaking. I thought it was the cops, bombarding the store with cannons as though their handguns and rifles weren’t sufficient. But when the floor erupted, throwing shelves into each other like dominos, I realized it was someone else entirely.

  Tu and Pavati hadn’t had that far to come, either.

  The two of them came launching out of a tunnel in the middle of the store, tucking and rolling as they hit the ground, Words flying from their mouths like bullets. The floor dropped out from underneath Pierre, but not before his rifle went off. I would have ended up like my least favorite cheese if a powerful blast of water from a broken pipe hadn’t hit him at the same time, throwing his arms—and the rifle barrel—up and riddling the ceiling tiles full of holes instead of me.

  In seconds it was over. The shopkeeper was buried up to his shoulders behind the counter, the earth packed tight around him as if his head were growing from some weird planter. The water from the pipe ceased flowing—or at least spraying like it had a mind of its own—but not before Pavati had washed the rifle out of sight.

  Tu surveyed the damage with a satisfied smile. “We work well together, don’t we?” he said to Pavati. “Earth and water: the perfect team, even in nature. You know how water always caresses the earth, and the earth holds it … ” He rubbed his bare chest with a grin.

  “You mean, how water always carves the earth into whatever shape it wants before leaving for the ocean?” Pavati said with a smirk.

  “Cruel, cruel woman.”

  “Uh, guys?” I said, and they both turned to me. “I hate to interrupt, but—” I gestured at the front windows, which let in the flashing of blue and red lights. “I think we’re sort of surrounded.”

  That was when a voice, amplified by a megaphone, shouted at us in French. I didn’t understand quite what it said, but it was probably something like we’ve got you surrounded.

  “See?”

  Tu scoffed, helping himself to a candy bar from the floor. “I’d like to see them try—”

  There was a loud pop, a shattering of glass, and the clank of something metallic bouncing across the floor. A canister. It was also hissing, spewing white gas. My eyes started to burn, my throat prickling like I’d swallowed a porcupine.

  “Tear gas!” I wheezed.

  “How dare they!” Tu snarled.

  I ignored him, sweeping the sweatshirts off the counter along with one of the baskets full of food, giving Pierre’s head a quick word of apology. Khaya already had the other basket on her arm, and as we turned to run for the tunnel in the ground, Pavati followed us with the backpack over her shoulders.

  Except Tu wasn’t following. He was marching the other way. It took the jingling of the bell attached to the front door to make me realized he’d walked straight outside.

  “We’ve got to help him!” Pavati cried, abandoning the tunnel. Before I could shout, she’d sprinted through the white haze and out of the store.

  Khaya and I exchanged reddened, watery-eyed glances, then went after her.

  We burst out into the chilly, fading sunlight just in time to meet the firing squad. I didn’t know what Tu had done or said, but he’d obviously pissed them off. Shots cracked all around us from the police cruisers ringing the small parking lot, their open doors shielding the officers while they pointed and fired at us. I would be filled with holes after all.

  Or so I thought, but then none of the bullets hit. Something did, like little stinging pinches of sand that probably wouldn’t leave a mark. Tu was standing in front of us, chanting, and I realized that the bullets were disintegrating before they reached us … turning into particles of lead and copper. Might as well have been dirt clods fired at us.

  The shots died, and the thundering echoes with them. Then Tu said a word that wasn’t in Chinese, a name for the cops that Drey would have called French—as in, “Excuse my French”—except it wasn’t French, and involved mothers. And then he crouched and pressed his palms to the ground.

  Thunder rose again: Tu’s thunder. The earth shook, then cracked and lifted, splitting the parking lot into jagged chunks of bucking asphalt. And then there was a chorus of voices—Words—all around me, not only Tu’s.

  Water and roots sprang from the fractured earth as if they were tentacles belonging to some wild, unleashed beast, tearing the guns out of the officers’ hands and flattening others to the ground. The water moved with a life of its own, like a liquid snake, twisting around and underneath cars to strike. So did the roots, lashing like whips. Pavati and Khaya knew how to wield their Words as capably as Tu.

  For my part, I watched with my mouth open.

  Tu’s voice brought me back to myself, where I stood next to an empty police cruiser on the only patch of ground that wasn’t heaving. The engine was still running, blue lights flashing; its occupant had been pulled away screaming by writhing
roots. “Tavin!” Tu was yelling. “None of us know how to drive, so you’d better be able to!”

  “You want me to drive?” I asked, staring at the car and picturing a high-speed chase down unfamiliar Swiss roads. “Why don’t we just duck back underground?”

  Tu grinned, and it didn’t look friendly. “We will. Now get in!”

  I hesitated. By now, most of the officers had fled or were lying stunned, the sirens left shrieking into the oncoming twilight. Still, the Swiss police had to have notified Eden City that they’d found me. The Athenaeum’s forces would be showing up in no time at all, and they had helicopters at their disposal.

  After tossing the sweatshirts and grocery basket in the backseat, which I had to do through the rear door because of a metal screen between the front and back, I threw myself in the driver’s seat and the transmission into gear. Alien knobs and buttons and gauges gleamed all around me and the radio chattered wildly. I ignored everything but the steering wheel and gas pedal as Tu leapt in the passenger seat and the girls slipped into the enclosed back of the car with the supplies.

  “Now what?” I asked Tu.

  He hadn’t closed his door, and leaned to brush his fingers along the cracked ground, whispering to it as though it were a creature he was petting. The ground sure reacted as if it were alive, rearing up in front of us and opening a wide mouth down into the bowels of the earth, straight through the asphalt, broken pipes, and other chunks of what looked like concrete. The sudden movement flung vehicles and people

  out of the way. I hoped no one was hurt by the rolling cars. They’d tried to shoot us, but I at least didn’t want to kill anyone.

  The tunnel was wider than our stolen cruiser. The still-flashing lights on our car’s roof illuminated the dark entrance in an eerie blue glow.

  “Now,” Tu said, “drive. But you might want to turn on the headlights.”

  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 yourself?” 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.