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.
“Khaya,” Pavati said. “His arm is about to—”
There was a muffled snap, and Tu screamed. Both sounds were pretty awful.
“Too late.”
Khaya leapt off him, a look of horror on her face. “Gods, I didn’t mean to! I was only … ”
Tu rolled onto his uninjured shoulder, gripping his arm and groaning. He must have been in too much pain to say anything biting.
Pavati sighed. “At least you can heal him. Come on, let’s get him into one of the rooms.”
Khaya tried to help him up, but Tu batted her hand away. “Bitch,” he wheezed.
Pavati hauled him upright, none-too-gently. “None of that now,” she said, then half-supported, half-dragged him down one of the hallways.
Khaya followed, looking more scared than ashamed. Not of Tu, I thought. Of herself.
twenty-three
When my breath came back fully, it had to fight for room in my throat with the blood. I rolled over on the packed dirt floor of our warren and spit out as much as I could, probing for damage as gently as possible with my index finger. Tu’s left hook had loosened one of my teeth on the right side, and where his first punch had nearly knocked me senseless, my cheek was puffy and excruciatingly tender. I would have a spectacular black eye in the morning. Maybe a pair.
“Gods,” I said to myself from my huddle on the ground. I wanted to find a warmer place to lie down, away from the stairs leading to the surface and the colder air outside, but I didn’t feel like moving yet.
“Yup,” Pavati said behind me, returning from the room where she’d taken Tu. “How are you?”
“Fine.” I grimaced, then winced when grimacing hurt. “How’s Tu?”
“Khaya dislocated his shoulder and fractured a few other odds and ends, but she’s patching him up. He’ll just need to s
leep it off. Ah, well, he probably deserved it.”
So much for reaching Drey’s address in two hours. I could have punched myself a third time.
“Then I deserved this.” I reached up to touch my face, then thought better of it. “I set him off by getting him a smaller sweatshirt. I did it on purpose.”
Pavati retrieved the flashlight from where it had fallen and crouched next to me. “That’s mature of you to admit it, but you didn’t quite deserve to have your face mangled over a joke, even an irritating one.” She whistled after she brushed back my hair to look at my cheek. Her hand fell away and she sighed. “He’s not a bad guy, really. He’s just conflicted.”
She looked pretty conflicted herself as she glanced down the hallway where Tu and Khaya were.
“But why?” I said, embarking on the long climb to my feet. “I mean, I see why he’s pissed at Eden City, but then to want to go play the same role for some other country … ”
“He can’t imagine not using his power,” Pavati said, looping her arm through mine and helping me up. “But as powerful as he is, he’s only one guy. He wants to be a part of something. Which I can sympathize with, even if I’m too cynical to think I could ever really belong anywhere.”
I steadied myself against Pavati as a surge of dizziness threatened to knock me down again. “Well, like you said, China basically sold him into slavery before he was conceived. Why would he want to go to them, in particular?”
She sighed and started walking me toward the downward spiraling stairs like an invalid, scooping up the backpack for me and aiming the flashlight while she was at it. “It’s complicated. It has a lot to do with his mother.”
“The Japanese lady? I mean, the Word with a Japanese donor parent?” I said before Pavati could correct me.
“That’s the one. Also known as Tsuchi. She was the reason Tu looked toward his unknown donor father from China—and China itself—for a sense of belonging. It didn’t help that Japan already had such a shaky relationship with Eden City in the first place. In fact, you could say that started everything.”
I winced as my foot hit the first downward step, the motion vibrating up my leg and torso and into my head. At least the air was warmer the deeper we went. “What do you mean?”
“It has to do with the Words of Power and how, these days, only the Word of Shaping is left out of the original four,” Pavati said as we made our slow way down the staircase. “The Word of Movement was the first to go—
vanished, centuries ago. No one knows quite where he went missing, but it would have been pretty hard to keep track of an insanely powerful telekinetic without all the modern innovations they have for us now, like monitors. Then the Word of Naming—arguably the most powerful of the Words of Power—was assassinated by an agent of the Spanish crown in the mid–nineteenth century.”
We were in a hallway that would have been pitch-black without the flashlight. Pavati steered me toward the closest doorway, which opened up to reveal a smallish room with a raised dirt platform in the middle—a bed.
I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask her why the Word of Naming had been so powerful before she continued.
“That was what inspired Eden City to make other countries feel invested in the Words, with the whole donor-country scheme. It kept jealousy of Eden City’s power to a minimum, if the whole world was busy vying for their favor.”
She paused the story to let me drop onto the bed and busied herself pulling out the emergency blanket and water bottle for me. It was amazingly nice of her, and I didn’t have the energy to protest.
“That leaves the Word of Time,” she said, shaking out the silvery blanket. “Japan was a rising star after they opened their borders to the West and secured their country’s contribution to the Words near the turn of the century—the first non-European country to do so. The future Word of Time was born in 1895 as a little boy named Toki, and all seemed to be going pretty swell until … well, until Toki killed himself after the First World War, taking the Word of Time into oblivion with him.”
“Why’d he do that?” Running away was one thing, but suicide was a pretty extreme form of escape. I eased myself onto my back with more winces—or maybe it was one prolonged wince.
Pavati tossed the blanket over me. “My theory is that time is probably not a thing that many people can mess with and stay sane. The Words of Time had been notoriously nuts throughout history, and this was probably just another expression of that insanity. It’s amazing Time wasn’t lost sooner that way.”
She took a seat on the edge of the bed, her grim smile illuminated from below by the flashlight in her lap as if she was telling a spooky story. She must have noticed, because she said, “Sorry, this isn’t the most comforting bedtime story. Anyway, Eden City, of course, opted for the racist theory and blamed Japan, calling Japanese stock unstable and weak. Ritualistic suicide does have a history in their culture, with the hara-kiri and stuff like that. It’s still a problem today—but it’s not exactly weakness, and Toki wasn’t even raised within Japanese culture. He was born in Eden City like all of us. But the City Council didn’t care, and Japan was banned from contributing to the Words.
“That pissed the Japanese off big time. Some people think it encouraged them to act the way they did in World War II, making them go all imperialistic and invade anyone in the vicinity to try to prove their strength and save face.” Pavati shrugged. “Who knows—maybe it worked. Because Eden City accepted Japan back in ’65. But the Godspeakers were careful. First of all, they only allowed a girl to be born, thinking she might be less prone to suicidal samurai tendencies—which is sexist horseshit, but that’s another discussion. Secondly, they raised her to have ultimate control over her emotions. This woman—Tsuchi—was a stone. Fitting, I guess, for the Word of Earth. But not so good for a mother.”
Pavati hesitated, her eyes drifting to the floor. “We only have our one real parent until we’re five, but that’s more than enough time for them to help shape what we become before they die. And Tsuchi … well, she ignored Tu. Didn’t let any attachment form. With such a cold and unloving mother—never mind the stigma still surrounding the loss of Time—it’s no wonder Tu clung to his donor father’s heritage.”
“China,” I said. “So that’s why he wants to go wave their flag for them.”
Pavati nodded. “You know, Khaya and I were lucky to have at least one parent so caring. Tu and Herio … not so lucky. That’s probably why Herio turned out the way he did, too. Next to him, Tu’s not so bad.”
“What do you mean? Em didn’t love Herio?”
Pavati continued staring at the floor, twisting the flashlight in her hands and sending shadows skittering across her face. “Em had a premature stillborn the first go-around. She wasn’t ready to carry again so soon, and yet each generation of Words needs to be born within a short window. So the doctors used the same donor material from France, extracted some of Em’s, and used a surrogate mother. Herio didn’t come from Em’s body, and she never really tried to make that connection, you know? She never loved him like a son, even though he had her genes. So Herio basically had two donor parents, nothing more than genetics.”
I wasn’t quite sure how the conversation had switched from Tu to Herio. Neither topic was really comfortable, but together, they were enough to make my head start pounding like a drum.
Pavati must have noticed. “Go to sleep,” she said, and did something even nicer and more surprising than tucking me in. She bent over and kissed my forehead, right at the hairline. Then she stood, taking the flashlight with her. She paused before she walked through the doorway. “Try not to judge him too harshly.”
I wasn’t quite sure if she meant Tu or Herio. She probably meant the former, since no one seemed to feel too kindly toward the Word of Death.
I did sleep. And I slept pretty well, aside from the fact that whenever I rolled over, the sore parts of my face�
��which was basically all of it—came into contact with the unyielding surface of the bed and I woke up. At one such point I realized Khaya hadn’t joined me. A hollow pang of disappointment rang in the pit of my stomach like a gong, but I didn’t have the flashlight to go find her. I would probably walk face-first into a wall, which was the last thing I needed.
Then I woke up when I rolled over and my face didn’t ache.
Her voice came out of the darkness nearby: “I want to hurt people now, for you.”
I reached toward the sound of her voice, over the side of the bed, and my fingers encountered her sweatshirt-clad shoulder. She was sitting on the ground next to me.
“Khaya? Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“I’m frightened.”
It took me a sluggish second to process what she’d said before that. And then a few more seconds to remember everything that had happened: her attack on Tu to defend me; her recent, arguably violent, uses of the Word of Life; and, most shocking of all, her near-surrender in the supermarket to save Drey and give me my life back. Which, needless to say, would have hurt a lot of people, including herself. Honestly, I didn’t know how I felt about any of it. It wasn’t what I would call frightening, exactly, but it was certainly something.
If I couldn’t articulate the thought in my own head better than that, I didn’t have any business saying anything out loud.
But I was grateful, and probably would have done all those things for her if I’d had power like hers—maybe even something as foolish as condemning the world. At least I would never be faced with that kind of decision, because her well-being happened to coincide with everyone else’s.
Everyone’s except for Drey’s.
As if she knew what I was thinking, she said, “I’m sorry I lied about there being a cure. I didn’t want … I didn’t want you to … ”
“I know why you did it,” I said. “You were trying to give me hope and to keep me from turning myself in, or turning you in and messing up our lives and the whole rest of the world while I was at it. It’s okay.”
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