Lifeless Read online

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Copyright Information

  Lifeless © 2015 by AdriAnne Strickland.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

  First e-book edition © 2015

  E-book ISBN: 9780738744339

  Book design by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover image: iStockphoto.com/40086126/©Nastyaaroma

  Word Family Trees: Llewellyn Art Department

  Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Strickland, AdriAnne, 1984-

  Lifeless / AdriAnne Strickland. -- First edition.

  1 online resource.

  Sequel to: Wordless.

  ISBN 978-0-7387-4433-9 () -- ISBN 978-0-7387-4222-9 [1.

  Prisoners--Fiction. 2. Assassins--Fiction. 3. Blessing and

  cursing--Fiction. 4. Literacy--Fiction. 5. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S91658

  [Fic]--dc23

  2015019483

  Flux does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

  Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.

  (Any other disclaimers – medical, herbal, etc.).

  Flux

  Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  2143 Wooddale Drive

  Woodbury, MN 55125

  www.fluxnow.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  To Deanna: my mother, my number one proofreader,

  and the only person who will still love me after

  dedicating a book called Lifeless to her.

  one

  I wanted to kill the woman next to me. I could have, with only my bare hands and a simple command. My fingers twitched, and my eyes wandered to the slender stretch of throat exposed above the white collar of her lab coat. One brush of my fingertip, one whisper, and she would be dead.

  She could have a heart attack, simplest of all, or her blood could boil, her flesh could melt off, her head could roll from her neck … the Words in my head told me how I could do all of those things and more, each Word like a piece in a puzzle, building to the eventuality of her end. There was only one Word of Death, of course, but I heard the sinister whisperings as many Words in one, all bending toward the same result.

  It would be so easy. And part of me would be happy to see her die.

  It was a day like any other in my new life that revolved around death.

  The woman, Ryse, knew what I was thinking and smiled from where she stood next to me in front of the sterile steel table. The smile reached her near-black eyes, only to make them crueler. Her straight, shoulder-length hair was also black, in stark contrast with her ghostly pale skin. Ryse was stunning, but in the way of a graceful predator as it stalked and toyed with its prey.

  “Do it,” she said.

  She knew I wouldn’t. While a part of me yearned to kill her, muttering in a dark corner of my mind like a crackhead with a craving, a stronger part of me told the first one to shut the hell up.

  “Death,” Ryse crooned, addressing the crackhead in me. “You know who you are. Do it.”

  I took a deep breath, resisting the urge. The lab smelled like antiseptic, as sharp and unforgiving as the fluorescent lighting and metallic furnishings. My hands tightened on the edge of the table as if holding themselves down, my fingers white-knuckled against the cold steel.

  “That’s not my name,” I said, the words coming out strangled, my throat fighting not to let anything else escape—like Words.

  The City Council had let me keep my name. They’d made the decision after they began my rudimentary reading and writing lessons, placing an electronic stylus and tablet in my hands and a bigger screen in front of my face, which flashed individual letters and announced their sounds for me to copy. I couldn’t emulate the sounds, of course, since my mouth was strapped closed at the time, but I tried to write. They’d lengthened the leather belts running from my bedrails to the padded cuffs around my wrists so I could reach the tablet with the stylus. I was only given these traceable electronic tools, not pens or paper or anything I could hide and try to use to get a message to the outside world—not that I could have written anything even if I’d been coherent enough to want to.

  After all, the City Council didn’t want me to remain wordless as the newest addition to the Words Made Flesh: their elite team of super-powered individuals who carried the Words of the Gods within their bodies. But also, they were hoping the lessons would distract me from the Word ravaging my brain and dominating my every action. I couldn’t become their trained killer if I was insane and constantly trying to kill them.

  The Word came to me late in life—too late, according to the experts, for me to be able to control it. The others received their Words at the preordained age: five. I was seventeen, and my becoming a Word was one big catastrophe in the City Council’s eyes. And mine. Until they handed me that tablet, all I could do was shout ways for everyone to die—when my jaw wasn’t strapped shut—or fade in and out of reality in a drugged stupor, cuffed to a hospital bed in my locked white room. Eventually I just lay there for about two weeks, with a tube stuffed down my nose to feed me.

  That was one of the best things about being up and around, able to walk and talk like a relatively normal person again: eating a meal that didn’t come in liquid form, squeezed directly into my stomach. And my name was what had done it.

  Once I learned T-A-V-I-N, the letters of my first name, it was all I wrote for days on end, covering my tablet from the top of the screen to the bottom with my sloppy scrawl, electronic page after page. I could have filled books with only my name.

  And in turn, over the next couple of weeks, my thoughts became something like: TAVIN-die-TAVIN-kill-TAVIN-destroy-TAVIN … until my name finally drowned out the Words raging through my mind. I held on to my name like a life preserver in the midst of a tsunami, because it was the only thing that kept me from killing anyone and everything within arm’s reach.

  Like Ryse, the Godspeaker in charge of me, standing only two feet away, taunting that barely suppressed side of me with a smile. She didn’t actually want me to kill her, of course, but to give in to the killer instinct. Aside from making my life a living hell, this had been her sole purpose in the month since she’d been assigned to me. She made the time I’d spent tied down in the hospital seem like a dream vacation.
r />   On the table, there was an open glass cage that held a small white rabbit. It was fluffy and fat and cute as hell.

  “Don’t,” I said to her, gritting my teeth. “Don’t make me. Please.”

  The last word came out sounding a bit pathetic. I would have rather spit in her eye than begged, but spitting wouldn’t inspire any mercy in her. Not that begging would, either.

  She took a half-step closer to me.

  “Roaches, okay,” I continued, babbling as if I could distract her—or distract myself. “I would have stomped on them anyway. Mice … less okay, but I can understand the argument that they’re pests.” Mice had come during the

  second week and required twice as much godspeaking as the roaches. “Rats, yeah, they’re bigger pests, but what did they do to anyone? You know, aside from the bubonic plague?” I’d been assigned that topic in my history lessons the third week, as if it would encourage me to exterminate them. It hadn’t. I’d been a shivering, ranting wreck for hours after killing a single rat. “But a bunny? Gods, come on!”

  “Shh.” Ryse shushed me and spoke in a soothing tone that I didn’t find soothing at all. “Rabbits are far easier to kill than some … things … and practice makes perfect.”

  I knew she was forcing me to work up to “something” much bigger than a rabbit. More human-sized. But I couldn’t let myself think about that now or I would be raving in no time. Already I was trying not to look into the rabbit’s eyes and chanting to myself: I’m Tavin, I’m Tavin, I’m Tavin …

  It wasn’t just that the rabbit was cute. There was another component to my inner defense against the Word of Death. Not only did I drill it into my skull that I was still Tavin, but I couldn’t view the beings I touched as nameless victims, or it would be too easy for the Word to strike. So, anyone I wanted to kill—basically anyone near me—I pictured wearing a certain face with long dark hair and dark eyes. Or at least I made myself see some aspect of this girl in everyone, and then the thought of touching her with Death made the Word recoil within me as if her beautiful face had burned it.

  The further from human a creature was, the easier it was to kill. But even in the rabbit’s deep brown eyes, I could see a flicker of life that reminded me of Khaya. She was the Word of Life, after all.

  But it was getting harder and harder to see anything I wanted to save in Ryse.

  “Death,” Ryse crooned at me again, as if countering the name I was repeating in my head. She lifted a finger to run it along my bare shoulder, over the Words that streaked down my back like black ink.

  Like the morbid whisperings inside of me, the markings on my skin made up the Word of Death. Khaya had explained it to me—a Word was like a concept, a seed, involving so many components, so much potential. She’d been talking about herself and the Word of Life, but now I was getting to experience it firsthand in my own twisted way. The multiple, shifting Words on my back, constantly changing to new ones, all spelled the same thing in the end: Death.

  I was shirtless, of course. I spent most of my time shirtless these days. And not because I liked showing off. I shuddered, my skin twitching. Ryse’s fingertip was cold; she’d taken off her black glove. The glove was made of something that looked like a cross between leather and rubber, but was actually a far more advanced material known as Necron.

  Gloves like hers were what kept my Word from taking hold of another body. Most of the time, my power could reach through any clothing if the fabric wasn’t too thick. But it could never cross Necron, which comprised most of my clothes now. Here in the Death Factory, as I called this lab where I had all my lessons other than reading, history, and jiu-jitsu, I wore pants and boots made of the stuff, and weird sleeves that went from my wrist to my shoulder—a valid precaution, I supposed, when a stray elbow from me could kill someone. But my torso and hands were bare, so Ryse could read the Words on my back and make me kill with a touch.

  Ryse herself always wore a black body suit of Necron underneath her white coat, but now the idiot had taken off her glove. In the month that I’d been meeting with her in this lab once a day, she’d pushed me, driven me, to the point of imagining her death in a thousand different ways. But she had never done something so risky or stupid as to expose herself in order to coax the Word of Death out of me.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” I hissed, jerking away from her.

  She dropped her hand and deftly snapped the black glove back over it, like a doctor prepping for a surgery. “I’m trying to get you to acknowledge who you are,” she said. “Admit it: you want to kill me.”

  “I would want to kill you anyway,” I said, “even if the Words weren’t telling me how.” Which was probably true, though my own thoughts on the subject would have been less creative.

  Her eyes took on an eager, almost hungry light. “What do you hear? Tell me.”

  I clamped my mouth closed. She’d baited me, and I’d swallowed it. I folded my oddly sleeved arms, wishing I had a shirt, and looked away from her.

  “You need to be at peace with yourself. First you shouted the Words uncontrollably, and now you hold them so tightly inside that we have to force them out.” She masked her frustration with concern as saccharine and fake as cheap, artificially flavored candy. “Don’t make me force you.”

  I shook my head in disgust, still not looking at her. “You’re sick, you know that?”

  Ryse moved lightning-fast while my head was turned. She, too, had trained in jiu-jitsu and hand-to-hand combat, for far longer than I had. In seconds she had me pressed against the table, one of my arms twisted painfully behind my back, the other braced to keep my face from smashing into the steel surface. Startled by the commotion, the rabbit made squeaking noises in its cage, its little pink nose twitching madly just inches from my eyes on the other side of the glass.

  She leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Not as sick as you. I know what’s in you. I can read it in your skin.” Her black hair swung forward to tickle me between the shoulder blades, brushing over the Words written there. Her breath was warm on my neck, and the perverted, mock-intimacy of the situation made my hair stand on end. I could feel her eyes tracing the dark letters in my skin, searching for and finding what she wanted.

  “Don’t. Don’t do it,” I said again, my pleas half-garbled against the table. I struggled, but it was pointless. I knew what was coming, that nothing would stop her.

  She whispered again: the Words. Her voice … slid … into me, like her hand into the black glove, taking up the Words as her own. The sound tugged on my flesh and bones, like a current pulling me along. Even her thoughts seeped into my brain:

  Death, relax.

  My straining muscles responded and slackened, following her instructions.

  “Reach, grasp, squeeze … ” she began, speaking the Words through me.

  I could only watch as my hand snaked out, whipping into the glass cage. The rabbit squealed as I seized its neck and lifted it, hind legs kicking the air in panic.

  “ … pressurize, burst … ”

  The little creature shrieked, making a noise no animal should make, and those wide brown eyes, pink nose, and long, downy ears began to bleed. It was the Words; my hand wasn’t even squeezing it hard. Until …

  “ … tighten, pinch, crush … ”

  My grip was now like a vise around its throat, sealing off its screams. I felt its windpipe collapse. Its neck snapped next, vertebrae separating under the strain. The body went limp, head drooping and red-stained eyes staring, its fur soft and wet between my fingers. Still warm. My hand was covered in blood.

  Ryse stopped godspeaking, her voice releasing me. She always let me go right after a kill so she could see the raw expression of what I was feeling inside.

  I didn’t know what she saw in my face, but she smiled again. The Word of Death could kill in a split second with the lightest touch, but she’d drawn it out and mad
e my hand do the bulk of the dirty work. I sagged against the table now that she no longer held me up and stumbled away from her, too unhinged to even drop the rabbit. My knees hit the floor and I vomited all over the white tiles.

  So much for enjoying more solid meals.

  “There, that wasn’t so bad now, was it?” she said behind me.

  Blind and burning rage flooded me. Before I could stop myself, I turned and hurled the bloody corpse at her. It hit her chest with a wet smack and bounced off, splattering red all over her white jacket. I wanted to shout at her, too, unleash all of the Words that were filling my throat, straining against my lips. But I ground my teeth together instead, my hands squeezing my head as if I could hold my thoughts inside. My shoulders curled around me.

  Ryse’s dark eyes were wide; furious. “You think that was bad?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “You have no idea how bad it can be.”

  “I’m Tavin, I’m Tavin, I’m Tavin,” I said out loud, rocking back and forth.

  “You are not—” She strode toward me, raising her gloved hand like she was going to strike me in the face. Never mind that I was still on my knees in front of her.

  “Ryse!”

  At the sound of that authoritative voice, Ryse stopped mid-stride and dropped her hand. Dr. Swanson stood framed in the sliding steel doorway to the lab. His usual tailored gray suit was draped with a white lab coat, matching Ryse—his assistant, and the Godspeaker he’d appointed to work with me in his place. He’d been viewing the proceedings through the reflective glass windows ringing the lab, as other Godspeakers and their trainees often did.

  But unlike the others, he watched in order to look out for me, not to get an “educational” or, rather, entertaining glimpse of the new freak-show: the Word of Death who hated killing.

  I knew this because he was my father. My biological father, and in name only, since he hadn’t raised me and I’d only recently found out he had any relation to me. But in his strangely reserved way, he cared about me. He’d tried to save me from this life, risking his career as the head of the Godspeakers and his reputation with the City Council to sneak me out of the Athenaeum as a baby. So maybe he cared about me a lot.