Wordless

  Copyright Information

  Wordless © 2014 by Adrianne Strickland

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  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 © 2014

  E-book ISBN: 9780738741444

  Book design by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover image: iStockphoto.com/1569366/©Atropat

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  Flux

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  Woodbury, MN 55125

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Lukas,

  who is the Word of Support, Patience, and Love

  one

  I’d heard the story when I was a kid. Everyone had, even wordless nobodies like me who had never set foot in any of Eden City’s cathedrals. The story went something—no, exactly—like this:

  Two Nameless Gods created the earth just by speaking. Twelve Words was all it took. Then they made their Words into flesh, giving twelve people the powers of creation—people who could bring darkness or light, harness the earth or air, spark a fire or raise a flood, shape things from the clay and breathe life into them. Or kill with a touch.

  Old Man Drey was killing me with the story right now. I hadn’t even leapt off the back of the garbage truck before he’d stepped down from the driver’s seat, leaving the truck rumbling like a neon-green beast against the curb, and walked around back to continue lecturing me about the Nameless Gods and their Words, like I hadn’t heard it a hundred times before. He acted like he belonged behind a podium, not the wheel of a garbage truck, somehow managing to look dignified even in those goofy green overalls.

  As for me, I jumped down onto the gray cobblestones and straight into a pile of dog crap. I slipped and almost ate it—literally. So much for dignity.

  “Damn it.” I glared at the bottom of my boot and scraped it on a rare uneven cobblestone. The stain wouldn’t be there for long, once the street sprayers got to it.

  “Tavin, language,” Drey reminded me. “Now, where were we?” He stepped into an alley nestled between two four-story buildings.

  He didn’t mean in our trash-pickup routine. He meant the story, which he’d started telling when the sky was still dark. Now a pale blue light frosted the frilly stonework decorating the buildings on either side of us, making even the alleys in this section of town look better dressed than we were. Not that many people were up and around this early. Usually it was only us, cleaning the city before everyone else awoke.

  “The Words have to live in the flesh of man, inscribed into skin like ink in the pages of a book until the flesh becomes the embodiment of the Word,” Drey continued. “Or else the Words would lose their spark, that special something—the breath of the Gods.”

  I dragged my foot as I followed Drey’s voice, both to clean it off and because I was none-too-eager to hear the rest of what he had to say. But I didn’t complain. Instead, I listened to him over the coos of the pissed-off pigeons we’d awoken on the wrought-iron fire escape above our heads. I listened because Drey was the only one who ever bothered to teach me anything. And because he was the reason I had a job, not to mention the reason I was alive enough to work in the first place. So what if he got repetitive sometimes?

  That didn’t stop me from looking at the sky, to better dodge pigeon crap and to imagine what it would feel like to fly up and out of this alley. It was depressing that even a stupid pigeon could manage such a feat, but not me.

  Drey kept talking in his lofty way, like he was a God in the heavens instead of a garbage man in the alleys of Eden City, even as we picked up the trash bags waiting for us by back doors. “The Words must be sustained by a man’s breath. Or a woman’s,” he added, glancing at me over his shoulder as if he was trying to keep up with the times and failing by about a century. “Or else the Words would die and we would lose the power of the Gods forever.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, throwing in a nod for good measure even though, to me, the story seemed like a bigger load than the trash bags I was hauling back to the truck.

  Sure, there were Words—nine that were still around. There was picture proof right in front of me on the giant flat-screen TV across the street: an image of the Word of Earth, smiling smugly with his muscular arms crossed. He was the poster child for Eden City and its diplomatic mission to bring peace on earth through worldwide cooperation. The Word of Life appeared next, her face as unsmiling as always but equally stunning. I was downright sick of seeing them.

  Not that I ever saw any of them in person. They gave public service announcements that appeared on our video phones, reminding us to be good citizens, and posed on billboards and posters. But the Words Made Flesh were as distant from me as the world outside of Eden City. Only the glowing TV screens that Drey and I passed on our daily route proved the existence of either: the various Words—young and beautiful, as poised and perfect as the city they controlled—shaking hands with the heads of various faraway countries like China, Russia, and America, or greeting the leaders of our much-closer but equally inaccessible neighbors like Switzerland and France.

  The Words might have been far above people like me, but that didn’t mean they let us forget they were there, as much as I tried.

  Yet I just didn’t buy the crap about the Nameless Gods. That part of the story was way too up-in-the-clouds, not meant for normal people down on the ground—or knee-deep in garbage.

  “Tav, I can tell you’re bored,” Drey said, making me start with the guilty realization that I’d been tuning him out. “But I’m telling you this again because it’s relevant.” He heaved the black trash bags, bunched in his hands like giant sagging funeral balloons, off his shoulder and into the gaping maw in the back of the truck.

  He could always sling them more accurately than me, even though he had grizzled stubble on his chin and a frightening cough, and I now had bigger arms than him and was “at the peak of youth”—which was Drey’s fancy way of saying he didn’t know exactly how old I was. Or how old I’d been when he’d found my nearly dead infant body in a trash container about seventeen years ago.

  “I want it fresh in your mind,” Drey went on, “and I thought it best that it came from me. Unless, of course, y
ou want me to drop you off at a cathedral … ?”

  “No, no!” I said quickly. “But how the hell—I mean, how is any of this relevant now?” Or ever, I thought.

  Drey looked at me seriously. “I came from the Athenaeum before picking you up at the garage this morning.”

  “Right,” I said. Not only would that mean he was up earlier than any sane man would be awake, but no one—especially not the garbage brigade—just went to the Athenaeum. That was where the Words were, not the wordless. The Gods would have to come down from their clouds to personally vouch for people like me and Drey before we could ever set foot inside.

  Or at least that was what I thought until Drey said, “I think I got you a job there.”

  “What? ”

  Right then one of my bags tore, spilling empty wine bottles and—my favorite—rotten fish onto the curbside. We were next to Bodine’s, one of the nicer seafood restaurants in Eden City, but what came out of the back end of something was never as pretty as what went in the front. Drey hadn’t even taught me that; I’d learned that lesson on my own.

  That was when I spotted the fur in the pile of refuse. “Aw, hell.”

  I dropped to my knees and lifted the small body in my gloved hands, cradling its head and trying to glimpse some life in its half-closed eyes.

  A puppy. A dead puppy. This day just couldn’t get any better.

  Drey didn’t even scold me for my “language.” He just looked down at me, a sad expression on his face. He probably knew why I liked to save anything alive we found—the only thing that separated my fate from that of the tiny body in my hands was the cot in the back room of the garage that Drey let me sleep on.

  That was me, Tavin Barnes, able to relate to dead puppies. Drey’s sympathy only made me more embarrassed to be on my knees.

  I cleared my throat. “Weren’t you saying something completely insane about getting me a job in the Athenaeum, before—” I waved at the mess.

  “Part-time. You start tomorrow.”

  “What? Why? How?” My words grasped at the situation as clumsily as my hands, which were now trying to scoop everything back into the torn bag. A fish head fell back into the gutter, and a man in a crisp black suit with a matching briefcase gave me, not the fish head, a disgusted look as he walked by.

  Drey bent down to help me. He never had to do things like that—I mean, technically, he was my boss, and the boss of our district garage—but he always did.

  “I already told you what,” he said. “As for why … I think you should try to move up in the world, Tavin, and not just rot on the street with this trash. And me.”

  “But—but I can’t read!”

  That was only the first of many reasons why I could never set foot in the Athenaeum. The wordless survived at the bottom of the food chain, far beneath the rich and influential. Eden City was the richest of all self-governing city-states, a haven for the über wealthy because of its favorable taxes, and the Athenaeum was the hive at the heart of it, swarming with those types of people: not only the Words and the City Council—who, together with the Words, ran the city—but the politicians, diplomats, and businessmen that flocked around them. It was the center of government, international relations, and power. The wordless were the nobodies of Eden City, the lowest class, treated like the trash we cleaned or the dirt we scrubbed from floors.

  “That makes you a more desirable employee.” Drey chucked the torn bag into the trash compactor. “You don’t pose a threat. You can’t read the Words and use their power, even if you were standing right next to one.”

  I didn’t understand how on earth someone could “read” a person—Drey called this kind of reading “godspeaking”—but he was right, as usual.

  “So instead of being the young thief who’s broken into the sultan’s harem, I’m more like one of those servant-guys who’s had his balls chopped off.” I flashed Drey a shit-

  eating grin.

  “Those ‘servant-guys’ were called eunuchs,” he reminded me with a scowl. He didn’t like being reminded that he’d told me that story, which had veered away from my history lesson into fantasy. “Here I want to give you a good education, and that’s the sort of thing you remember.”

  Maybe because I often felt about as impotent as if I’d been neutered. Impotent—a great word for a wordless guy like me.

  “I’ll never be educated,” I said, finally pitching the rest of my trash bags into the back of the truck. My lack of education wasn’t Drey’s fault. He couldn’t read either, so he couldn’t exactly teach me. I didn’t want to make him feel bad, so I changed the subject. “And I still don’t know why the hell they’d want me. What can I do?”

  Drey pushed a button and the green steel jaw of the compactor began to whine shut, devouring bottles, fish heads, and dead puppies alike. It sounded impolitely loud on the quiet street. “Someone needs to clean up after them.”

  “So,” I said with hefty skepticism, “I’m going to collect trash … for the Athenaeum?” There were some things that simply didn’t fit together, and “trash” and “Athenaeum”—the colossal, shining pyramid rising at the north end of the city like a glass mountain trying to reach the Gods—were two of them. Did they even generate trash there like normal human beings?

  “They sure don’t clean up after themselves,” Drey said.

  And that made sense. Because garbage really didn’t have anything to do with them—only with people like me. Maybe the Words liked to take credit for Eden City being so clean, as if one of them was the Word of Trash Removal, shooting sunbeams out of his ass to scour the streets … but no.

  “Fine,” I said, grabbing a handle on the back of the truck and assuming my precarious perch above the cobbled street. “But you never answered this question—how? Who did you even talk to, to get me this job?”

  Drey gave me the smile that meant I was being a shithead but he didn’t mind. “‘Whom,’ you mean—‘to whom’ did I talk. And I have connections.”

  “You have connections?”

  Maybe I’d gone too far with that one, because his tone was stuffier as he said, “I don’t need to remind you that I’m your manager.”

  Sometimes I did need reminding. He often didn’t act like my boss, always driving a trash route with me and only me. He was more like a protective uncle—the closest thing to a parent I would ever have.

  “I wasn’t always in the business of garbage,” he continued, much more softly.

  Now that was curious. If Drey had connections to the Athenaeum, what the hell had he done to get thrown out here—to rot, as he’d called it?

  “And it’s none of your business,” he added, right as my mouth opened to ask him. “I’m dropping you off at the Athenaeum tomorrow morning, and I’ll pick you up when you finish at noon. Maybe other opportunities will open up for you in such a place.”

  He leapt into the truck and gunned the engine with a roar, leaving me hanging off the beast’s backside.

  two

  Drey made good on his word, coming to the garage even earlier than usual to tip me out of my cot and shove a cup of coffee into my hands. It looked and smelled like he’d brewed it out of old truck tires.

  I blew on it, sitting on the side of the cot, and took a sip. “Mmm, even tastes like tires.”

  “I want you alert this morning, Tav. This is important,” he said, scooting aside a box of spare earplugs and gloves to lean against the metal desk across from my cot. He used to use this room for storage and still put a few boxes in here, but I didn’t mind. He was letting me live here for free, after all. Before moving in here, I’d lived with him in his tiny studio apartment—a total bachelor pad—until we could no longer stand the proximity. That was when I was about six.

  “I know it’s important,” I said. “If the Athenaeum’s garbage doesn’t get collected, they might realize it exists.”

  “
Tavin.”

  “I’m listening.” I got up and padded barefoot across the concrete floor to the mini-fridge that I hoped would contain breakfast.

  “You’re an intelligent, handsome, hardworking kid, Tav. This is an important opportunity for you … to be noticed.”

  I froze. “I’m handsome?”

  Drey scowled like he usually did when I was ridiculing something he said, but this time there was no ridicule. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked in a mirror. I’d grown a lot in the last year, my arms thickening to the point where other guys at the garage joked they needed to start working out to catch up to me, but that was about all I’d noticed.

  “You can still do something with yourself. Don’t squander your life,” Drey said, reiterating what he’d told me yesterday.

  And like yesterday, I still had some serious doubts, even more now that he’d thrown “handsome” onto the list of my imaginary attributes. “Thanks for the pep talk, but it’s not like I’m going to climb to the top on the strength of my trash-hefting muscles.” I peered into the fridge. “Especially with no milk to put on my cereal.” Captain Crunch was my favorite American import—there was a flow of goods across the borders, just not people—and I tried not to go a morning without it.

  Drey sighed and raised a brown paper bag that had been resting behind him. It had grease splotches on it, which was always a good sign. Unless that was engine oil and not butter. “I got you a pastry,” he said.

  He’d gotten me two. With chocolate filling. I started in on the first one as I trailed him down the narrow aisle between the trucks and a wall of tools. The smell of diesel fuel and ripe trash didn’t bother me as I inhaled the pastry like a starving man. I was used to those things.

  It was so early that the other guys hadn’t yet arrived to take the second truck. Still, Drey didn’t give me time to shower in the weeny stall in the garage, which was there for the sake of anyone who’d gotten doused in garbage juice. And he raised a hand to stop me when I reached for my usual neon-green overalls and jacket.