Wordless Read online

  “I’m always careful.” I hopped out onto the asphalt, failing to mention that I was planning on being a hell of a lot less careful that morning. I slammed the heavy door without another word and immediately wished I’d said something nicer—warmer, maybe, or at least a goodbye. But I didn’t want to reopen the door only for that, and then Drey was driving off.

  My little white truck was waiting in the same spot. I didn’t grin or even acknowledge the security guards this time. The palms of my hands were already coated in a film of sweat when I got into the truck and started the engine, my body reacting to what my brain knew: I wasn’t headed off on my usual pickup routine.

  I collected a few bags of trash, enough to look busy and avoid suspicion, but then drove straight to the gated alley between the still-quiet apartment buildings. The sun was barely lighting the peak of the pyramid as I turned off the engine and slipped out of the truck, leaving the door cracked to avoid the slam of closing it. There was no sign of even a stray person wandering at this hour, though the other days I’d seen joggers not much later than this. Haste would be necessary if I didn’t want more people to start cropping up. The security camera and retinal scan were bad enough, as far as discreetness went.

  At least the gate popped open without a wait.

  I speed-walked down the alley and into the courtyard, grimacing as my shoes squeaked over the grass. It was wet, as though it had just been watered, clear drops beading on the blades and on the plants in their beds. At least I wasn’t tiptoeing through sprinklers—if this was even the work of sprinklers and not the Word of Water. They probably didn’t do anything like normal people here.

  I didn’t let myself think about who I was trying to help as I stopped underneath the darkened balcony. She was just a girl. Just your average all-powerful, insanely beautiful girl.

  My thoughts weren’t calming. My heart was thumping as loud as a jackhammer at the crack of dawn—which was about what time it was, sunlight trickling down from the peak of the pyramid, turning the world to gold.

  Would she even be awake? In my eagerness to help her, I hadn’t really considered the possibility that she wouldn’t be. I almost wanted to laugh.

  Then, out of nowhere, something hit me like a pile of bricks, so heavy it flattened me on the wet grass.

  Not a something—someone. A person, sprawled on top of me. A girl covered in blood.

  She breathed against me, her hair in my face, so at least I knew she wasn’t dead. A blow from her elbow to my head had dazed me, but I was pretty sure I’d heard a snap when she landed. I wasn’t hurt, and I’d only partially broken her fall, so it must have come from her foot or leg as it met the ground. I wondered where all the blood was coming from until she tried to lift herself off of me, pressing against my chest.

  The thumb of her right hand was missing. The gaping wound glared at me, weeping red all over my white jacket. White obviously didn’t go well with trash or blood.

  I yelped at the same time she gave a stifled cry of pain. She must have somehow forgotten her thumb was cut off when she’d tried to use her hand. She almost fell on me again—albeit from a much lesser height than her balcony. I grabbed her wrist to steady her. My hand was now wet with her blood, but I hardly noticed as I pushed us both upright until we were seated in the grass facing each other.

  There was no mistaking that face, scattered strands of wavy brown hair sticking to her tear-streaked cheeks.

  It was her. The Word. She was definitely as beautiful as I’d previously thought, if not more so, but that was beside the point. I’d wanted her to show up or drop another clue from her balcony, but she’d done both in one go.

  “If you’re here to help me, stop staring and start moving,” she said. Her dark eyes were focused, looking right at me, her voice and breath ridiculously steady for the amount of pain she had to be in. “But don’t pull that bracelet off yet or we’re both in trouble.”

  After registering that she had a husky voice I would have found sexy on any other occasion, I noticed that my hand was still around her wrist, encircling it along with a black plastic bracelet.

  My fingers were sticky when I pulled away. Though her tight black shirt and pants hid most of the blood on her, save for what was on her hands, they couldn’t disguise the horribly wrong angle of her ankle.

  “Did you hear me?” she said calmly, maybe even coolly. “My ankle is broken. If I try to move and cause myself more pain, my heart rate will spike and they’ll notice.” She nodded at the bracelet, now mostly red instead of black as she held her arm upright, blood running down her wrist. It amazed me that she wasn’t trying to staunch the flow with her other hand, until I noticed what it held.

  Her severed thumb.

  “Gods,” I said, involuntarily leaning away from her. “Don’t you want to … don’t you need … a doctor or something?”

  She smiled grimly. Rather, she gritted her perfect, pearly teeth and followed my stare to her thumb. “Anything but,” she said, then took a deep breath. “I can reattach it myself, but only after I take off the monitor. That’s why I cut it off in the first place.”

  “You cut off your thumb?” My voice came out higher than I would have preferred.

  “Yes!” she said, suddenly impatient, gritting her teeth again. “That’s the only way I can get the monitor over my hand. And the longer you wait, the sooner I bleed to death, since they’ll know the moment I take it off—and the location. So I can’t heal myself until it’s gone, and I can’t get rid of it until we’re moving. Go!”

  “Where?” I asked, leaping up and looking around, as if the flower bed might hide a first aid kit or a splint.

  “To your truck! You have spare black bags in there, yes? Bring four of them.”

  “Four? Why?” Plastic bags weren’t very absorbent or very structural, as far as mopping blood or splinting a broken ankle went.

  “Because one bag would tear. You’re going to use them to carry me. You have to get me out of here, out of the Athenaeum.” Desperation was offsetting the steady tone of her voice. “You have to help me.”

  Her words hit me like another blow to the head, and I couldn’t think to argue; I simply reacted. I turned and ran, slipping across the grass and down the alley until I reached the truck. I wrenched open the door, cursing as I left bloody streaks on the white paint. Thank the Gods the truck was blocking me from the security camera so they couldn’t see what I was doing.

  A roll of paper towels flew out of the glove box as I ripped into it. I wiped as much blood as I could off my hands and face and the door before I tore four bags off the roll in the back of the truck and quadrupled them into each other. After taking the laminated card from my pocket, I stripped off the not-so-white jacket, leaving myself with an undershirt that was mercifully dark blue. I threw the jacket and the bloodied towels into the beefed-up bag and even ripped open one of the actual trash bags, grabbing a few handfuls of crumpled wrappers and plastic cups and takeout boxes to stuff in there too, filling it about a fourth of the way.

  It occurred to me that I could still drive away from the insanity at this point, throw away the bloody evidence tying me to the scene like any other trash. But it was only a passing thought. I was already dashing back the way I’d come.

  five

  When I returned to the Word, she was crouched over her ankle on the lawn, muttering under her breath with her eyes closed, her right hand still held aloft. She looked like a dark goddess in the shining golden grass, a piece of night shoved out of the sky by dawn. Blood continued to flow from the place her thumb had been, but her ankle—she’d straightened the bone. I hadn’t heard her scream or even make a noise. I’d broken my wrist falling off the garbage truck when I was twelve, and when the local doctor straightened my arm, you could have heard me shouting from the other end of Eden City.

  “My ankle isn’t healed yet,” she said, and I realized she was ta
lking to me now, whereas she’d been mumbling words before—had they been Word words? “It’s better, but I’ll be too tired if I go all the way. Lost too much blood. I need to save energy for my thumb.”

  She looked up, blinking at the layered bag slung over my shoulder and the roll of paper towels in my other hand.

  “It already has something in it?” she asked, looking at the bag.

  “My jacket and some … trash.” I wondered if a Word would be offended by the thought of sharing a bag with garbage. “To hide your shape.”

  “Smart.” She sounded surprised by her assessment, and almost sleepy. She stood slowly on one foot. “I’m Khaya,” she said, meeting my eyes in a heavy-lidded way that made my heart lurch in my chest. “The Word of Life.”

  I already knew who she was. What I didn’t know was why the Word of Life would want to escape the Athenaeum. And I didn’t have time to ask, because she fell over.

  I dropped the paper towels and caught her before she hit the ground. She was easy to hoist with even one arm, her head lolling only as high as my shoulder, her frame warm and light and soft against my chest in ways I didn’t want to think about. I didn’t quite know what abilities the Word of Life had—aside from giving life, obviously, and healing, apparently—and I hoped mind-reading wasn’t one of them.

  She smelled good, too, not like the trash bag I shook open with my other hand.

  “You sure you want to do this?” I asked, doubt creeping into my tone—the one sane voice among the decision-making committee in my head. “You’re not doing too well. We can still find a doctor.”

  In response, Khaya half-knelt, half-slid down my side, tipping sideways into the bag. Once in, she curled into a ball, wrapping her left arm around her tucked knees, trying to brace her ankle while still clutching her detached thumb. She held her disfigured hand upright as I ripped a small hole through the four thin layers of plastic: an air hole.

  When she waved her raised arm at me—the arm with the bracelet—I realized she was doing more than trying to slow the bleeding.

  “Do you see that drain next to the flower bed?” she asked, her voice muffled by the plastic but still firm. “Slide the bracelet off my wrist, quickly, then drop it in there as fast as you can. It will be sailing around in the sewer system after that. It will confuse them.”

  I was confused myself until I made sense of what I should have minutes before. The bracelet was a tracking device—a very sophisticated one, if it also monitored her vital signs and could only be removed by chopping off a thumb, not by cutting the bracelet itself.

  What the hell …? But there wasn’t time to ask.

  Another wad of paper towels soaked up the blood that had found its way back onto my arms and hands. Then I dropped it, with the rest of the roll, into the bag with Khaya. I clamped my fingers around the bracelet, eyed the metal grill set in the gutter several yards away, and positioned my feet.

  “Ready?” I asked, almost more to myself than her.

  Khaya gave a short nod from within the bag, her shadowed eyes showing a hint of fear for the first time.

  “My name’s Tavin,” I said.

  Then I whipped the bracelet off, ignoring her gasp as it brushed over her wound. I sprinted for the gutter and rammed the bracelet into the drain, like a starved nicotine addict racing to get a coin into the slot of a cigarette machine. I skinned my knee and jammed a finger, but I didn’t care. The bracelet was gone in about two seconds flat—but not before I saw a little red light embedded in the material begin flashing angrily.

  As if she’d seen it, Khaya hissed, “Hurry!”

  I arrived back at the bag, knotted it, and slung it—slung her—over my shoulder before she could say anything else. She was heavier than a normal load of trash, but not too heavy for me to march back to the waiting truck. I probably could have run, with the amount of adrenaline pulsing through my veins, but running would raise suspicion and not be too comfortable for someone with a broken ankle and a severed thumb.

  Her body shook against my back, low sniffs punctuating the words she was whispering too quietly for me to hear. I would have been howling if I’d chopped my own thumb off, yet this was her greatest show of pain, even with the monitor bracelet gone. She was posing as a bag of trash, but still, I wondered if her subdued tears weren’t just to keep up her disguise. This was the Word, after all, who never smiled or showed any emotion. So I tried to ignore her reluctant, semi-private display, along with the less-subtle feeling of panic crashing over me.

  Where the hell was I supposed to go now that I had a bloodied Word in a bag over my shoulder?

  Out. She’d said she needed to get out. Who knew why, but I focused on that goal as I reached the truck and deposited her gently but hastily in the back among the other identical black bags of trash, avoiding looking at the security camera as I did so. I made sure the air hole was unrestricted and wiped my hands on my pants to clear any remaining blood before I leapt in the truck and turned the key.

  I didn’t hear anything. Then I remembered how quiet the engine was, muttered another curse, and threw the truck into gear.

  I was too anxious to worry about going slow. The slight hum of the engine rose until it became a high-pitched whine while the apartments and buildings flashed by my window in quick succession. Luckily, there was hardly any traffic. My eyes were half on the road and half on the lookout for anyone coming—coming to arrest me, in particular.

  Or to kill me.

  No one had stopped me when I reached the main road out of the Athenaeum, but as I flicked on my blinker like any good driver who hasn’t just been going sixty miles per hour, I realized something was wrong. The security guards were standing outside their booth again, not lazing in their chairs, and both were talking on portable radios. And then a siren sounded, echoing among the distant central buildings under the peak of the pyramid. It was so loud that I didn’t need to roll the window down to hear it, but I did anyway.

  It must have been because Khaya was no longer wearing the bracelet. I didn’t know what else it could be.

  I made the turn and drove at a measured pace for the gate as if I hadn’t noticed the commotion, trying not to think about the bloodstains darkly visible against my brown pants, my missing white uniform jacket, or the black bag with the air hole sitting in the back of the truck within plain sight of the security guards now that they were out of their booth. All I could do was take a deep breath, like Khaya had done against the pain of a severed thumb and a broken ankle.

  The truck slowed to a halt when one of the guards inevitably raised his hand for me to stop. I tried to roll down my window only to discover that it was already down. Deep breaths.

  “You’ve finished early,” the guard nearest my window said, his radio still halfway to his mouth. “Thought you were done at noon.” He didn’t even look at me, his eyes on the source of the siren, emanating from the heart of the Athenaeum.

  “Part of my contract agreement on … Wednesdays.” I needed to grope for the day of the week. When I found it, I realized I actually had a good excuse. “It’s garbage barge day for us, so I have to cut my route here short.” Only the second part was a lie. The barge left at night, so I would have had plenty of time to finish up all my routes.

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” the guard said, more grouchy than suspicious. “And we have a situation, anyway, so I’m afraid you’ll have to sit tight before you’re clear to leave.”

  “But I could lose my job.” My hands rubbed the steering wheel, stress edging into my voice. I noticed a splotch of blood on my finger and dropped my hands into my lap.

  “Not my problem.” The guard still wasn’t looking at me, missing all the details that were screaming as loud as the siren, trying to give me away. He obviously didn’t imagine I had anything to do with the “situation.” How could he? I was a garbage boy. He was being a bastard to me because he could, not becaus
e he was trying to catch me out.

  I forced a superior smile, adopting a tone to match. “But it is your problem, officer. Dr. Swanson is well aware of our agreement. We arranged it specifically, which is why he granted me a higher level of clearance. Don’t you remember that?”

  He finally cast me a glance. “Yeah, but—”

  “Well then, you’ll remember he gave me this card that says I can come and go as I please.” I ignored the other security guard, who’d stepped up to the passenger door with his hand on his hip—or, more significantly, on his gun holster. I passed the card out the window with clammy hands, breathing a silent thanks to the Gods that there was no blood on it. “Dr. Swanson wouldn’t be happy if you cost me my job for breaking the terms of my contract. I thought he made that clear.”

  The guard snatched the card from me and squinted at the words on it, under the barcode. There was a good chance he couldn’t read any more than I could, but he wouldn’t want to admit it. I hoped that was the case, because the card probably said absolutely nothing about me coming or going “as I pleased.”

  “See?” I said. “I’m allowed to go now. You could call Dr. Swanson to double-check, but he probably wouldn’t appreciate having to repeat himself so soon.”

  The guard thrust the card back at me with a scowl. “Fine, runt,” he said, even though I must have been a foot taller than him. “I don’t know why Dr. Swanson gives you the time of day. I certainly wouldn’t. Now get out.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, too relieved to be sarcastic.

  I showed more restraint than I thought I possessed by not flooring the gas pedal as soon as he raised the gate. The limits of my restraint were reached, though, when I made it to the middle of the parking lot without being stopped or followed. I screeched out into traffic like a wild animal bursting from a cage, forcing a car to swerve widely around me. The little pickup was far more maneuverable than the garbage truck and I zipped between lanes of expensive vehicles, swearwords leaving my mouth in a rush to match my driving.