Whisperworld
Chapter 1
I unslung my crossbow and put my back against the cracked concrete wall. These raids didn’t usually end in violence, but people got emotional, and emotional people did stupid things. I worked the lever on my steel ‘bow and slid a bolt into place. On the other side of the door, Zach did the same with his own weapon.
When my partner was ready, he nodded. I banged on the wall with my fist.
“Greenguard!” I shouted. “Open up!”
People seemed slightly less threatened by a woman’s voice than by Zach’s big booming one and we needed the advantage. I hated these jobs even when they went smoothly.
There was a burst of activity from inside the apartment. Furniture scraped and voices whispered harshly.
“It’s the Greenguard, Sam. The Blackthumbs are here!”
“Quiet! Go and hide!” hissed a second voice. A baby began to cry, but was quickly silenced.
My hands were full of crossbow and I couldn’t punch the wall. So I banged my head against it instead. Blackthumb meant someone dangerous — usually one of the Greenguard — and that really wasn’t how I wanted this to go down.
Shit.
Zach frowned until I finished my temper tantrum and then cocked his head at the door. No one drew the curtain. The apartment had a computerized polymer door, of course, but the power that operated it had failed a long time ago. Now it was pried and propped open, covered by a mat of woven agave fibers.
Not for long. Zach grabbed a fistful of cloth and gave it a sharp yank. The hanging tore away with a snarl of ripping fabric and I stepped through. I kept my crossbow tucked against my shoulder but the bolt pointed down at the floor. Zach came in right behind me. A middle-aged man with thinning brown curls was herding a pair of children away and all three of them jumped as I charged into the room.
“Where’s the baby, Garza?” I asked.
Sam Garza pulled his children protectively behind him. One was a girl of nine or ten with her father’s thick brown hair. Her brother was a few years younger. They stared at me with wide eyes, at Zach and then up at their father. Sam’s lined face was pale and his kids began to cry.
“These… these are my children,” said Sam. “Gabby and little Samuel.”
“Where’s the other one?” Zach asked.
“These are my children,” Sam repeated. “Two’s the limit. We would never break the Gardeners’ law.”
I glanced around the Garzas’ apartment. We were up on the tenth story, high enough that Zach and I had to climb two ladders and then a crooked set of stairs that would probably collapse before the end of the year. No one lived this far off the ground that didn’t have to. The highest floors were always the first to collapse. They were a long climb and a dangerous fall from the busy streets and markets below.
But Sam’s clothes and those of his children were linen — not cheap cotton or agave weave — and dyed a deep, vibrant blue that I didn’t see very often. A copper water pitcher sat on the counter, polished and well cared for. Dinner was still on the table and looked like a nice fat gopher snake, not the grainy gray crickmeal I expected from a highriser.
“You’re a dyer, Sam, and you obviously bring in good barter,” I said, nodding to the table. “What’s a man of your means doing up this high if not for privacy?”
Sam tightened his shaking blue-tinged fingers on his children’s shoulders. Zach moved to the doorway where Sam had been taking them. My partner stopped and brushed aside the curtain that hung across it, leaning inside. He motioned with his crossbow and then stood back.
A woman emerged from the doorway. She hung her head, dark hair falling over her face and the baby she cradled to her chest. She shifted the child in her arms and her breast popped out of its mouth. The baby fussed until Sam’s wife resettled it against her.
Zach shook his head. “Two children, Garza. You know the law. The Whisperward is already straining to protect us all. A third baby means another mouth to feed and someone else goes hungry.”
“Please, don’t take her!” the woman begged.
“Mary, be quiet!” Sam hissed, but then took up his wife’s plea. “Please, sir, we didn’t mean to. Surely she was a gift from God!”
“The Gardeners speak for God,” Zach said without hesitation. “Two children. No more. You know what happens to the extras.”
Mary cried even harder and the other two kids clustered around their mother. Sam stepped forward and I tightened sweating hands on my crossbow. The weapon was suddenly heavy in my arms. If things went stormy, this was when it would happen. This was always when the parents did something stupid. Sometimes they tried to bribe us. Sometimes they came at us with a kitchen knife. One hysterical woman even threw a potted cactus at Zach a few months back.
Don’t be stupid, Sam.
He was.
“Don’t give her to the storms,” Sam pleaded. “Take me instead! Leave my children and take me. I’ll go willing!”
“And leave your wife on her own to raise three children?” Zach asked. “You’re the tradesman, Sam. Do you want your family to starve without you?”
Sam hung his head and his whole body shook with bitter sobs. He was breaking down now and I didn’t think he would do anything violent. Sam had taken his only shot and missed. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy. There’s nothing like birth control duty to make me hate my job.
Zach looked away from the family. I doubted that the mourning Garzas could see it, but I knew Zach well enough to read the turmoil beneath his steely expression. This was different than killing the dangerous mutants that strayed into the Whisperward, different than hunting down thieves or dreameaters. He hated this just as much as I did.
“Zee, do we have to…?” I said, but Zach was already speaking.
“The Gardeners have read from the Book of Law, and you have broken that law.” Zach’s jaw was clenched and sweat beaded along his dark brow. “So here is what we’re going to do. Julia and I are going to leave now. But we’re coming back tomorrow. And when we do, we’re only going to find two children. Rosy?”
Sam and Mary looked up hopefully, but Zach kept his expression stern and his crossbow leveled at the family. With his dark eyes and square jaw, he did stern way better than I ever could.
“Two children,” Zach repeated. “You find a way, or we have to do it ours.”
“There are refugee families who have lost their own children–” Sam began.
Zach held up one big hand. “Shut it. I don’t want to know. Just make sure your family’s the right size when we come back here tomorrow.”
We hurried out of there before the Garzas could blubber their thanks too much. I didn’t like this job nearly enough to enjoy being thanked for it. And I really didn’t want any of it getting back to Gregory. Being chewed out by the boss wasn’t as bad as birth control, but it still wasn’t fun.
It was a long climb back down to the street and not much easier than going up. Some of the buildings in Angel City had ropes and pulleys running through the old elevator shafts, but the one in the Garzas’ highrise was choked with rubble that no one had ever managed to clear out. The upper stories probably only had a generation or two left before they crumbled, anyway.
When we reached the sixth floor, Zach and I climbed down a series of ladders braced against the outside walls that led to lower rooftops nearby. From around our necks, we pulled bandanas up over our mouths. Zach settled his wide-brimmed hat low over his brow, but I left my goggles up in my hair. The dust wasn’t so bad today and the view from up here looked out all across Angel City.
Angel City was the largest Whisperward in the west and second only to Apple City far in the east. There used to be other cities besides the walled Whisperwards, but that was a long time ago. Now we were all that was left of civilization.
From this high, I couldn’t see all the cracked walls and rusting bits of exposed rebar. Harsh white daylight was giving way to sunset’s flaming colors and shadows softened the city’s sharp edges. A dozen other ancient buildings rose up around us, apartments just like the Garzas’ stacked high into the sky. The top stories were all long gone, crumbled away decades or maybe even centuries before my birth. Their remains crowned each highrise in jagged angles of broken concrete and shattered glass that threw back the bright sunset glow until the buildings shone like huge torches.
Below us spread the patchwork of houses and markets, cactus fields and scale farms built from ruined old buildings. One of those farms was likely where Sam picked up his nice little dinner. As the long day darkened toward night, the lizards crawled over one another to find the warmest spots on the cracked cement while the night herders waved off black clouds of evening insects. I wondered if the prices down there were any better than with Harrison, my usual scale farmer.
From the center of Angel City rose the huge, dark shape of the Stormsphere. The shiny black dome was perfect and impervious, never dulled by dust or damage. It reflected the sunset’s fire all along the smooth western curve. Haloed in red and gold, I could almost believe the Stormsphere really was the Tear of God that the Gardeners claimed.
I slipped on a rung of the ladder and Zach scolded me for daydreaming.
Again.
“You’ve got the sharpest mind I’ve ever seen, Julia, but you let it wander way too much,” he said.
Zach sounded like my mother. Let your mind drift and a dreameater will gobble it up!
Maybe Zach thought that he needed to father me a little. God knew I was the malcontent child of the Greenguard. I began to answer, but my bandana slipped and the wind whipped the tip of my auburn braid up into my mouth. I spat it out again.
“Eat thorns, Zee,” I said.
I think Zach scowled at me beneath his own bandana, but I doubted he meant it any more than I did.
The lowest levels of the apartment building were better patched and cared for than up high where the Garzas lived. Down here was where the rich and important people lived, where the foundations were strong. Zach always said that I should be grateful that I had one of those lower-level apartments now. We had both grown up in poor families, but making it into the Greenguard was the next best thing to being an actual Gardener. We had privilege and power and all that good shit.
Sometimes I missed my mother’s eighteenth-story apartment, but by the time we were on the ground again, my legs ached and I was glad for my neat, clean little second-story home. Now I just had to get back to it.
A group of children ran around the corner, all laughing and shrieking as they chased each other. In the distance, I heard some poor parent’s shout, trying in vain to summon them back for dinner. The kids pulled up short at the sight of me and Zach. In our olive drab fatigues, big black boots and carrying our steel crossbows, they knew exactly what we were: Greenguard. Blackthumbs.
Our uniforms were made of something the Gardeners called carbon microfiber, though I guess there weren’t any carbon plants left and nothing that grew in the Whisperwards made cloth like that anymore. It was stain-resistant, repelled the dust, and was next to impossible to tear or cut.
The children skidded to a halt, all crashing into each other, and eyed us warily.
“Evening,” said Zach. He touched the brim of his hat in salute.
“Good evening, sir,” they chorused.
I remembered how I used to look up at the Greenguard when I was a little girl, with a confusing mixture of fear and respect. The Greenguard practiced birth control and took away the extra children, but they also fought off dangerous mutants from beyond the walls and protected us from dreameaters and Whitefingers. I never wanted to be one of the Greenguard when I grew up, but they were heroes.
Still, it was hard to forget that at the end of the day, our job was to kill. Our official name was Greenguard, but just about everyone in Angel City called us Blackthumbs — violent death-dealers that they counted lucky to have on their side and prayed that the Gardeners never sent against them.
But not even our oiled metal crossbows or the knives sheathed on our hips could hold the children’s attention for long. As soon as we passed, they leapt into motion once more, continuing whatever game we had interrupted.
“Hey, Zee,” I said.
“What?”
“Thanks for what you did back there. With the Garza girl… I really didn’t want to give her to a storm.”
Zach shrugged his big, broad shoulders. Like me, he was one of few Blackthumbs not born to a Greenguard family. He’d grown up like the Garzas. A lot worse, probably. Zach’s lantern jaw worked for a second before he spoke.
“They’re our people. I was only doing my job,” he said.
“I doubt Gregory would see it that way.”
“We’re not Whitefingers, Julia. We don’t worship the storms. We don’t breed dreameaters to hunt innocent souls. And we don’t kill people we don’t have to. As long as we can count only two Garza children tomorrow, then the law of the Whisperward is preserved and we don’t have to execute a baby girl.”
“What if the Gardeners ever change the law?” I asked. “Only one child?”
With all of the refugees from Sun City and now Bridge City, too, the Whisperward was filling up. Fast. If Angel City wasn’t already at its limit to support them, it soon would be. And more people were arriving at the city gates every day, tired and hungry after month-long treks across the endless desert that separated the Whisperwards.
“I don’t know,” Zach said.
“Do you think there will be a pruning?” I asked. “Even the Gardeners would never order that, right?”
Zach shrugged again. But I could tell he worried about it, too.
