Whisperworld
Chapter 10
Someone was trying to wake me. I told them to fuck off, or at least as close to those words as I could mumble. Who was in my room, anyway? Sometimes, when I had too much mezcal, Zach had to come and rouse me for work. My skull hurt like hell, but I didn’t remember any drinking and even Zach wouldn’t just sit there poking me in the head.
I opened my eyes as little as possible to find a pair of fuzzy shadows looming over me, and opened my eyes the rest of the way. Needed more information to figure this out.
I blinked a few times and the two shapes coalesced into a single man that I didn’t recognize. He was daubing my aching head with a rag soaked in something. The man was in his thirties, with bronze skin and a head full of close-cropped brown hair. His clothes were made of some dark, stiff weave, but stippled with white where salt had been ground deep into the cloth.
Whitefinger!
I leapt into a fighting stance. At least, I tried to. My body actually gave a sort of limp jerk and I half sat up, but my hands were bound behind me with a rough rope.
“Get away from me!” I said out loud.
Control over my mouth had returned — at least as much control as I ever had over my mouth — and my body was starting to do some of the things I wanted it to. My brain was still lagging behind, though.
“Kiyu gave you a good bump on the head,” the man told me. “I’m trying to take care of it. But if you’d prefer to die of dehydration or infection, I’ll leave.”
Smart-ass. I was the one who was supposed to say stuff like that. But I lay back down on what felt like a scratchy mat and after a moment, the Whitefinger took that as permission to continue tending to my pounding skull. He was using a salve made out of cactus pulp to coat the swollen gash on my head, but I recognized the small clay jar in his hand. I saw that same potter’s mark every week when I went shopping — the medicine was from Angel City. I sure hadn’t brought any with me, so the fuckers must have stole it.
Whitefinger thieves.
Apparently the man had almost been finished when I came to; it wasn’t long before he moved away and squatted down next to Zach. He was bound, too, and still unconscious. My partner had a nasty purple tortoise-egg on his head that the Whitefinger was now smearing salve over. Zach groaned.
We were in some sort of basement. Storms had knocked down part of the floor above and its rubble filled half of the room, but the other side was dug out to expand the space. The corner where Zach and I were tied up contained several more woven mats and a small fire pit, currently cold and dark. A larger pit burned further down, where the basement had been enlarged and the smoke bent gently toward the slope of the fallen wall.
Good. That meant airflow, which meant that was our way out. If I could just get out of my ropes…
Four more Whitefingers sat gathered around the fire. Two of them held lizards speared on knives over the flames, but a pot hung above the fire, too. I smelled something cooking inside, but the scent wasn’t familiar.
The girl was there. She had removed her hood and bandana to reveal her delicate, heart-shaped face, but she wasn’t looking at me. Her attention was on one of the other Whitefingers. The guy must have been a mutant — he was even bigger than Zach. His skin was dark brown and his head shaved smooth. When he turned to look at the girl, I saw the scars. They were shiny and red and burned all over the side of his face, clear down his neck until they vanished under the collar of his cloak. The old burns turned the big guy’s left eye into a permanently narrowed slit and his ear was gone, no more than a hole in the side of his head.
I strained to hear what the scarred man was saying. Zach made it hard to listen, groaning as the Whitefinger healer started rubbing stolen salve on the fulgurite cut under his arm, but I picked out some of the words.
“No,” said One-Ear. “We should have turned back when Lekan died. We needed another yin. This is no job for a yang.”
“Jacks, I can do this!” the girl protested. Kiyu, based on what my surly nurse had said. “Even I can hear the call. They need help!”
“We already knew that,” Jacks said. I guess One-Ear wasn’t actually his name. Pity. It was a good fit. “Did you help them?”
Jacks reached down beside him to stroke something. I craned my head as unobtrusively as I could and saw a brown and white animal lying at Jacks’ side. A dog? As a… pet? I’d seen a couple in the wastes since joining the Greenguard, but they had a tendency to come up mutants and no one in their right mind kept an extra mouth to feed in a Whisperward.
“Well… no,” Kiyu admitted. She had a soft, sweet voice that clashed with her indignation. “But I got the key, Jacks!”
“You killed three people retrieving that thing. And then got caught trying to use it.”
“I got away,” Kiyu said.
“And they followed you.”
I’d been on the receiving end of enough chew-outs to know one when I heard it. Jacks was definitely in charge, and Kiyu was in trouble with her boss. I tried not to sympathize with the Whitefinger girl.
Jacks glanced pointedly past Kiyu to me and Zach. I almost looked away in time, but he saw I was awake and nodded, lowering his voice for whatever else he had to say to Kiyu. Not that I would have been able to hear much over Zach.
“Get away from me!” he growled.
Partners really do rub off on each other, I guess.
The Whitefinger man dropped his rag with a sigh, rolled his eyes and closed the lid of the clay jar. He walked back to the others, shaking his head. Jacks asked him a few questions, but the burn-scarred man kept watching us.
“Zee!” I whispered.
“What happened? Where are we?”
“We got our asses kicked, remember? We’re in some kind of basement or buried building, I think. Exit’s on the far side of that fire pit,” I reported. I scanned the room as surreptitiously as I could manage — which wasn’t very — but thankfully, what I was looking for was not hidden. “Our weapons and water are right by that fire.”
Zach blinked bleary eyes and made his own inspection. His gaze paused on the fire, the exit, our gear and each Whitefinger. Cataloguing threats.
“Julia, we have to–” he started.
But Jacks had risen to his feet and was walking over to us. The dog stood and followed. It had two front legs on the right side, one right next to the other, but ambled along easily enough even with the extra limb, a long pink tongue lolling from its mouth. Jacks stopped a few yards back from us.
“You had better kill us now,” Zach snarled. “Or I’m going to kill you.”
The dog peeled its lips back from long, sharp white teeth and growled right back at Zach. Jacks made a downward motion with his hand and the dog silenced instantly, but kept its amber eyes glued to Zach.
“That girl is a dreameater and a murderer!” Zach said, glaring at Kiyu. “We’re taking her back to the Whisperward to face justice for her crimes.”
“She’s inexperienced,” Jacks answered. His voice was low and rumbling, almost like thunder. “What happened was an accident. Kiyu didn’t mean to hurt anyone. You Greenguard are the ones who hunt us, not the other way around.”
Zach wasn’t buying it. “How can you harbor a damned dreameater? Choose to keep those God has cursed? Or did she just gut your mind? Are you her puppet?”
Kiyu followed Jacks and stood a few feet behind him, to one side. She gave us a dark-eyed glare.
“Do I look like anyone’s puppet?” Jacks asked.
“Then why do the Whitefingers tolerate psychics?” Zach’s voice was still raw with anger, but he was sincere. “You don’t have to live in the wastes like animals. You could have the safety and protection of the Whisperward. You could share in the grace of God.”
Kiyu let out a short, sharp laugh. “We’ve seen how you live. Your Gardeners control a lot more than the greenhouses. And Greenguard like you kill anyone who doesn’t fall in line. You would execute us just for taking what we need–”
“Thieves!” Zach snapped.
I remembered Gardener Matthew from the Whisperward in Bridge City, what he had said about the Whitefingers looting his fallen city. Zach was right…. But I had to agree with Kiyu’s assessment of Whisperward life, too. Her take was a little over-simplified, but still more or less accurate. And not so different from my own judgment.
Damn it.
“Why were you trying to get into the Stormsphere?” I asked before Zach could make things worse. The irony of our sudden role reversal was not lost on me, but I wanted answers. “What did you do to the Tear in Bridge City?”
“We have harmed nothing and no one,” Jacks said, then hesitated. “Except for that Gardener and his Greenguard in Angel City. We don’t want to share your lives, but we don’t want to destroy them.”
“Can’t you hear the voices in the sphere?” Kiyu asked. She was still angry, too, but seemed genuinely curious. “Can’t anyone hear them calling?”
Liam. The boy told me that something had called to him, had wanted him to come to the Stormsphere. And I called him a liar. Was whatever summoned Liam the same as what Kiyu was talking about now?
Zach hadn’t made the connection yet. “What?”
“You don’t know?” asked Jacks. “You don’t know what’s inside the Stormspheres?”
Zach kept his face neutral, but I doubted that I was hiding anything. Poker’s never been my game.
“No,” I admitted. “No one knows what’s inside the Stormspheres or how they work. Except maybe the Gardeners.”
“Where do the Whispers come from?” asked Jacks.
“They’re the voices of angels,” Zach answered promptly.
“Only if angels can die,” Jacks said.
“Die?” Zach and I echoed.
“We were too late in Bridge City,” Kiyu told us. Now she actually sounded sad.
“There’s… something in those things?” I asked. “And when it went silent, the Stormsphere stopped working. Then the storms came, right?”
Jacks and his dog watched us carefully, but Kiyu nodded. The Whitefingers’ story made sense… If Jacks and Kiyu were telling us the truth. But it matched up with what I’d overheard of Thorn and Matthew’s conversation, what Liam told us, and with what everyone knew and feared. The Whisperwards were failing.
I had always assumed that the Tears of God were pretty much solid. Just huge, glistening black all the way through, mysteriously constructed with the old science to repel the storms. But I’d already seen the Door and the passage inside. The Gardeners took offerings into the Stormspheres. Were there really angels in there? Or something else?
“They don’t know,” Jacks muttered, apparently to himself. He sounded frustrated. “They can’t hear the distress call.”
“They don’t have yins,” Kiyu said.
“Yins?” I asked. My curiosity was off and running again. It didn’t give a shit about the ropes holding the rest of me back.
“Psychics with the power to listen and feel,” Kiyu said. “Yangs can move things.”
“Dreameaters,” Zach simplified. “You can kill with your minds and you can steal thoughts. We kill creatures like you to protect the innocent.”
“They don’t steal anything,” Kiyu snapped. “Yins just listen. And they don’t even do that unless it’s important.”
“Our yins have heard a call for help coming from the Whisperwards,” Jacks said, returning his attention to me and Zach. “It’s been going on for a few years, but getting clearer and more urgent over the last few months. Whatever is inside your Tears of God, it’s becoming desperate. The cry is now so loud and sharp that… Well, some of our yins can’t stop listening and have lost their minds. Others have died.”
“But the call is getting weaker, too,” Kiyu went on. “Your Whispers may be desperate, but it hasn’t been enough to save them. At least two of the Stormspheres have died and the remaining ones are failing.”
“Sun and Bridge City,” I said.
“And you fools hunt down the only people who could have told you what was happening,” Jacks said.
The big wastelander stood abruptly and I couldn’t help stiffening a little at his obvious anger. But Jacks just shook his head and the dog mirrored his gesture.
“We need to figure out what to do next. With Lekan dead, we don’t have anyone who can commune with the Whispers. And we’ve got to figure out what to do with you two.” The scarred man looked down at us for a moment and then turned away. “Diesel, watch them.”
The five-legged dog gave a bark and sat back on his haunches to stare at us. Kiyu lingered a moment and then began to follow Jacks, but he held up his hand.
“You too, Kiyu,” he said.
“What?” she protested. “Don’t I get a say?”
“You’ve made enough mistakes already. Help Diesel watch the Greenguard.”
Yeah, Kiyu was in the shithouse. The dog looked up at her with sad eyes. When Kiyu sighed and sat down, he laid his snout across her knee. I had a creeping suspicion about the animal.
“Is that dog a dreameater?” I asked.
“His name is Diesel. It’s an ancient word that means power,” Kiyu answered in clipped tones. “And he’s not a dreameater. He’s just a little psychic. Mostly a yin.”
“That thing has the Mark of Caine,” Zach said. “It’s cursed.”
“It’s just another mutation,” I argued. “Like rotting skin or tumors… or extra legs.”
I glanced at Diesel’s fifth leg. The dog had managed to fold it under himself along with the rest of his limbs without looking too awkward. Mutations cropped up every generation, even in humans, and they went out to the execution stakes, too. Their blood was contaminated, the Gardeners said. But most animals had a faster breeding cycle than humans, so they mutated much more rapidly. Tenders in the scale and bug farms had to keep careful watch and cull their herds often.
“Don’t listen to them, Diesel,” Kiyu told the dog. “What do they know?”
She scratched the dog behind the ear, suddenly reminding me that my hands were bound and I had no ability to scratch. Naturally, a fierce itch promptly manifested on my nose. Kiyu remained silent, looking offended, and I realized too late that she was a dreameater… a yang… too, and that I’d pretty much called her a rotting mutant.
Jacks sat with the other three Whitefingers, in a tight circle around their fire. The roasting lizards were done and they passed around the food. I noticed that a few lizards had been set aside. Dinner for Kiyu and Diesel, probably. And maybe Zach and me… if they decided not to kill us.
Which didn’t seem likely.
“Are you alright, Zee?” I asked. I pointed with my chin as best I could to the wound on his head and the gash under his arm.
“Yeah. Rosy, just…” His eyes flicked over to Kiyu.
I was unsettled, too. What the Whitefingers were saying about their yins and yangs was a little different than what the Gardeners told us in Sunday school, but I kept thinking back to Byron’s body, riddled with glass shards. Kiyu did that. There was no doubt that psychics were dangerous.
We sat there in silence. I tried to listen in on Jacks’ conversation, but our captors were speaking too quietly. Kiyu busied herself petting Diesel. Zach tensed once, flexing his powerful arms against the rope around his wrists. The dog’s ears pricked forward and he gave a single sharp, warning bark. Jacks looked up from his council, then turned away again when Zach relaxed and Diesel settled down.
I couldn’t take the silence anymore. “Why did you kill Byron?”
“Byron?” Kiyu asked.
“The Gardener. That was his name.”
“I… was only trying to get the key,” Kiyu said. She scratched Diesel behind one furry ear. “Lekan listened into the Gardeners’ minds until he learned about the keys. There were only three men who carried them. We picked out your guy. Byron. He spent a lot of time alone in the greenhouses. Working on the flowers, Lekan told me. We just had to take his key and then we could get into the Stormsphere and see what was making the psychic cry.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Something went wrong, didn’t it?”
“We were coming back here to report in with Jacks and figure out how to get the key when Lekan got bit by a snake. It was a bad one and Lekan… he died. We’re a week out from the warren here and I convinced Jacks that we didn’t have to go home. I told him that I could get the key and use it.”
Kiyu’s voice cracked as she spoke and her dark eyes glistened with tears that she refused to shed. I believed Kiyu that she hadn’t meant to kill Byron and the Blackthumbs. It didn’t change the fact that she had killed them, but it was a different story than the evil Whitefinger monster coming to murder good people in their sleep. I thought about the Whitefingers that Zach and I had hunted and killed over the years. What if they hadn’t been there in our city to hurt anyone? Just to get things like medicine and information? And what about the dreameaters? What if they were all like Liam?
“So I went back in to finish the job,” Kiyu said. “But someone outside saw me. He shouted and I panicked. I shattered the greenhouse. It was an accident. I really didn’t mean to do… that.”
“Why don’t the Whitefingers kill dreameaters?” Zach asked, speaking to Kiyu for the first time since Jacks walked away. “Your powers are clearly dangerous. Look what happens when you’re scared.”
“The warren needs all of us,” Kiyu answered. “Yins and yangs and everyone else. I protect the warren from the mutants. A lot like you, actually. Except I don’t kill babies.”
“Hey,” I protested, but I didn’t have any other arguments to follow up with. She wasn’t wrong.
“You have your weapons. So do I,” Kiyu said.
Zach grunted, grumpy about being compared to a dreameater. Diesel cocked one ear toward my partner, but apparently decided that he wasn’t going to do anything violent. How much of that was animal instinct and how much was the dreameater dog’s psionic ability? I wished that I still had the Halo, but Zach delivered it back to Gregory days ago.
Oh well… The polished polymer probably wouldn’t have survived hauling Zach up from his fall into the fulgurite tube, much less the sandstorm.
Kiyu was still watching me. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Can’t you just read my mind?” I asked.
“No, I’m mostly a yang. My yin powers aren’t very strong. You would have to be feeling something pretty intensely for me to sense it and I can’t really read individual thoughts. But I can pick up a grown man and throw him like a ball.” Kiyu smirked at Zach, who shifted uncomfortably. “So, can I ask my question?”
I nodded.
“Why do you call us Whitefingers?” Kiyu asked.
“Seriously?” I asked. “That’s what you want to know?”
“I’ve been to Bridge City and Sun City, but both of them were abandoned. Angel City is the first Whisperward I’ve ever seen that was still inhabited. The people there talk a lot about the Whitefingers. Why do you call us that?”
“Uh… Because of your white fingers,” I said.
Kiyu lifted her small hands, looking at them. Her skin was a light gold color and she had surprisingly nice nails.
“Your gloves,” I clarified.
Kiyu took them from her belt and examined the salt ground into the cloth. She smiled a little. “Okay, fair enough. But why are you called Blackthumbs? Your gloves aren’t black.”
“That’s not our official name. We’re really called Greenguard,” I explained. “Blackthumb is just a nickname because we’re soldiers. It’s what we say when someone’s good at fighting and killing. You’ve got a fairly black thumb, too.”
Kiyu’s high cheeks colored and I couldn’t tell if she was flattered or insulted.
“Whitefingers. Blackthumbs. Greenguard,” she said. “Don’t you get confused with all those names?”
“Stop talking to her, Julia,” Zach warned me. “She’ll get into your head.”
“She said she can’t do that, Zee.” I wasn’t really sure I believed the Whitefinger girl, but I said it anyway. “Hey… Kiyu, right?”
The Whitefinger nodded, regarding me warily. So far, Kiyu had been speaking fairly freely, probably more freely than she should have with a pair of prisoners. She was actually answering my questions and I didn’t want to waste this opportunity. I struggled to get my bound hands down to my hip pocket. No luck. Diesel lifted his head and sniffed, but the dog must have sensed that I wasn’t trying to escape.
“I have something. It’s in my pocket and I can’t reach,” I said.
Kiyu’s expression darkened. “I’m not untying you.”
“I know. Can you grab it for me?”
Kiyu stared at me. Hard. Her dark brown eyes were flecked with gold and amber. I braced myself, wondering if all the stories about dreameaters were true after all and if I had just set myself up for a terminal brain scramble.
Rosy. Good one, Julia.
But I didn’t feel anything and Kiyu didn’t seem able to read my thoughts — she looked to Diesel for confirmation. The dog sniffed at me again and his furry tail thumped against the basement floor.
“Fine,” Kiyu said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to the dog.
Kiyu approached cautiously and knelt down. I stretched my hands away in what I hoped was a reassuring gesture and rolled my hip up toward her. The Whitefinger girl slipped her hand into the front pocket of my fatigues. Her slender, delicate fingers slid down my thigh. I bit my lip as a hot shiver shot along my spine and tightened my throat. I really hoped that she wasn’t yin or whatever enough to sense that.
Kiyu felt around for a moment, then touched on the scrap of lace I had found at the shattered greenhouse. Her fingers curled around it and pulled the lace slowly out of my pocket. Kiyu’s eyes lit up and she smiled.
“Is it yours?” I asked.
“Yes,” Kiyu said. She ran her thumb gently over the intricately coiled and knotted thread. “It’s mine.”
“What’s it for? Does it help you control your powers? Or enhance them? Did it belong to someone important?”
Kiyu looked uncomfortable and wouldn’t meet my eye. Maybe it was some sort of Whitefinger secret. God knew the Gardeners had theirs, and we had our own secrets in the Greenguard, too. I wasn’t about to explain Halos to Kiyu, regardless of how hot I was feeling between the legs with her this close.
“I found it in Bridge City,” she said so quietly I had to lean in closer than was entirely comfortable or wise to catch the words. “It’s… pretty.”
Kiyu pulled open a pouch hanging from her belt and carefully slipped the lace inside. I heard other things clinking together and craned my head to see a marble, a ribbon, maybe a colorful piece of broken glass and a folded piece of paper that looked like it had been drawn on.
Kiyu pulled away, blushing again. I couldn’t help noticing how pretty the pink flush looked on her. I was still trying to phrase my next question while ignoring dirty looks from Zach when Jacks returned. Firelight threw the Whitefinger’s long shadow over us.
Hastily, Kiyu closed her belt pouch and stood. Diesel padded to Jacks’ side.
“When the storm is over–” Jacks said.
Here it comes. We’re dead. Sorry, Zee.
“–We’ll take you within sight of the Angel City walls and release you.”
Unless that was some very strange euphemism for killing us, it wasn’t the decision I had expected. I risked a sidelong peek at Zach, who wore a confused look that probably matched my own.
“Release us…?” Zach asked. I wondered if he remembered his own threat about killing Jacks if the big guy didn’t do it first. “Why?”
“This isn’t personal. That Gardener’s death was an accident. We just came to find out what’s going on and help. The Whispers’ call is hurting our yins and their failure is turning your people into homeless refugees.”
Jacks crouched down to look me in the eye. I wondered where that scar had come from, but now didn’t seem like the time to ask.
“I need you to carry a message back to the Gardeners,” Jacks said. “Tell them we had nothing to do with Bridge City. Tell them what I told you, and that whatever lives inside their Stormsphere is dying.”
