Whisperworld
Chapter 15
When I woke the next morning, Zach was already up. He had some cactus fruits and a few twists of lizard jerky laid out on his bandana. He separated them into two small piles. It wasn’t much food, even before dividing it. Our supply situation wasn’t looking too rosy.
“That’s not going to last us very long,” I said, stretching. “How’s the water?”
Zach shook both the canteens and they made a pleasant gurgle. For now.
“We need to find those Whitefingers soon,” he said.
My head felt better after a night of sleep with accompanying food and water. But it was a good thing Zach had kept my first meal light — when my body got used to food again, it would want more.
Zach and I ate sparingly from his stores and drank as little water as we could manage. Zach gave me more than he took for himself, citing my injuries, but promised that he wouldn’t do anything ridiculously heroic to spare me.
Liar.
The heat shimmer swallowed up all but the faintest shadow of Angel City. Between that and the glow of the sun, at least we had a vague bearing. So we moved north. On our left, the Pacific Desert was an endless expanse of blinding white. We kept our goggles firmly fitted over our eyes as we walked. My injured leg was stiff, but working a little better today and Zach didn’t have to slow down much for me.
I wasn’t at all certain we were going in the right direction, but when I had chased Kiyu out here before, my eyes were more or less glued to the ground, searching for any trace of the pretty Whitefinger girl. Zach had been watching my back, thankfully, and had a better image of the landscape we had tracked her through.
So I let him do the searching this time, and busied myself scanning the horizon. Maybe someone was still looking for us. I didn’t know if Thorn had Greenguard scouring the ruins or if the High Gardener figured that Zach and I were just as dead out here as chained to the stakes. And the Whitefinger man, Jacks, had sent us into the Whisperward with his message. After all the time and effort his team invested in reaching the Angel City Stormsphere, maybe they had stuck around to see what came of their message.
I sure hoped so. If the Whitefingers were already gone, we really were dead.
A glint of light caught my attention. I blinked, wiped dust off the lenses of my stolen goggles and looked again. Something shined out there behind us, flickering in and out of my vision. I whistled Zach to a halt.
“Zee? Do you see that?” I asked.
He turned around and looked where I pointed, but the light was gone now. “What was it?” he asked.
“Something shiny.”
“Probably lightning glass or maybe some old metal,” Zach said with a shrug.
Fulgurite glass not yet broken apart by the sandstorms sometimes gleamed like that. Most metal was so corroded and wind-etched that it reflected absolutely nothing. But some of the scientific relics — like I still believed the Stormsphere to be — seemed immune to God’s Wrath and maintained their original shine. But whatever I had seen, the light had moved or dust had covered it or something else. There was no sign of it now.
I wondered if it was pretty, maybe the kind of thing that Kiyu liked — something shiny plucked out of the drab sand. I found myself wanting to go back and find the mysterious shiny object for her, but collecting presents for Kiyu wasn’t going to do me much good if we died trying to reach her.
Zach let me wear his hat to keep some of the sun off of my pale face and neck. His brown skin was beaded with sweat, but I was turning an alarming shade of red. Zach must have been really worried — I’d never seen anyone wear that hat but him.
Our feet were blistering, too, but our boots held up. Whatever they were made of, it was a hell of a lot more resilient than simple cloth and leather. I was sure I would have walked right through even the best snakeskin boots by now.
At night, Zach and I took turns sleeping. The snakes and lizards were most active during the warm daylight hours, but insects and arachnids could hunt by day or night. We even heard some bats chirping in the dark, but they flew far too fast to hunt. The goggles that Zach had appropriated were better than either of ours had been, a rare model with night lenses. Pressing a small side-mounted button lit up the darkness in shades of green. But we didn’t know how much power the goggles had left, so we only used them a few minutes at a time during our watch rotations.
On the third day, Zach found the place where the Whitefingers had captured us.
“Look there,” he said. He pointed ahead and I saw several holes burned into the ground. “That’s where they used their spears like lightning rods.”
“Yeah.” I crouched down and peered at the rough glass. “Zee, if a storm comes up, drop that ‘bow.”
Zach regarded his metal crossbow and nodded.
It wasn’t hard to convince him that I should check out the scene alone. Chances were slim that those lightning strikes had created larger glass tubes beneath the sand — bolts that powerful would have melted the Whitefinger spears right down to slag, I suspected — but Zach was in no hurry to take any chances.
So I crept forward cautiously, and when I got close, crawled on my hands and knees. The Whitefingers’ spears had channeled the lightning into the earth, but it wasn’t particularly sandy here. There were patches of glass splattered across the surface, but the holes weren’t deep or large. I called out to Zach and we searched around for any clues about where the Whitefingers had taken us after the fight. It had to be close by, if only because Zach was a big motherfucker and not even Jacks would have wanted to carry him very far.
“Zee!”
I waved Zach over and pointed. There was a pair of shallow paw prints pressed into a thin crust of glass. Two right front paws. Diesel must have stepped in it when the glass was still soft. Not too soft. I remembered my surprise at how easily the five-legged dog had trotted after his master. Clearly, Diesel hadn’t burned his paws on the glass. The prints pointed northwest, so we began moving in that direction.
Late that afternoon, we found a scorpion burrow. It was a horizontal hole down into the earth, just wide enough for the pincers, Zach told me, and gave us a pretty accurate measurement of how big the scorpion inside would be. In this case, it must have been about as wide as Zach was tall. He shooed me away as he unslung his crossbow.
“Back up, Julia.”
“Wait a minute,” I said.
I pointed to one side of the burrow. There was something white pinned beneath a small stone there. A scrap of white lace.
“Is that…?” Zach asked.
“There’s no way Kiyu dropped it twice.” I crept closer.
“Not a good idea, Julia.”
But he loaded a bolt into his crossbow and covered my careful approach. I was right. The piece of lace was the same one that I had found at the crime scene in the Houses and returned to Kiyu.
“What are you doing? Julia, stop!” Zach hissed.
I poked my head into the tunnel mouth. “I don’t think this is a real burrow. The Whitefingers took us underground and I’m pretty sure this is their hiding hole. Maybe they made it look like a scorpion burrow to camouflage it.”
Zach swore and I had to admit that I wasn’t precisely thrilled to be crawling headfirst down into the earth and potentially right into the deformed maw of a monster scorpion. But I was right. The horizontal slash in the ground opened up into a carved tunnel better suited to humans than scorpions. It wasn’t quite as stony as I remembered and let out into the old basement cave where we had endured the not-so-terrible captivity of the Whitefingers. I held the lace clenched in my fist and realized that I was trembling with excitement.
But the hiding hole was empty. No Whitefingers, no supplies. There wasn’t much light, but Zach gave the place a more thorough search with his night-vision goggles.
“They’re gone,” he said in a flat tone. “Shit.”
“Why did they leave?” I asked, fighting to keep the panic out of my own voice. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they were afraid of this happening, that we would find them.”
“But they put bags over our heads,” I said. I kicked a loose piece of concrete. It bounced across the floor and vanished into the shadows. “They covered their tracks!”
“They don’t survive in the wastelands by putting all their lizards in one cage, Julia.”
Zach sounded just as miserable as I felt. For all his distrust of the Whitefingers, he knew they were our only chance at survival, too. We agreed unhappily to stay in the burrow for the night.
We didn’t know what else to do. Jacks surely had no idea about the lace Kiyu left behind, but if it was supposed to be a clue to where they had gone, I couldn’t decipher it.
My partner knelt next to the bigger fire pit and grabbed a rock, striking it against the flat of his knife, but couldn’t make a spark before he was worried about damaging the blade. We spent the night in darkness and finished off the last of our food and water. We had to find the Whitefingers soon or our situation was going to get damned stormy.
While Zach slept, I slipped his goggles over my eyes and adjusted the strap from his big head down to fit mine. I turned them on at intervals to peer out through the burrow entrance. I pulled Kiyu’s lace out of my pocket and held it, tracing the delicate threads with my fingers and wondering where she was.
In the morning, Zach and I argued for a while about the merits of splitting up our search. We hoped that the Whitefingers were still out there, keeping an eye on Angel City, just from a different vantage point. And if we were wrong… Well, we didn’t talk about that. I pointed out that we could cover more ground on our own, but Zach didn’t think it was worth the risk.
“Besides, you’ll get lost without me,” he said.
“Hey, I’m the smart one,” I told him. “You just keep flexing those muscles.”
But Zach won in the end and we set out together to see if we could find any trace or tracks that the Whitefingers might have left behind. By silent consent, we didn’t discuss our lack of food and water. But we did have one piece of luck — the sand around the Whitefinger hiding hole was riddled with scorpion burrows dug into the sandy bank. Most of them were small, just a hand’s width or less, and about the same size as those we bred in the Whisperwards.
There were some bigger burrows, which we steered clear of, but I had to admire the Whitefingers’ camouflage skills. Without Kiyu’s lace, I might never have picked out the fake tunnel.
Zach and I used a pair of bolts to dig a pit in front of some of the smaller burrows, each about twice as deep as the tunnel was wide, to trap the scorpion. Unlike their spider cousins, scorpions weren’t very good climbers and once they fell, if the sides of the hole were steep enough, the leggy little bastards were stuck.
We finished a dozen pits and then resumed our search for the Whitefingers. If we didn’t find Jacks and Kiyu and the rest, then we would check the traps on the way back and see how many scorpions fell into them when they emerged from their dens.
We decided to try our luck to the north first. Kiyu said she had been to Bridge City, which lay in that direction. If the Whitefingers had a home, maybe it was out there. By midday, we had found no sign of them, but I thought I caught another flash of light behind us. Even with my tinted goggles, though, it was too far away to see clearly. Zach saw it this time, too.
“Maybe it’s the Whitefingers trying to signal us,” I suggested. Desperately.
“But that’s back toward the Whisperward,” Zach said. He shook his head and rubbed the back of this neck. I think he missed his hat. “Let’s keep searching.”
An hour later, the distant shine was gone again.
“Hey, Zee!”
I pointed at a shallow depression in the earth. There was another scorpion burrow dug into the slope. This one was wide enough that Zach and I could have easily crawled in side by side. A few rocks lay scattered around the wide opening, but I couldn’t be sure if they had been placed deliberately. Was there something beneath one of them? I hadn’t seen everything Kiyu kept in her little pouch of shinies and most of them were small.
“I’m going to take a closer look,” I said.
Zach frowned, but he pulled the crossbow off his back, checked the bolt and sighted along it as I scrambled down the slope. I crept up to the burrow and craned my head to look inside, but I could see only dingy shadows.
I began toeing over stones outside the tunnel, and found nothing but boring shale and broken concrete. There was no glass, nothing painted or even very interestingly shaped. Nothing down here would ever have caught Kiyu’s eye.
I turned back toward Zach and shook my head. He looked disappointed, too. I only took a single step before I saw his muscles bunch, tensing like steel cables.
“Julia!” he shouted.
I tried to turn away, to look behind me, but something hit me hard in the head. Not the head, I realized a dazed second later, but my mind. Dreameater!
It wasn’t the gentle Whispers of the Stormsphere, but it wasn’t anything like human thought, either. The thing in my mind was hissing with hunger, pain and rage. I saw myself from the outside: a lanky, crude piece of loud meat that had wandered too close. I might have screamed and I definitely fell to the ground, clutching at my skull.
I rolled over and saw the scorpion emerge from the burrow. Its head was a bulbous lump on the front of the pallid carapace and contained at least a dozen eyes. Many of them were dull gray and blind, but more of them glittered malevolently. I choked on a thick, infected stench. What seemed like an entire army of legs scuttled over the sand and stone toward me. The pincers were serrated with jagged teeth along the curved inner edges.
“Leave her alone, you fucking monster!” Zach shouted.
There was a metallic twang and then a bolt sank into the chitinous plates on the huge scorpion’s back. Green-blue ichor oozed out around the shaft.
I shrieked again as the massive beast bellowed its pain into my mind. I knew that insects and arachnids bred and mutated fast, but I had no idea they could become dreameaters this powerful.
Zach staggered, too, and struggled to reload his crossbow. He jerked the lever and fumbled another bolt into place as the scorpion scuttled out into the sandy bowl. Its tail arced four feet over my head, but didn’t look strong enough to support its massive, swollen brown stinger. Its hooked tip hung low over the scorpion’s body and scraped along its back.
Not that it mattered much. Like any other Whisperward kid, I’d trapped a scorpion in a jar with a spider and knew that they hunted primarily with their claws. The scorpion crawled after Zach now, scurrying and staggering past me on too many legs up the sandy slope. Zach fired again, but managed only to impale one of the multitudes of leg joints. More teal blood splattered the ground and my skull felt like it was going to split with the creature’s psychic shriek of pain.
Zach fell back, still shouting his own rage and fear, and grabbed for another bolt, but the scorpion was closing swiftly, huge pincers held wide. I hauled myself to my feet, yanked out my knife and ran after it. I reversed my grip, wrapped both hands around the handle and pretty much fell on the scorpion. My knife point scraped along the thick exoskeleton and then found a crease between plates. The blade punched through and sank in up to the hilt. I hung on and braced myself for the psychic scream.
It was even worse than I feared. I screamed, too. Blood ran from my nose and left red spots on the mutant’s mottled hide. The scorpion bucked and hurled me back onto my ass. Its multiple legs stamped furiously and I scrambled back, just trying not to be trampled. The tail flexed and the stinger swung. It didn’t move very well, but if I got struck, even accidentally, I doubted that it would matter how poisonous it was — that stinger was longer than my knife.
The scorpion whirled on me, awkward but far too fast, and spread its twisted pincers. Either one could have snipped my head from my body like a Gardener pruning the sacred flowers. Zach put another arrow into the scorpion’s side and it hissed, the first audible sound it had made the entire time. The scorpion spun toward him again and I hacked at the tail. At its thinnest point, just where the tail met the bloated stinger, it was only as thick as my wrist. My knife cleaved through and the amputated stinger fell onto the scorpion’s back, then rolled away. The truncated tail thrashed wildly, spraying blue blood into the air.
I leapt away, but Zach had to put two more bolts through the scorpion’s wildly rolling black eyes before it fell into the dust. Zach and I ran until we could no longer feel the dreameater’s alien, dying pain in our minds. I sat in the sand, holding my head and trying in vain not to puke until the hissing finally fell silent.
I wouldn’t have gone back at all, but Zach pointed out that he had only a single bolt left.
“I need to recover the other ones,” he said. “You can stay here.”
“Like hell,” I panted. “Help me stand up.”
Zach did, but we waited ten minutes after the last twitch before going anywhere near the dead mutant scorpion. I kept Zach’s crossbow aimed at its head while he jerked his bolts free from the thick carapace.
“Think we could… eat it?” I asked.
Zach shook his head violently. “No way. It was a fucking dreameater. You… heard it. This is exactly why we kill them!”
I nodded wearily. I didn’t want to eat the scorpion, either, but I worried about my partner. The Whitefingers didn’t hunt or kill their dreameaters like we did, like Zach had spent his whole life doing. If we ever found them and managed to convince Jacks to take us in, Zach was going to have a hard time adjusting.
