Whisperworld
Chapter 16
Zach and I trudged back to the Whitefingers’ old den. Along the way, we checked the pits we had dug that morning. Eight of them had scorpions inside. One had a ridge of weird blue spines down its flanks. This one, Zach crushed beneath his boot.
But we pinned down the other seven, cut off their stingers and pincers, then threaded them onto a bolt like a kebab. Neither of us felt good about eating the scorpions and not just because we lacked fire to cook them. I shuddered as they twitched slowly on the arrow shaft and tried not to think about their big brother. But by the next morning, we were both too hungry to object and ate the scorpions in quick, crunching bites.
We both felt a little better for the food, but we still had no water. And there wasn’t much of the coppery blue-green scorpion blood. It was getting hard to swallow and my eyes seemed to be shriveling in their sockets. I began trying to convince my stomach to take another drink of lizard blood… if we could find a lizard.
Zach and I agreed that we had to search further out and that meant leaving the basement hiding hole behind. We couldn’t live on scorpions and sand. The Whitefingers were still our only hope of survival.
So we resumed the search. I was looking for anything drinkable as much as for the Whitefingers, but there was no sign of either. There wasn’t much out here at all. Centuries of storms had scoured away what little survived God’s Wrath. Only a few megalithic structures remained — superbuildings like the Greenguard base and the Gardeners’ headquarters — so Zach and I made for them. The empty husks were just that, empty of anything but long-broken furniture and dust, but one of them still had a final gift to give.
It was noon and the sun’s merciless white glare was directly overhead. I could feel it through Zach’s hat, hot and itchy. Zach wasn’t sweating anymore — which meant he didn’t smell as bad as I did — but I didn’t think that was a good sign. He had to be getting badly dehydrated.
When I spotted the little smear of green, I thought it was another mirage. But Zach saw it, too. In the lee of a slick white wall, we found the grey-green spot in the dust. When we scraped the sand away, I discovered an oblong tuber of some kind. I didn’t know if it was fungus or a cactus, but when I cut off the tip, a milky green fluid oozed out. It was wet and that was all I cared about.
We found a few more of the things and Zach swallowed a single small mouthful before we squeezed the strange juice out into our empty canteen. The stuff was as sour as barrel cactus and too thick to satisfy thirst very well, but it was cool and it was liquid. I felt my body begin forgiving me for the abuses I had heaped on it over the last week.
We dug through the surrounding sand some more, but seemed to have exhausted the patch of mysterious plants, so we finally gave up the hunt and moved on. We had one canteen half full of sour juice and were still thirsty. I took a drink and passed it back to Zach. He made a face as he swallowed and I suddenly laughed aloud.
“What?” he asked.
I imitated his expression and Zach burst into loud laughter too, which only made me laugh harder. I had never been prone to giggling fits, even as a little girl, and it had been a long time since my last attack of them. I was dimly aware that this was weird, but the way that the horizon kept swirling and the ground wouldn’t be still was just so funny. But Zach was giggling and that was even stranger.
“Zee, wait,” I gasped. “Something’s wrong. You’re not funny.”
“No,” he agreed. “I’m really serious.”
It was hilarious. We laughed so hard that we would have cried if we could.
I was starting to have trouble placing one foot in front of the other. The ground moved up and down like water sloshing in a bucket. When the wind stirred the sand, the earth and sky blurred together.
I tried walking and fell down. I sort of remember getting back to my feet. A feeling of dread crept over me. What if I lost Zach again? We were still going to die out here, probably, but dying alongside my partner seemed okay. I just didn’t want to be alone.
I didn’t remember falling again, but I was on the ground. I squirmed in the sand, desperate to find Zach. I tried to call for him, but I couldn’t find my voice. I found Kiyu instead. She walked toward me out of the distance. Everything beyond arm’s length had become as watery and indistinct as heat shimmer, but she was clear. I reached for her and missed. I crawled forward and tried again, but like a mirage, Kiyu remained just out of reach no matter how I chased after her. Didn’t Kiyu know how much I needed to find her? She was so close…
“Zee!” I tried to scream. “Help me!”
Wildly, I looked around for him, afraid that I had lost him before Kiyu found us, but Zach was only a few feet away. He knelt, his large hands cupped in front of him and full of a dancing red glow. He made the sign of the teardrop and the flame-colored light left an afterimage like a Halo in the air, a glowing red teardrop suspended before him.
I wanted to reach out to Zach, to feel him real and right there beside me. I didn’t want to lose him, but I was frightened of the burning, bloody red tear he had made out of light.
So I turned away, squeezing my eyes shut. When I opened them again, I lay on my back, staring up at the sky. But there was something wrong with it. The sky wasn’t white anymore. It was bright and blue, like in the mural on the stairs into the Tear of God. There were patches of more familiar white, but they were fluffy like balls of thistledown.
Something moved against the blue. I squinted. The sun was so bright, but a small, flickering shadow fluttered closer, carried on a breeze as cool and crisp as ay-see against my cheek. Was it a flower? It only had four petals, but they were so beautiful, striped with orange and black and dotted in white.
It wasn’t a flower at all I saw as it fluttered by, but something else. Those weren’t petals — they were wings. Some kind of insect?
I reached out and grabbed the flutter-by thing and the bright wings tickled my fingers. The bug farms of the Whisperward bred ants and crickets, termites and sand-hoppers. Nothing this beautiful or delicate. But when I opened my hand, I threw the thing inside onto the ground in revulsion. It wasn’t colorful anymore. The wings were shriveled and white, the body a dull gray. The flutterby bug wobbled across the cracked earth on twisted, deformed legs, antennae waving blindly.
I yanked off my boot and held it over the crawling little mutant, but I stopped myself before smashing it. The blind white thing was so helpless, defenseless. Carefully, I picked it up again, wondering stupidly if I could fix the tiny creature somehow. It wasn’t supposed to be sick like this…
Something grabbed me roughly by the sleeve and jerked me upright. Desperately, I grabbed for the flutterby, but my hands were only full of sand. There was nothing on the ground and the sky was white once more.
“We have to keep going,” Zach said in a rough, rasping voice. He pulled on my arm.
“There was a flutterby,” I tried to tell him. “I have to find it…”
Zach gave me another hard yank and we staggered on. The sand burned my bootless foot with every other step, but we broke into a trot as we tried to outrun the strange visions.
“Look,” Zach said.
I saw square shapes in the ground like drawings. When we got closer, I could see they were the edges of old foundations. How big had Angel City been before the Wrath? Zach found the crumbling remains of a wall high enough to lean against. He steadied himself and then vomited spectacularly onto the concrete. I watched in uncomprehending interest for a moment before a sympathetic wave began in my own belly. And then I was on my hands and knees, spewing sour green juice into the dust.
When I could lift my head again, it was close to sunset. How much time had we lost? But I felt a little better. Edges tended to blur and double at times, but the world seemed somewhat steadier beneath my feet.
“Zee?” I called out.
I found Zach walking unsteadily a few yards away. He stared intently down at the earth.
“Zach? Are you okay?” I asked.
“We’ve got to find their hiding place.”
I nodded. “Thirsty. Where’s the juice?”
“I poured it out,” he said. “It was bad. Weird dreams.”
I frowned at the loss, but Zach was right. Whatever was wrong with us, it was a lot more than just dehydrated delirium and the green juice was probably to blame.
We made agonizingly slow progress through the fading dayglow, searching the ground for more disguised tunnels or openings into long-forgotten basements. White flashes at the corner of my vision kept trying to distract me, but I kept reminding myself that the flutterby had been a hallucination. Unless I wanted that pale and twisted little thing to be my final thought, we had to find the Whitefingers.
Zach and I stared too long at every bump and dip in the ruins for potential Whitefinger hideouts. Finally, I managed to grunt his name through dry lips and pointed to a dark crevice. Zach approached slowly, wobbling on unsteady feet. I toed sand into the crack and it vanished into an open space below.
“I found something,” I said.
And then the earth gave way beneath me and I plunged down into empty blackness. I grabbed for the edge and my fingers closed on old concrete that crumbled as though rotten. Zach threw himself to the ground and grabbed the back of my jacket. The cloth cinched up painfully under my arms, but didn’t tear. For a moment, I stopped falling.
“Julia, hold on–” Zach began as he pulled on the back of my fatigues.
The ancient concrete shattered beneath him and we fell together into darkness.
By the time I could make sense of the world again, the sky was black. Not even a wisp of moonglow. It was like looking down into a hole instead of lying at the bottom of one, but the ground under me was reassuringly solid. I felt around until I found Zach sprawled nearby. I gave him a gentle shake.
“Zee?”
Zach didn’t move and I shook him harder until he gave a pained but very living groan. Carefully, I removed his goggles and pulled them down over my eyes. The night lenses flickered a few times and I worried that we had broken them in the fall, but the people of the old world manufactured some tough shit before God killed them all. The hole lit up in green and black.
We were in another basement or buried room. Except for the rocks and concrete that had tumbled down with us, it was empty. Wherever my boot was, it was too far away to have fallen in. The ceiling was about twenty feet above us, though, which meant that even standing on Zach’s broad shoulders, there was no way for me to reach the surface again.
Zach made another sound, this one louder. “Shit.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I… hurt,” he gasped. “I think I landed on the crossbow. Something’s wrong with my back. My arm’s worse.”
I looked Zach over with the night lenses and helped pull the crossbow out from under him. I sucked in a breath when I saw his arm. Bolts had tumbled from the quiver as he fell and Zach had the bad luck to land on one. It impaled the thick muscle of his arm. Blood welled up around the shaft.
“Hold still,” I told him. “You’ve got an arrow in you.”
“Shot?”
“No. You fell on it, dumb-ass. But I don’t think I can pull it out yet. You’ll bleed too much. We’ve got nothing to stop an infection, either.”
Zach nodded grimly. “What else did we lose?”
“Don’t worry, I still have your hat.”
I placed it gently on Zach’s head and he chuckled. The laughter died a second later, though, as Zach gave his pockets a panicked pat. But then his expression turned into one of relief and he sagged back into the rubble.
“What?” I asked.
Zach touched the empty canteens and then his sheathed knife.
“Just making sure we have everything,” he said.
I frowned. That wasn’t true. He stopped his frantic searching at his pocket, not his belt. But he didn’t want me to know what he kept there. Some frilly, romantic keepsake? Could Zachary Dias have a girl back in Angel City?
“Can we get out of here?” he asked.
I passed the goggles back so he could have a look for himself. I couldn’t see his face clearly in the dark, but I could still read the set of his shoulders and tilt of his head. He didn’t see any means of escape that I hadn’t. Damn.
“We need help,” Zach said.
I saw him touch his pocket again. Did the big religious bastard keep a holy relic in there or something? If he did, no wonder Zach didn’t want to tell me. I would have mocked him incessantly.
It wasn’t unheard of for people to take stones from the base of the Tear and swear that they brought good luck. I wondered if anyone felt that way about the shards of glass from Byron’s greenhouse… I frowned into the darkness. Byron’s greenhouse. There was a question there, but my head hurt too much to chase it down and there were more pressing concerns. Like not dying.
If Zach carried some holy charm in his pocket, I didn’t think it was going to do much good. God probably wouldn’t lift a finger to help the Gardeners, let alone a smart-ass blasphemer like me. What we needed were the Whitefingers. They were out there somewhere. They knew how to survive in the wastes and they could help us do the same.
I felt my own pockets until I found the piece of lace. Kiyu had left it for a reason. She wanted us to find her, didn’t she?
“I know what to do,” I said suddenly. “I can call for help.”
“No one can hear us down here. We’re days away from the city,” Zach pointed out. “And the Whitefingers obviously aren’t nearby.”
“Not with my voice, Zee. But yins can hear me with their minds, right?”
“You’re… going to call for a dreameater?”
There was a knife-edge of fear in his voice and a shiver ran down my spine, too. What if something did hear me, something like that scorpion? We were weak and injured. I took Zach’s big, rough hand in mine and squeezed it. If some dreameater mutant came looking for an easy meal, we would fight it off together as best we could.
I wrapped the lace around my other hand and closed my eyes. And maybe, just maybe, Kiyu would come.
