Whisperworld
Chapter 2
Sunset’s gold and orange had turned into deep red and purple by the time we made it through the crowded streets of Angel City to the Greenguard base. Zach had hung his hat down his back by the cord and he pulled his bandana off again to breathe in the cooling night air. Just a few more minutes, then we could make our report and finally be on our way home.
Even at this hour, Men and women in pale linen worked busily along the road outside the Greenguard base, carefully raking the gravel streets smooth. They swept the patched sidewalks clean of the day’s dust and sand, keeping the roads of the Whisperward clear and passable. Blackthumbs — like me and Zach — returned to the base after a day out in the city, passing other Greenguard on their way to the city walls or streets to make their evening rounds.
I followed Zach along a chain-link fence topped in spiraling razor wire that wrapped around the base to an open gate. On the other side, we headed toward the nearest building. The Greenguard base was a blocky complex of steel and concrete, sturdy and better built than almost anything else in Angel City. The centuries since God’s Wrath had hardly touched the building at all. The base’s huge gray bulk reared up over the Whisperward, dwarfed only by the Stormsphere itself; a stern knight kneeling at the foot of his great obsidian queen.
We made our way through two sets of reinforced metal doors and it was even cooler inside. The base was one of the few places in Angel City that still had power. Bright blue-white lights glowed in the ceiling without coal or oil, and there was a cold breeze inside created by something the Gardeners called ay-see.
As a child, I had demanded explanations from the Sunday school teacher. He told me that AC were letters, not words, though he claimed not to know what they stood for. I decided on my own that they meant air-cooling. It seemed accurate.
Yeah, that’s the sort of kid I was. And, if I was honest with myself, the kind of woman I am now. I ask a lot of questions. I don’t let up until I have answers and I’m not particularly polite about getting them.
I used to think that was why the Gardeners made me a Blackthumb. They say that anyone can learn any trade, if you can just find a master willing to teach you. But parents tend to apprentice their own children or close relatives. Gardeners were the sons and daughters of other Gardeners. Most Blackthumbs were the sons and daughters of older Blackthumbs, and so on.
But I ask questions and I’m good at finding the answers. So when I was offered an apprenticeship under a real Greenguard, I felt sure that I knew why. But now I was starting to think that the Gardeners preferred their Blackthumbs a little bit dimmer, a little more obedient than me. A little more like robots.
I’ve never been able to shut my mouth, though. Maybe the Gardeners figured that they should keep me close, where I would enforce their laws instead of break them. I wondered if the Gardeners ever regretted that decision. I sure as hell did.
Most of the Greenguard base was built down underground, with the floors above the surface taken up by our lockers and ready rooms. There was also an extensive armory, and a smithy where the crossbows were cared for, where new arrowheads were poured and honed to deadly gleaming points.
Zach and I exchanged greetings with a few other Blackthumbs, but being born outside the Greenguard, neither of us were particularly popular. We were smarter than the rest of the Blackthumbs, too, and Zach could outfight any of them.
Hey, that’s only my opinion. I’m entitled to one.
It was just my luck that one of the Greenguard who did like us caught up before we could report in with the watch commander.
“Hey, Reed, Dias! Wait up,” Woods called.
I’m Reed. Julia Reed. Zach’s last name was Dias.
Woods was twenty-one and had been a Blackthumb for just a few years. The only things he had going for him were a Greenguard mother and a Gardener father of middling rank. Woods liked me, though that seemed to be based more on the fit of my fatigues than out of any genuine interest in my sparkling personality or obvious brilliance.
We paused in the hallway under one of the rectangular lights. The glare was harsh. There was a buzzing sound and an occasional flicker from the tubes. Even in the base, the old things didn’t last forever.
“Gardener Gregory wants to see you both right away,” Woods said. “He’s been asking for you all afternoon.”
“It was just birth control,” I told him. “We got it sorted. Nothing for Gregory to get cracked over.”
“We’d better go see him, Julia,” said Zach.
I glared. Traitor. But I shrugged and we moved on, turning right at the intersection of hallways instead of left toward the watch commander’s station. Woods trotted after us.
“Hey, Reed?”
I looked back over my shoulder but kept walking. Briskly.
“What?” I asked.
“I’ve got an apple. I was wondering if you wanted to share it with me tonight?”
Damn. I had never eaten an apple before. Angel City had only two apple trees and barter for their fruit was steep. There weren’t many besides the Gardeners who had ever tasted an apple. Trust Woods to be able to get his grabby little hands on one.
I was tempted to take him up on the offer, at least long enough to eat half an apple before backing out of whatever else he had in mind. But I wasn’t sure I could endure Woods’ company that long.
“Sorry, Woods,” I said. “Gregory needs to see us right away, remember? Got to go!”
I picked up my pace and Zach lengthened his stride to keep up.
“Why doesn’t he get that he’s not my type?” I complained when we had put some distance between Woods and ourselves.
“No guys are your type,” Zach pointed out with a smile.
I silently took back the traitor thing. Zach understood me. If I liked men that way, I’d like Zach.
“At least I have this stupid meeting with Gregory as an excuse,” I said.
“The meeting isn’t stupid, Julia,” Zach chided me. “You don’t even know what it’s about. It could be important.”
Shit, I’d gotten on his bad side again. Zach was a nice guy and a great Blackthumb. The only way that Woods would ever have a true black thumb was if he smashed it with a brick. Which seemed likely… But Zach was the real thing, an actual badass. His parents had been well diggers, so an apprenticeship with the Greenguard was a dream come true.
But Zach had worked his ass off for it. When the kids in his neighborhood were playing handball for fun, he played to train. He couldn’t convince a Greenguard to teach him how to shoot, so he practiced throwing rocks until his aim was good. Zach learned to win fights by getting into them. In the end, the Blackthumbs didn’t have much choice but to apprentice him.
Zach was the best of the Greenguard. You may have picked up my thoughts on that. But he took the job way too seriously.
“Zee, you know Gregory just repeats whatever Thorn tells him,” I said before I could stop myself. “He’s as empty as an old saguaro boot.”
“Gregory is a Gardener, Julia,” Zach said. He had his stern face back on. “Chosen by God to tend the garden in His absence. They care for the Tears of God that protect the Whisperwards. Even if Gregory is only an extension of High Gardener Thorn, you should have respect. Thorn is a great man.”
One of these days, I would doubt the Gardeners or God a little too much and Zach was going to play handball with my head. Would that be today?
“You know that the Stormspheres can’t actually be God’s tears, right?” I said. “It’s only a nickname, like when people call us Blackthumbs. The Stormspheres were built with old science. They must have been.”
“God works in mysterious ways.”
I wasn’t really trying to shake Zach’s faith in God, though I wasn’t His biggest fan. Were we supposed to be grateful that after destroying the entire world, He cried a few tears that fell to Earth to protect us few survivors? If He wanted to protect us, then why destroy everything in the first place? Yeah, the hubris of man and all that. I remembered my Sunday school lessons at the Gardeners’ feet.
It was just a fun challenge to try to poke at Zach’s rock-solid conviction. Fun like punching a twenty-ton slab of concrete, maybe, but still fun.
Challenge accepted. I guess I’m a glutton for punishment.
But Zach was right about one thing. High Gardener Thorn was a great man, or at least a powerful one. He pretty much ran Angel City single-handedly. The Gardeners in charge of the greenhouses, the schools, the Greenguard and every other aspect of Whisperward life were hand-picked by Thorn. They were all like Gregory, chosen for their obedience more than their wits.
Some said — and for all his reverence, at least Zach wasn’t one of them — that the Thorn family name meant he was anointed by God Himself to rule. Thorn, Gardener, get it? More skeptical people tended to believe that the Thorn family simply named itself after their high position among the Gardeners.
I had my own theory: I thought his name was Thorn because he’s a giant prick.
But I let Zach win the argument this time and we walked on in silence. We took the north stairwell down a couple of floors, but to get into the deepest levels, we had to cross the hangar and use the east stairs.
There were only a few lights in the hangar, casting pale columns of radiance in the close, menacing gloom. Zach and I walked cautiously along the clear path down the middle. Our footsteps echoed on the hard concrete floor, resounding unevenly as they bounced off the hangar’s contents.
Robots loomed tall and still in silent ranks, filling the darkness with the burnt scent of ozone and standing at mute attention between massive gray supports. Dim light glinted off metal bodies, illuminating angled limbs and chassis and the muzzles of strange weapons that looked nothing like my crossbow.
The Gardeners said that at any moment, all of the ancient robots could be activated and ordered into action. They reminded the people of the Whisperwards that they were protected… and that the Gardeners held that power. Only Gregory and Thorn had the codes to activate the mysterious mechanical warriors.
I had seen a robot in action once. It was eleven years ago, when I was fifteen. Just before I apprenticed as a Blackthumb. A particularly nasty storm had driven every mutant out of the Pacific Desert and up against the city walls. The Stormsphere projected the vast invisible barrier that shielded all of Angel City from billowing, boiling clouds of scouring sands, but it couldn’t keep a hundred ravenous three-foot-long locusts from jumping over the walls. The Greenguard were fighting them off, but they were dying, too, and the mutants threatened to swarm the city.
Then this robot comes marching out of the base. I remember thinking that it was like a storm itself, an angel of thunder and lightning. It cleared the street in a few seconds and strode through the gates, fighting against the backdrop of sand and lightning. I was one of the rebellious kids who climbed up onto the wall to watch. Bright light and fire had streaked out from the robot and chopped mutant bugs in half, or just burned them down to ash. The locusts went wild, swarming all over the robot, but none of them could do any damage before being blown to pieces.
I had cheered along with the Blackthumbs on the wall as the robot exterminated the mutants. It was all over in less than five minutes. With its job done, the robot turned around and began marching back through the sand and charred corpses. But then it shuddered and stopped. It started up again a few seconds later, but ground to a halt almost as quickly. All of its shiny metal limbs drooped and the lights went out, one by one.
And it just sat there. After the storm passed, a dozen Greenguard hauled it back through the gates. The robot disappeared into the base once more.
Maybe that particular robot was even still down here somewhere, one of these silent sentinels. I doubted the Gardeners’ claim that they all worked, though. We had a lot of bits left over from the world before the Wrath, but the ones that used power only had so much. When it was gone, it was gone. We didn’t know how to give them more. And if the robots or anything else broke, we were shit out of luck then, too.
So the Gardeners never handed out any tool that wasn’t urgently needed. Even our uniforms. They’re tough and strong — like the Greenguard themselves, in theory — but there are only so many to go around. It would have been nice to dress everyone in resilient carbon microfiber, but we couldn’t. There were more than twenty thousand people in Angel City — with more arriving every day — and never enough for everyone. Not robots or clothes or apples.
Gardener Gregory was all worked up by the time we reached his office. He paced behind his desk, nervously smoothing his hands down the front of his black robes. Some Gardeners exchanged the robes of their order for the fatigues worn by the rest of the Greenguard. Gregory’s predecessor, Sidra, had been one of those — a real Blackthumb. Gregory looked the part, to be sure, with a prominent nose, strong chin and thick brown hair silvering impressively at the temples. But the head of the Greenguard constantly undermined himself with a dozen nervous habits and a tendency to quote Thorn in every conversation.
“There you are!” Gregory said when we walked into his office. “Where have you been all day?”
He ran his hands over his robes again and I barely stifled the urge to shout at him that it was fine, that his clothes were, in fact, still there. Gregory sat down at his desk, a huge block of actual wood covered in curling sheaves of pale green and brown paper. Behind him stood a row of metal filing cabinets and an immense, hand-drawn map of the Whisperward. Gregory steepled his fingers and cleared his throat.
“It was just routine birth control,” I started.
Gregory cut me off with a perfunctory wave of his hand. Did he already know that we hadn’t staked the Garza baby out for the storms? How?
“This has nothing to do with your regular duties,” Gregory said. “I have a special assignment for you two. This comes down from Thorn himself.”
Big surprise. Our boss tapped his fingertips together.
“Something happened last night,” he said.
“What is it, sir?” Zach asked, all respect.
Now seemed like as terrible a time as any to trade out my worries that Gregory had somehow found out about the Garzas — or the vain hope that Zach could bring himself to lie to a Gardener about it if asked — for some brand new anxiety. Gregory might only be good for repeating Thorn, but the High Gardener was smart.
“Thorn wants to speak to you himself. He asked for my best,” Gregory said. He brushed at the front of his robes again and must have seen the utter shock on my face because he elaborated. “That is, those Greenguard best suited to… hmm… complex and curious issues.”
The implications were pretty clear. I was hardly a model Blackthumb, but even Gregory couldn’t deny that when it came down to piecing together information, Zach and I were the best. I liked to think that we were the best at running down criminals and killing mutants, too.
Well, Zach was good at those things, but we’re a team, right? I deserved some of the credit.
“You’re to report to the Houses at once,” Gregory ordered. “The High Gardener will explain what he needs from you.”
“What? Now?” I blurted. “We just got back!”
“I’m aware of that, Reed, but this task is of the highest priority. It comes from Thorn himself,” Gregory reminded me, in case I had missed this all-important point the first time.
“That’s bugshit!” I said, glaring at my commander. “We’ve been climbing up and down the city all day. If you really think we’re going to go running off to the Houses just because–”
“Yes, sir,” Zach interrupted. “We’re on our way.”
He grabbed my shoulder and hauled me out of Gregory’s office before I could stick my other boot in my mouth, too.
