Whisperworld
Chapter 20
Kiyu returned the next morning with breakfast and some more water. There was needle and thread to mend the long tear in my pants, too. Angelica had informed her of the problem, Kiyu said.
“You didn’t notice before?” I asked.
Kiyu shrugged, but she was smirking as she set out breakfast. It was familiar prickly pears and lizard eggs. The eggs were scrambled and had gone mostly cold, but just eating something that I recognized was a pleasant change of pace. I asked Kiyu where she got this stuff and she rolled her eyes.
“We have scale farms here, too,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
Kiyu told us to bring the buckets if we had used them. Blushing furiously, I grabbed the pail and Kiyu provided a lid. Zach followed suit and then she led us out. Navigating up the ladders was a bit of a challenge while balancing our buckets, especially with my injured leg and Zach’s wounded arm, but Kiyu let us go slowly and offered me her hand at the top. She did the same for Zach, but their size difference made it a token gesture at best.
The upper caverns that we had climbed past the day before were deep and, to my surprise, bright with dayglow. Huge polished metal mirrors had been set at the entrances to reflect sunlight into the caverns. The sun shone from the mirrors and bathed cactus patches in horizontal beams of sunlight. There were saguaro, barrel cacti, agave and prickly pears. A couple of young women took our buckets away to fertilize the sandy soil.
“Come on. I want to show you the water,” Kiyu said.
She grabbed my hand and tugged me back out into the fissure. Kiyu didn’t release my hand until we reached the first ladder, but took it again at the bottom. I think she may have even passed up some ladders and taken a longer route down ramps and across bridges so she wouldn’t have to let go.
I could feel Zach’s eyes on us and my hand went a little clammy in Kiyu’s grip as I remembered his warning. If she wanted to, the pretty yang girl could fling me off the bridge with her mind and send me plummeting to my death. She might not even mean to. It could be an accident, like with Byron.
When we reached a solid and relatively wide path, I looked back at Zach. I had to admit that my partner was an impressive man. He was tall and kept himself in peak physical shape. It was hot down here, and away from the harsh, burning sunlight, Zach’s shirt was unbuttoned to show off a remarkable expanse of tawny muscle. Maybe Zach would find a nice Whitefinger girl to help him adapt to our new lives here. Maybe I could help him out, too. I bet Angelica could tell me about all the eligible girls in the warren.
I was still thinking about Zach’s body. I’m sure it was attractive enough, but that wasn’t the point. My partner was strong, powerful. If it ever came down to a fight between us, my bet would have been on Zach. He was strong and well trained. He could throw me right off a bridge, too. Kiyu’s power may not have relied on what had to be at least a hundred push-ups a day, but was it really that different from Zach’s purely physical strength?
We climbed back down the fissure, past the loaner caves until the light started to dim. Jars of phosphorescent aqua hung from the crisscrossing bridges and from ropes strung over the walkways. The blue glow was strange but beautiful, and I walked close beside Kiyu through the light. There was nothing like this in Angel City.
The air began to change, too. The salt smell we had left behind on the surface of the Pacific Desert returned on damp air, accompanied by a sharp tang. And there were whispers.
Kiyu winced as I squeezed her hand too hard and stumbled to a halt, grabbing the rope railing of the bridge. Zach froze beside me, listening. It was a susurrant murmur like the wind through cloth, but somehow softer and harder at the same time. The sibilant hiss grew rhythmically louder and quieter, ebbing and flowing.
“What’s that?” Zach asked.
“The water,” Kiyu answered. She squeezed my hand gently. “I’ll show you.”
Rocky pathways and swaying bridges spiraled down to the bottom of the fissure. It was lit by more of the aqua algae lights and their reflections on… water. So much water. The entire fissure was like an immense well. Dark water rose and fell in gentle swells, so deep that I could see no sign of the bottom. The stone all around the edges was stained a sparkling white. Salt water.
“What is this?” I breathed.
Zach pulled off his hat and made a teardrop over his heart. “God, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“This is what’s left of the ocean,” Kiyu said. “At the bottoms of trenches like this. All of the water is underground now. It used to cover the entire Pacific Desert. It was the biggest ocean in the world before the meltdown.”
Before the Wrath. But I remembered the vast white expanse above us. It stretched from horizon to horizon. Could that truly all have been water once? I couldn’t even imagine it.
Bridges were strung all across the cave and scaffolds had been added to ledges that extended out over the sunken ocean. Women and men clustered along them, holding long rods tipped with strings dangling down into the water. I saw two of them pulling up one of the lines with a silvery creature hanging from the end. It had no legs, like a snake, but was shorter and wider.
The sounds of children laughing drew my attention. There was a small rocky bowl on one side of the cavern, shallow and filled with water. Children splashed through the pool, laughing and playing. I thought I recognized Angelica.
Kiyu dropped my hand and ran forward as some of the other Whitefingers shouted. One of them — a man with a twisted arm who would have been left for the storm at birth in Angel City — struggled with his taut line. A woman helped him hold the bending rod steady and a shiny water-creature the length of my leg breached the surface, thrashing on the end of the string. To my astonishment, the two Whitefingers wrestling with the pole and line were laughing.
Kiyu leaned out over the edge of a bridge. She gestured and the beast rose up from the water. Its silver body flexed and rippled, but it couldn’t flail out of her mind’s grip. The men with the rods gave a shout as Kiyu floated the beast to the ledge and they fell on it. Deftly, they pinned the scaly animal down, removed a hook from its mouth and wrestled it into a large sack attached to a post by a rope. They dropped the sack into the water and Kiyu waved at them cheerfully.
“What the hell was that thing?” I asked.
“A lingcod,” Kiyu answered. “It’s a kind of fish. Look, I need to help the fishers out down here for a while. We all have work to do. We’ve got new mouths to feed, after all. You should start thinking about your contribution.”
“Can I… stay down here for a while?” I asked. I wasn’t ready to leave this amazing place just yet.
“Yeah,” Kiyu said with a smile. I guess she liked my idea. “Stay out of the way, though.”
Zach and I sat down on a bridge, feet dangling over the edge. The water lapped just a few feet below, but this time I wasn’t scared. This place was too astonishing to be scared.
“What do you think, Zee? What could we do around here?” I asked. “Maybe I’d be good at catching those fish things.”
“They don’t have Greenguard.”
“But they have hunters. And people like Kiyu. Blackthumbs, I think, if not Greenguard,” I said. I glanced back at Kiyu, who perched at the edge of the little piece of ocean. Occasionally, she pulled a fish up out of the water with her mind. “Though I guess they still need to help out with other stuff sometimes.”
“Could you really do this, Julia? Stay here for the rest of your life?” Zach asked.
“All this water? Those fish? I could stay down here forever and never get bored,” I said.
“It’s lonely here. The population here is less than a tenth of the Whisperward. It feels so… small.”
“That’s okay.”
“They don’t have any of our technology. No lights, no Halos or… robots.” Zach trailed off, looking uncomfortable. He pointed surreptitiously to the man with the withered arm. “There are mutants and dreameaters here, too.”
I looked where Zach was pointing. The fisherman limped, too, but was working just as hard as any of the others. And they seemed to treat him no differently.
“It’s not his fault, Zee,” I said. “He can’t help how he was born. Neither can Kiyu. And he’s doing just fine, seems like.”
“I know it’s not his fault.” Zach hesitated. He replaced his hat and turned to look at me. “You hated birth control as much as I did, Julia. But it was for the good of the Whisperward.”
“You let the Garzas off.”
“I know. But a man like that–” Here, Zach nodded to the one-armed fisherman again. “–allowed to live? To breed? What would that be like? And what about his children? How many generations until everyone in the city was like him? He might even be sterile. Some mutants are. What if that happened to an entire generation? Humanity would die out.”
“I’m not too fucking likely to have kids,” I told Zach. “Doesn’t mean I can’t help out, Zee. Maybe I could even take in children like that little Garza girl.”
Zach smiled, though his eyes remained unhappy. “If you could curb that mouth, Julia, you would make a great mother.”
“You bet your ass.”
I couldn’t be bitter. Zach was a good man. As soon as he learned to think of the Whitefingers as his own people, he would be the first to lay down his life for them.
“In any case, we’d better get used to it,” I told him. “We’re never going back to Angel City.”
“Maybe,” Zach sighed, the word nearly lost in the hiss and rush of the water below.
The fishers took a break for lunch. Kiyu brought us food a lot like what we’d eaten on the long trip to Lago Warren — rice and fish meat rolled in a dark green leaf. Kiyu called the leaf seaweed and said it grew underwater. This time, all of the ingredients were fresh and I was getting used to the fish flavor. The meat was much softer than lizard or snake, almost flaky. It was delicious and even Zach didn’t complain about the food.
“Kiyu!”
We looked up to see Jacks and Diesel. The dog trotted out ahead of his master and sniffed us. I scratched him behind the ear and he licked my nose. His breath was terrible. Jacks waved briefly to me and Zach, then pulled Kiyu away to one side. They weren’t speaking particularly softly, but with the constant echoes of the splashing water, I couldn’t make out a word.
“What was that all about?” I asked when Kiyu came back.
“Diego and the elders have been talking with the other warrens. They’re going to attempt to make contact with the Stormsphere directly and commune with whatever is inside.”
“Who’s Diego?” I asked. “Is he your leader or something?”
Kiyu laughed. “No, he’s just one of the elders.”
“Is he a yin?”
She shook her head. “Not all the elders are gifted. They’re just the oldest and wisest people in Lago. Diego has the respect of the other elders. He’s strange, but most of the elders are. Probably because of all the engan they drink. But he’s intelligent and we listen because he’s almost always right. And Diego isn’t above gloating if we ignore his advice.”
“What’s communing?” asked Zach.
“Well, the elders all drink engan and the yins join their minds together,” Kiyu said. “The engan helps them reach out with their thoughts to the other warrens. That’s how they can communicate with one another.”
“Other warrens?” Zach’s eyes widened.
“Sure. You didn’t think Lago was the only one, did you? There are more warrens than Whisperwards. When the elders commune, they can speak to warren councils all across the world and pass along information. That’s how we learned that the other Whisperwards are failing, too.”
“How many of them?” I asked.
“Apple City’s protection is beginning to shrink and Wind City is trying to build a bigger wall to stop the storms.”
That wasn’t going to work. Maybe for a while… but the sandstorms had torn ancient Angel City apart. How long did Wind City think their wall would last?
Zach actually growled in anger. “They need to do something!”
“And that’s why the elders are going to talk to the Stormsphere,” Kiyu said. “All of the most powerful yins in the Pacific will join their minds and reach out to whatever’s inside the Angel City sphere.”
“Then why did they send you out to our Whisperward?” I asked. “The ‘Ward, I guess. It’s not ours anymore… Why steal a key and try to break in if yins could just talk to the Stormsphere?”
“Because it’s really dangerous,” Kiyu said. “That call for help was so powerful that it… affected our yins. Some died from even brief contact. More killed themselves afterward.”
“And that might happen again?” I guessed.
“It could be even worse this time. Elders from dozens of warrens will be communing together. It will make them more powerful, but if something happens, if someone died, the effects could spread through the whole communion.”
“Spread?” I repeated. That didn’t sound good.
“A dozen warrens could all lose their elders. That’s why they’ve never communed on this scale before.” Kiyu helped me to my feet and then motioned for Zach to stand up. “Come on. Diego wants you there during the communion, so we better get moving.”
“Does he want us to… uh… join in?” I asked.
My heartbeat sped. This seemed every inch as bad as any of my mother’s dreameater horror stories. Zach and I fell into step behind Kiyu.
“No, but you were both Greenguard,” she said. “You know Angel City and even saw the Stormsphere up close. Diego just wants you on hand to answer any questions.”
“What about you?” I hoped I didn’t sound too worried about her, but I guess I wasn’t schooling my tone very well. Kiyu smiled and blushed a little as she answered.
“I’m not a strong yin. There are much better ones among the elders,” she said. “But I’ll be there with you.”
Kiyu took my hand and led us up through the blue light.
