Whisperworld
Chapter 23
Kiyu didn’t take me back to my cell or even to the cave where I had stayed before the attack. Instead, she led me up the opposite wall of the fissure and held aside a curtain that looked new.
She didn’t have to tell me that it was her own home. I knew. The cave was smaller than Diego’s spacious cavern, though still much larger than my loaner or cell. There were a few cushions and a low table, but what caught my eye and made Kiyu’s influence unmistakable were the shelves and niches carved into the walls. Every one of them was full of pieces of glass, colored stones, cloth, bits of sand-scoured wood, painted scraps of precious paper and even toys.
I drifted over to the shelves. My numb fingers stole out of their own accord, touching plastic and glass and wood and metal. Some of Kiyu’s prizes really were beautiful, but others were shoddy and cheap, remarkable only in that they were shiny or brightly colored. A shield-shape of metal leaned in one corner, painted red at the top and then blue beneath. I couldn’t make out the words, but even through the peeling paint, I saw a large number five printed there in white.
I found the tattered piece of lace that Kiyu and I had exchanged so many times.
“Why… why do you keep all of this?” I asked.
Kiyu let the door curtain fall shut and shook a jar of algae. Even in the aqua light, her blush was dark. “I told you. They’re pretty.”
“Is that all?”
“Is that all?” Kiyu repeated. “Julia, there’s nothing up there but sand and salt. Everything in the world is worn out or broken, but there are still beautiful things all around us. Little things. Unimportant things. But they’re important to me.”
She touched the lace I held. Her fingers brushed mine.
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you care about any of it?”
“There has to be beauty left in the world. Otherwise we have nothing.”
“Kiyu…” I squeezed the lace in my hand, wanting to crush it. Everything inside me felt so broken and ugly. “You told Diego that you wanted to help the Whisperward. The people. Not the mural in the sorting shrine. Not some shiny bit of glass.”
“But I did find something beautiful in your city,” Kiyu said. She closed her fingers over my clenched fist. “It wasn’t a painting or glass, though.”
“What, then?”
Kiyu sighed. “You, stupid. That’s why I left the lace after we took you back to Angel City. I… hoped you’d find me again.”
She stood up on her toes and kissed me gently. Her lips were so soft. I turned away and replaced Kiyu’s lace on its shelf.
“I’m sorry about Zach,” she said, still standing close.
I leaned against the wall, staring down at the little shred of lace. It was rumpled, so I smoothed it out as I looked over the shiny, bright collection again. They were beautiful, and I was unexpectedly glad to know that Kiyu had all these pretty little things. That they were as important to her as answers were to me.
“We all have our own truth,” I said. I couldn’t stop the tears anymore. My best friend was dead. “Zach… Zee wasn’t a bad guy, Kiyu. I knew him. He was a highriser like me. He wanted to help people. He saw what they did to each other in the ‘Ward and he worked so hard to join the Greenguard.”
The lace and shelf full of shinies blurred and tears stung as they rolled down my raw cheeks.
“Zach just needed more time,” I whispered. “He thought you were a monster. He thought you would hurt me. He only wanted to protect me, protect Angel City. That’s all.”
“I believe you,” Kiyu said quietly. “I’m not a powerful yin, but I told you that I could read people when they felt strongly enough. All I ever sensed from Zach was fear and love. He would have done anything for the people who mattered to him.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged them around myself, weeping bitterly for Zach. The sobs shook me so hard that I couldn’t talk anymore. I couldn’t see anything. I just wanted Zach back. Just for a minute to tell him that I understood. I could never agree with what he did, but he only wanted to save me, save the people he loved. I could never hate him for that.
Kiyu’s slender arms wrapped around me and she held me close. I fell against her, crying into her hair. Kiyu stroked my back and didn’t say anything. She held me and kissed my wet cheeks, then my lips. I tasted my own tears on her kiss.
We slept together, though not the way I had wanted to so badly since first seeing Kiyu in Angel City. By the time we made it to her bed — thank God, they actually did have beds in the warren, not just hammocks — I was cried out and exhausted. Kiyu let me hold her and I fell instantly into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Kiyu woke me in the morning with breakfast. Eggs and tea with a slightly different flavor than what we brewed in the cities. Kiyu had poured me a bath so I could clean up after my imprisonment. She gave me some privacy to bathe.
The salty water was cold and still stung my leg, but other than the eerie, wrinkled white corpse-fingers, it felt nice to scrub myself all over. When I was done, Kiyu brought some clothes that were large enough to fit me and clearly not her own. She must have borrowed or bartered them from someone else. There were far fewer people in Lago Warren now, I reflected sadly. Was I wearing a dead woman’s clothes?
There were some woven pants and a loose shirt of plain white cloth. I cinched it around my waist with my Greenguard belt, to which Kiyu had returned my knife. I slipped my feet into my old boots and tied my hair back with a ribbon borrowed from Kiyu. It was damned good to be wearing clean clothes again and I felt a little more capable of dealing with the world today.
Zach’s betrayal and loss was a weight inside my chest, still unfamiliar and prone to knocking me off balance if I bumped up against the wrong memory. But I would learn to live with it. I would remember Zach for the man he was, even if no one else did.
“You look nice,” Kiyu said.
She stood up on her tiptoes to kiss me and I returned her affection eagerly. I was beginning to think that putting clothes on might have been a waste of time when someone called from the cave door.
“Kiyu?”
She pulled away, opened the curtain and waved Jacks inside. His eyes darted to the knife on my hip, but otherwise, he ignored me. Diesel had dragged Jacks clear of the blast and then charged the robot, Kiyu told me the night before. The dog was found only a day later, cut almost in two.
Jacks and I had both lost our best friends in the attack. I wondered if we would ever be able to talk about that.
“The elders will try the communion again at noon,” Jacks said.
“I’ll be ready,” Kiyu said. “I can do this, I promise.”
Jacks nodded unhappily and left. Kiyu asked me to go down to the water and wait for her there. I wasn’t sure I was ready to be on my own yet, but if Kiyu needed some time alone to better prepare herself for the communion, then I wanted her to take all the time she wanted. Enough people had died already and I didn’t want Kiyu to be one of them.
I made my way cautiously down the fissure. At least I couldn’t get lost. All I had to do was take every downward ramp or ladder, though I had to retrace my steps a few times as I found my way barred by broken stone or missing bridges.
I finally discovered an empty ledge overlooking the water and sat, dangling my feet. Some men and women were back at work, pulling up fish and seaweed. Not everyone was dead in Lago Warren and for those who remained, life went on. I saw the mutated man with the crippled arm. He sat patiently with his fishing rod cradled in his good arm, waiting for a bite. It hurt to smile, but I was glad he was alive.
On impulse, I found a rope bridge still intact that led me across the water to his fishing spot. Everyone else was working, trying to keep the warren going. It was the least I could do to help.
“Hi, I’m Julia Reed,” I said.
I offered him my hand. It was trembling. The fisherman shook it with his bent arm and I couldn’t be proud of myself for not flinching. He wasn’t a mutant like the scorpion had been, I reminded myself. He was just a man.
“Joshua,” he introduced himself. “You must be the one from Angel City.”
I nodded. I braced myself for the onslaught of accusations, but Joshua patted the ledge next to him.
“I saw you running after that death machine. You threw a rock at it,” he said. “That was pretty stupid.”
To my surprise, I laughed. The sound was raw and painful, but it was real. Yeah… For a woman who prided herself on her brains, I could be really stupid. As Zach had never hesitated to remind me. And protect me from.
“I was just the distraction,” I said. “It was a crucial part of a very clever plan, you know.”
I waited with Joshua until his line went taut and then helped him pull in the catch. He showed me how to tire the fish out before towing it up. A big fish could easily snap the line.
“If it’s not big enough to break your line, then it’s not worth bringing in,” Joshua told me. “Especially the tuna. We let them get nice and big. A full-grown adult can feed a family for a week.”
When Kiyu came to find me, we had nearly filled up Joshua’s basket, though not with any of the huge tuna he had told me about. Maybe next time.
“It’s time to go, Julia,” Kiyu said.
I thanked Joshua, then followed Kiyu up through the warren to Diego’s cave. The remaining elders were seated in a circle of blue algae light, the rest of the cushions occupied by younger psychics of the warren. I recognized one of the yangs from the robot’s attack.
Kiyu squeezed my hand and then took her place in the circle. Jacks stood protectively over them, the crossbow he had taken from Zach cocked and loaded. The business end drifted toward me a few times and I kept my hands well clear of my knife.
The girl with the engan made her circuit of the volunteers once more and filled a bowl with thick, cloudy juice for each of them. She knelt next to Diego and poured.
“Grandpa, please let me help,” she said quietly, but not so softly that I couldn’t hear the worried note in her voice. “I’m a yin. I can do it.”
But Diego held up a thin hand. “You’re too young, Hannah. And if something else goes wrong, we can’t leave the warren entirely without gifts.”
Hannah bit her lip, but helped Diego raise his bowl. His left hand remained limp in his lap and engan dribbled out of the slack corner of the old man’s mouth. Hannah wiped Diego’s chin with a cloth and eased him back into the cushions.
The others drank, too. Kiyu squeezed her eyes closed as she choked down the sour juice. It was obviously her first time and she wasn’t the only one. A man with violet patches on his skin retched and vomited. Jacks and Hannah carried him out of the circle.
The Whitefingers settled into silence, eyes closed and bodies slowly going limp in the wavering blue light. After a few minutes, their breathing synchronized and then I heard the whispers as Lago Warren reached out and touched minds with the remaining Whitefinger yins across the Pacific Desert. The whispers were quieter this time, barely perceptible at the edge of my mind. I thought I heard Kiyu in the muddle of voices.
I stood in the swirling, watery light, and watched with my heart in my throat. Without Kiyu to tell me what was going on, the whole experience was even stranger and more alien. I picked nervously at my fingernails and felt warm, sticky wetness as I cracked one of my dry cuticles. I was working up the nerve to ask Jacks what was happening when the circle of psychics suddenly moaned in one choral voice.
“So weak,” they said together. It was eerie to see Kiyu’s lips form the words but speaking in that shared voice. What did the communing psychics mean, though? Were they too weak to contact the Stormsphere?
“So many. So weak,” the voices moaned. “Who are you?”
“Help. Help us!”
It was the same voices, those belonging to the thirteen men and women filling Diego’s cave, but the mingled voices were louder now. Something had been added to the group mind, new thoughts joined in communion. Thousands of voices spoke through a dozen mouths.
“What happened?” the circle asked themselves.
“Our journey was… interrupted,” came the answer, hissing and quiet despite a dozen voices. I knelt with my head cocked at Kiyu to catch the words. “The journey of generations. The migration. You traveled in our shadow, followed our path, under our protection.”
So many, they said. Our. There was more than one mind inside the Stormsphere. A hell of a lot more than one.
“But you stopped us. Caught us. Caged us,” murmured more voices than mouths. “The seasons and the generations passed, but the journey could not continue. We’re dying. You’re dying. We can’t protect you anymore. We’re too weak. Release us! Free us!”
“What?” I said. “No! If you leave the city, everyone there is going to die!”
Jacks hissed for me to be quiet, but the strange psychic voices from across the desert were asking us to let them go, to let them abandon Angel City.
The circle was silent. The whispers of their joined minds still hovered at the edge of perception, murmuring. Thinking…? I remembered Thorn’s shouted words, the High Gardener swearing that his people would never return to wandering the desert like beasts. What else had he said?
At the mercy of mutant abominations.
The contents of the Stormsphere still hadn’t identified themselves, but they were obviously dreameaters of some kind. Just like the dreameaters the Greenguard hunted down and killed. For all the lives those in the Stormsphere had saved — even if they no longer could — Thorn didn’t have much reverence for the Tear of God he served. Hypocrite.
Finally, the circle spoke again.
“Free us,” they said. “Let our journey continue. Come to us and we can show you how to live. Hurry… We are dying. Save us, and save yourselves.”
