Whisperworld
Chapter 5
I was grateful to finally get away from the Whispers. They faded not long after leaving the Houses, and by the time I made it back to my street, they had fallen silent. No, I corrected myself. Just gone, not silent. I remembered Matthew, the Gardener from Bridge City to the north. Their Whispers had gone silent and when they did, the Stormsphere stopped working. Its barrier crumbled and the Whisperward failed.
Storms gathered quickly in the vast deserts year round, and could engulf a Whisperward for days at a time. Winds churned and blew sand hard enough to strip away skin and do lethal damage to an unprotected traveler within hours. Constant lightning strikes melted sand and dirt down into glass, which relentless winds tore apart and added to the deadly shrapnel of the storm. If the lightning didn’t kill you, the glass sand would finish the job. It wasn’t pretty.
But the Tears of God protected us from all of that. I didn’t make a big secret of doubting all the Sunday school stories, but even I couldn’t deny the power of the Stormspheres. About five hundred yards outside the walls of the Whisperward, the sandstorms just hit an invisible wall of force and flowed around it. That invisible wall was projected and maintained by the Stormsphere in the heart of the Whisperward.
From the top of the city wall, you can still see bits of old Angel City outside, worn down to dust and skeletal ruins by centuries of storms. Without the Stormsphere, we’d all be dead. It had happened in Bridge City, and I supposed that was what happened to Sun City, too, since refugees were coming to us from the east. I wondered if some of them were moving north to Boulder City or Wind City, maybe even further east to Apple City… If those far-off Whisperwards weren’t having the same problems that Matthew told Thorn about.
What about Angel City? The storms still seemed to part around us like the mythical Red Sea and nothing more dangerous than dust made it over the walls. We were safe here.
Our apartment building loomed suddenly out of the dark night. Zach and I trudged up the stairs, but stopped at the second floor. This building was mostly Blackthumbs, though there were some homes for well diggers and sweepers up on the highest levels. Zach grunted a weary good night and turned down another coal-lit hallway. I stumbled toward my own door.
A few doors down, a curtain twitched aside and a pale woman poked her head out into the hall.
“Reed, are you only now getting in?” she asked.
“Yeah, Silva. Just got off.”
Diane Silva usually worked nights patrolling the greenhouses, so she was still awake at this ridiculously late hour, even on her day of rest.
“Did someone really murder a Gardener?” she asked.
Rumors must have been flying.
I nodded. “A pair of Blackthumbs, too.”
“Why would anyone kill a Gardener? They care for the flowers,” Silva said. She sketched a teardrop shape over her heart with one finger. “They care for us all. It was a mutant, wasn’t it? Or maybe a Whitefinger?”
“We don’t know yet,” I told her. “But Zach and I will find out.”
I pushed through my curtain and left Silva to go back inside or anywhere else. I was way too tired for her piety.
I stumbled around my apartment until I could light a lamp, then checked the cool box for dinner. There were a couple of grass snakes and barrel cactus fruit, but I didn’t have the energy to cook up the snake. I grabbed a few fruits and ate clumsily while I undressed. When I was done, I placed my crossbow on its wall hook, dropped bonelessly into my bed and tucked the Halo under my pillow for safekeeping. Lumpy, but luckily, I’m a deep sleeper.
I blew out the lamp and pulled the covers over my head. Tomorrow, Zach and I might be sifting through hundreds or thousands of people for a single dreameater — unless there had been more than one. In any case, it was going to be a long day and I wanted a few hours of sleep.
Except that sleep cared what I wanted about as much as a rock did. I lay awake in the darkness, inhaling the scents of dust and old plastic. I needed a candle or some of that expensive flower oil.
Silva’s question kept echoing through my mind. A Whitefinger? It was possible. While Greenguard hunted dreameaters as treacherous abominations in a world already full of dangerous mutants, the Whitefingers welcomed them with open arms. Some said that they even bred psychic animals out there in the wastes.
So our psychic killer could have been a Whitefinger. They occasionally scaled the city walls and prowled into Angel City. The Whitefingers stole food and clothes, sometimes weapons or other supplies, but they rarely hurt anyone. Searching out the wastelanders and catching them was a Greenguard’s job. It was a damned sight better than birth control duty, and Zach and I were both good at it. Whitefingers fought like scorpions when cornered, but they were more thieves than murderers.
Which amounted to the same thing, I supposed, with supplies stretched so thin. Still…
That key Martin had refused to tell us about was gone. Maybe theft was the motive for Byron’s murder. Or was there some strange dreameater reason? Did they read something in Byron’s thoughts? Or was there something in his head that they wanted to find?
What about the flowers…? Martin seemed to dismiss Byron’s breeding program as a potential motive, though, and not even my overactive imagination could manage anything that made sense. The Gardeners tended greenhouses full of trees and flowers, but most of the citizens of the Whisperward lived on cactus, crickmeal and lizards. I could hardly see even a Whitefinger killing Byron over some new flower breed.
What if someone wanted access to the Houses and the orchards inside? I remembered Woods and his damned apple. Despite my dinner, my mouth watered. I’d never eaten an apple and I would seriously consider killing to taste one. Or at least consider killing Woods. What would a Whitefinger born and raised in the Pacific Desert be willing to do?
So did the stolen key open the greenhouses? I thought back to the evening’s investigation. I didn’t recall any locks on the greenhouse doors, but I resolved to check next time. Still, the walls there were only glass and our dreameater — potentially a Whitefinger one — had made spectacularly short work of them. What did he need a key for? Maybe he wanted to keep the greenhouses intact? Zach had guessed that the destruction was accidental, after all.
I wished that Zach would let me grill Martin a little more. But he just didn’t share my skepticism of the Gardeners. Zach was grateful for his job and strove every day to prove himself worthy of the uniform.
But Zach didn’t blindly obey the Gardeners’ every order — I needed only remember the Garza girl to know that. He really did care about the Whisperward and its people. My partner did a good job and was suitably rewarded. It seemed like a fair enough deal. So why did I always feel like I was being punished instead of blessed?
I finally dropped off to sleep with the sky already beginning to pale outside. I dreamed of the Whispers, but even in my dreams, they told me nothing.
