Call Forth the Waves Page 13

  “Where was it?” I asked, wondering if he’d been inside the Ground Center with Wren when my father’s traveling coat took me there. If he’d been there and I left him . . .

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “They never let me see a window,” he said. “I heard them talking about you, and I heard the screams, but I didn’t know if they were yours.”

  “No one was screaming at the Center, Jermay. Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

  “Maybe—they kept us moving, and we were all pretty out of it. Drugged, I think. Then they separated us. I was in pain, and then I was in the dark, with the clock. But every once in a while, the ticking would stop and I’d hear the warden’s voice like a PA system making announcements or something. I can’t even remember what he said, but his voice was almost nice, and for a split second on either side of his words, I’d hear the engines.”

  “The prison level sat right on top of them,” I said. When Greyor took me into the maze of cells to find my sisters, we’d taken an elevator down and down and down to the lowest habitable levels.

  “This whole place sounds exactly like it. I can’t stay here. I keep expecting to hear that voice or the clock or—we should leave. You and me.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m serious. We can take Xerxes and leave Bijou for the others.”

  The missing spark in his eyes made a brief appearance, flashing in the dark like an icy flint that couldn’t catch fire.

  “You’re exhausted. You need to sleep, and then—”

  “I can’t! Not with them here. Not with him! I don’t trust him. Look at him. He’s a wreck.” He stared at Birch’s cocoon.

  “No worse than me or you.”

  “Exactly. I was in that cell for a month, and I can’t close my eyes for two seconds without seeing apparitions of the warden or hearing his voice. You see the difference in Winnie after being held prisoner. Birdie almost faded away for good. Anise and Klok nearly died in there! What do you think a life lived in that nightmare does to someone?”

  “All he wanted was a way out of Commission custody.”

  “Then why didn’t they need a collar to keep him there?”

  “I wasn’t wearing one, either. Does that mean you don’t trust me?”

  “Stop twisting things! You don’t understand what it was like!”

  “I was there!”

  “You were playing dress-up in a dollhouse! That voice . . . it’s . . . it’s in my blood. It’s in my bones. It crawls up under my skin and makes me think the words it says are my own thoughts. I don’t trust him. Especially not after what the shadow-woman said to me while I was out.”

  “Nafiza spoke to you? What did she say?”

  “She ambushed me. Random gibberish mostly, but I understood enough to know she was trying to warn me. Betrayal. Lies. These are not good words, Penn.”

  He was serious.

  This wasn’t my Jermay, quick with a trick and quick with a joke. This was some scared, wild thing wearing his face.

  “We need to leave. We need to go now. Go by yourself if you don’t want it to look like we ran away together. Just get away from here and him before something bad happens.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen. We’re miles off the ground, and no one knows we’re here. No one knows this place is here. I know it’s hard to accept, but we’re safe. I’ve got my father’s notes and his computer. They might tell us where to go. Nafiza scares everyone; she doesn’t mean anything by it. I don’t want to run anymore. Go to sleep. Tomorrow we’ll talk to Anise and decide what to do.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah, you’re probably right. My head’s just a mess, you know?”

  I thought I did. One conversation with Nafiza was enough to turn reality on its head, and that wasn’t an easy feat to accomplish with people who had grown up inside a circus. We were used to knowing all the tricks and double-checking the safeties before attempting them; being in the dark felt wrong and uncomfortable.

  I settled in beside Jermay, laying my head against his shoulder so I could hear the steady beat of his heart beneath his collarbone. His arms closed around me to let me know it was okay to stay put.

  This is now, I told myself. This is real. Whatever had happened before didn’t matter anymore, because we could keep running from it, the same way my father had. Jermay and I were as constant as a heartbeat and just as infallible. No prophecy could change that.

  CHAPTER 12

  I heard a crash, and then a scream.

  I shot off the floor, disoriented enough to wonder why I was sleeping on a pallet instead of in a bed. Sleep had rearranged my perception of the room, but I’d weathered enough catastrophes in the last few weeks for those kinds of details not to matter. Things were crashing. People were screaming. We were in danger, and I didn’t know where anyone was.

  Thoughts of Evie were still fresh in my mind, the final imprint of a dream I’d already forgotten. Fire lit along my nerves, blazing down my arms until it manifested on my hands. There was no real tactical advantage to setting myself on fire, but the sight could startle someone long enough for an escape or a preemptive strike.

  One of many things I wished I didn’t know, but that was the world I’d been forced into.

  Flame was ready to fly, but my phoenix needed directions from me. I had none to give; the room was empty. It wasn’t even the room I was expecting. This wasn’t the Hollow. This wasn’t my nursery. I was in my father’s room inside the house belonging to Winnie’s Baba. I was on the Golden Mile.

  “Whoa!” Jermay said. He moved toward me from the door with his hands up as though he thought I was attacking him. “Penn, what are you doing?”

  “I heard shouting. It wasn’t a dream this time. I really heard it.”

  It came again, shrill and loud enough to pass through the closed windows from outside. All of the voices were children. There were children shrieking, and Jermay was just standing there, acting like I was the one not making sense. The fire in my hands turned from orange to hotter blue.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “Back it down and look out the window.”

  Birdie was running up and down the street at full speed, holding a younger girl by the hand. Dev was right behind them, dragging a little boy along.

  “They’re playing,” I said in amazement. Another dozen or so had paired off into teams for a mock melee. One of them got tackled, and I heard the shrieks again.

  “Yeah,” Jermay said. “That’s all it was. Kids playing. I think it’s safe to put the fire out now.”

  My hand was still burning, and I hadn’t noticed. I quashed the flames, willing them to recede and take the heat in my blood with them, and unlike yesterday’s uncooperative air bubble that had me nearly walking on the ceiling, they listened.

  Outside, Birdie and her new friends were on the move, skipping from one newly sprouted patch of lawn to the next. Birch had been busy. The grass still needed new soil to thrive, but things had definitely improved. This whole section of the Mile was set up with narrow streets made of suspension bridges surrounded by netting to prevent anyone from falling off while playing chase. Each house was two or three levels high, with plants growing from pots and troughs on ledges bolted to the sides. Most of the planters held only sticks where their greens had died. The ones Birch had handled were overflowing with flowered bushes.

  “They’ve been running like that for over an hour,” Jermay said. Nothing remained of the nervous insomniac who had begged me to flee the Mile. This Jermay was smiling his perfect lopsided smile. Only his hair was disheveled, like he’d worn it for The Show, as untamed as the secret enchantments that sparked in his eyes. “I forgot that running was supposed to be fun.”

  “Me, too.”

  Our recent games of chase had been us running from heavily armed Commission wardens. We ran and ran, and they still caught up. When we got tagged, people died.

  The little girl with Birdie climbed up on her back, freeing Birdie’s hand
s. She scaled the side of one of the other dwellings with ease, spotting hand- and footholds that no one else would have noticed, and ran across the suspension cables that tethered one house to the next.

  “Hey! No fair!” Dev complained. “We called No Touch!”

  “That’s not my touch,” Birdie shouted back. “This is!”

  Starting with the crown of her head, she blotted herself out of view. The little girl on her back was left looking like she was flying.

  “Powers on!” Dev called. The rest of the kids cheered, turning the street into a crossroad of fire hitting water, and wind blowing people over like bowling pins.

  Dev jumped back into a cloud of rust-colored smoke and sparklers that enveloped his body. He blinked out of sight, only to pop back into view directly behind Birdie and her friend.

  “Gotcha!” he announced, and accomplished the impossible—he caught Birdie off guard, causing her to show herself.

  Startled at his sudden appearance, she tipped backward. She wasn’t used to the extra weight of another girl on her back. Dev’s hand shot out to catch hers as she leaned almost parallel to the ground off the edge of the house, with the smaller girl dangling. Dev pulled Birdie up; the two of them locked eyes and cracked up laughing.

  “You’re it!” Dev shouted. He smoked himself off the roof and down to his companion.

  Birdie scrunched up her nose, annoyed, before turning herself and her friend completely invisible so they could chase down the boys without being seen.

  “You should see him do the teleportation thing up close,” Jermay said. “That smoke smells like burnt cinnamon.”

  Teleportation wasn’t one of the four elemental powers common to touched children—any more than Birdie’s invisibility or whatever it was that Nola could do, assuming her claims of “sight” indicated that she was touched, too. I knew nothing about Birdie’s past, and neither did she, so it was possible that she was a Level-Five separated from her twin brother. But from what I’d read in Nye’s files at the Center, most fifth girls had no powers, and the majority of them died at birth. Winnie’s family was even more peculiar. If she and Dev and Nola were all fifth-born, where were their siblings? Even with the ten people Winnie said used to pack into Baba’s kitchen, where were the others? No other family had come forward on the Mile, and Dev was markedly younger than Nola. Winnie was younger than Nola. No way were Nola and Dev twins.

  Was that why Arcineaux had been so upset about losing Winnie? Was that why he’d fixated on her when he found out that Nye had squirreled her away? I’d thought it was his pride, but what if her genetics were different enough to change the rules of progression? Not exactly questions I could ask her in friendly conversation.

  “So, now that you’re not likely to kill anyone for giving you a wake-up call, do you think you can come downstairs? Winnie’s grandfather is accusing us of trying to starve him because we waited on breakfast for you. I swear that old man eats more than Squint and Bruno combined.”

  I wasn’t hungry, but I did have a lot to do between helping Anise with the topsoil harvest and the possibility of the repair work Nafiza had foretold. For that, I’d need fuel.

  I accepted Jermay’s hand up and stuffed my hideous morning hair into the scarf that Nafiza had given me, but when we tried to leave, Bijou blocked the door.

  He stood in the opening, tall as he could manage, with his wings out to their full, shrunken span, showing off the jewels on the underside.

  “Move!” Jermay said.

  Bijou rattled his wings.

  “His eyes are red,” I noted.

  Golem eyes were usually made of backlit pieces of gold-flecked glass. During the assault on our train, they had turned a menacing, glowing red to signal the start of a guardian routine my father had buried in their programming.

  That stranglehold feeling was coming back.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Bijou dropped his wings. He pointed his snout at the stairs down the hall. That was where Xerxes had positioned himself as sentinel. Body stretched low in the way of a cat ready to pounce. Feathers standing up off his neck. Something downstairs had him royally ticked off.

  “Do you hear that?” Jermay cocked his head toward the door.

  I slid around Bijou, careful of the sharp points on his wings, and moved closer to the stairs. There were people in the kitchen, and they were shouting.

  “Something tells me they’re not playing tag,” I said. These voices were adult and angry.

  We crept down the stairs until we could see better. Ollie and Esther were back, with more neighbors. Nafiza was sitting in a chair with her face in her hands, overwhelmed by the commotion, while Baba and Anise tried to mediate.

  Winnie, Birch, and Klok were there, too, standing at the edge of the room, with Klok as a barrier between the angry crowd and the other two.

  “Tell them nothing’s changed!” Ollie demanded. “She’s still a threat to everyone here!”

  “Nafiza, do you think my granddaughter is dangerous?” Baba asked.

  “I never saw Winifred as a danger.” Nafiza wrapped her arms around herself, hands twisted in the fabric of her shawl. “She was such a darling girl. She still is, mostly.”

  “You said—” Esther broke in, but Nafiza’s mind was clear enough that she wouldn’t let herself be run over.

  “Winifred is present at the end of the Mile. The two are linked, and she will accompany destruction, but she’s not dangerous. Why can’t you understand the difference?”

  “That’s not what you said,” Esther insisted.

  “I did! You ruined the order!”

  Klok’s voice screen beeped furiously. I couldn’t read it, but I took solace in the assumption that he was being inappropriate.

  “You can’t change the order.” Nafiza rocked back and forth, pulling at her shawl on the sides of her head, mumbling to herself. “Now it’s out of order. She has to be there because she was there. If she was there, then she has to be there. You can’t remove her! You can’t change the order!”

  Her unique way of seeing the world didn’t translate easily, especially to people who refused to listen.

  “I see you,” she said to Winnie. “I see you.”

  “Do you see what she’s causing?” Ollie asked the others. “That girl brings trouble. She has to leave.”

  “We have never turned away someone in need,” Baba argued. “Winifred knew this; that’s why she directed her friends here.”

  “Those rules aren’t meant to allow exiles to force their way back in.”

  “Force is hardly accurate.”

  “With what she can do? How else do you explain her presence here?” Ollie asked.

  “She is a child of the Mile and has every right to be here!”

  It looked like a second war was about to break out in the kitchen, only this time, the participants could bleed.

  “I asked for asylum, not Winnie,” I said from my spot on the stairs. “I mean, she told me how, but I’m the one who spoke. She’s very particular about what she says and who she says it to.”

  “And who are you to interfere in our affairs?”

  Ollie was obviously used to being listened to. He used his size and booming voice to their full advantage, but I knew an act when I saw one, and I wasn’t afraid of him.

  I stood straight and faced him, with Jermay beside me, hooked to my finger, and Xerxes a step behind me as backup. Anise and Birch were there if I needed them, and I had Klok, who was my own army of one. Ollie was outnumbered and didn’t even know it.

  “I’m Penelope Roma.” I used my ringmaster voice and delighted in the confusion on his face. That voice was based on my father’s, and far more masculine and authoritative than I appeared. “Magnus is my father—and Anise’s. That’s who I am.”

  “She’s telling the truth.” Nola spoke up for the first time. “I was nervous when I realized it was Winnie”—she stumbled over the name—“in the shop, but she never used her touch. I would have seen. S
he hasn’t used it since she’s been here. I . . . I don’t think she’s dangerous, either. I vote she stays.”

  She gave Winnie a timid glance but otherwise stayed still.

  “That might mean more if her touch couldn’t make you say anything that serves her purpose. Keeping her here is too great a risk to take for one person,” Esther said. “We all agree.”

  “I don’t,” Birch said.

  “Neither do I.” Anise.

  “Nor I.” Baba.

  Beep! Klok.

  I loved my friends. Esther didn’t know what to say when they challenged her, mainly because no one came to her defense. Crowds are fickle; their loyalties can change.

  I brushed past her into the crowd that had closed in on Nafiza’s seat. A bunch of idiots harassing a woman and a girl while their own children played outside, oblivious to what their parents were up to.

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked Nafiza. Stress had left her eyes halfway between brown and black, so there was no way to tell if her mind was clear or if she was on the verge of losing track of the past, present, and future.

  “Stardust.” She pointed to the shooting star on my chest.

  I wanted to cringe at the name, but I forced myself to smile. The secret to crowd control was authority, and the secret to authority was confidence. Letting my smile crack would have been weakness, and then I would have lost them.

  “It’s yesterday’s tomorrow. I need to fix something in return for the clothes you gave us. Can you tell me where?”

  “The power core, in the middle of the Mile,” she said calmly.

  “Then I think it’s time to go.”

  Ignoring Ollie’s rage and the others’ willingness to follow him gave me the advantage of surprise. No one stopped me when I moved toward the kitchen door and held it open for Nafiza, because no one knew what to do with me.

  “I know for a fact that Baba told all of you that we intended to help get this place back to its best. While I repair the power problems, Birch and Anise can show the rest of you how to deal with your growth problem, so your produce yield will increase,” I told Esther. “You’re going to have to be specific with what you want planted and where.”