Call Forth the Waves Page 5

  Red for the blood spilling into the streets. White for the bodies and grief no one speaks. Power is golden, but heavy as lead. Remember the brick street; remember the dead.

  No one spoke of the dead, but they did remember them. And Nagendra mourned the Mile like a lost loved one.

  “He saw it,” Winnie said bitterly. “Why do you think he had nightmares?” She passed us as I waited for Birdie to lose interest in whatever had caught her attention on the other side of the Mile’s rim. “Keep up. It’s easy to get lost here. It’s even easier to fall off.”

  “Why is she so angry at us?” Birdie asked me.

  “I think she’s in pain.” Both from her mouth and whatever memory seeing her relatives had dredged up.

  “Not Winnie, her.” Birdie pointed to the front of our convoy, where Nola was walking so quickly, she had to be hoping we couldn’t keep pace. She hadn’t uncrossed her arms since we’d left her shop.

  I directed a puff of air toward my sister and Birch, who were struggling with where to step, and the walkway cleared.

  Nola sped up.

  “What did we do wrong?” Birdie asked.

  “I don’t know, Little Bird,” I said. “Winnie said the folks up here don’t like strangers. They’ve been hiding for a long time.”

  “Is she scared of us?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Should we be scared of them?”

  “I hope not.”

  Home turned out to be in a neighborhood made from several metal-sided dwellings all grouped together along walkways used for streets. More shipping containers, like the shops, only these were predominantly silver. Fading graffiti capped the entrance to the neighborhood with a gateway dedicated to the Medusae. Smaller works on individual units detailed touched families. Brown hair and brown skin decorated one wall, green-eyed pale blondes another. A flash of red and more brown at the end of the row.

  Most of the characters showed elemental powers, but an odd few were spectacular anomalies, crackling with electricity or directing symphonies of birds, controlling the weather and creating disks of light for unknown purposes. Here on the Mile there was nothing hidden about being touched; there was no shame in it and no danger of being exposed by those around us. Why didn’t my father bring us here, where we could have been safe? We could have grown up with family and friends. The Commission would have been nothing more than a ghost story told to scare us when we misbehaved. I could have learned to harness my touch where no one would have been afraid to see me use it.

  The only danger here was possibly the woman in black. She was still there, still shadowing us, and she wasn’t alone. Others were gathering. Runners were knocking on doors as we passed, whispering and pointing, gawking at our parade. We must have been quite the spectacle in our pajamas: me and Anise in our father’s long shirts, without pants or shoes. Jermay and Birch with the pants and no shirts. Winnie and Birdie wearing things nearly two decades out of style. Klok and his flashes of glistening body armor at the neck of his shirt and past his coat sleeves, looking like an army of one.

  Nola stopped at a fused stack of containers with a blue door.

  “Don’t do this,” she said, pausing before she opened it.

  “Do what?” Anise asked.

  “Ask the ghost. She knows what will happen if I open this door.” Nola glared at Winnie, still refusing to speak her name.

  “Talking to people who don’t exist is a bad habit,” Winnie said. “It might give people the wrong idea. They might even decide you’re too dangerous to keep around.”

  Maybe it was due to the infrequent nature of her speech, or maybe it was her natural voice, but Winnie had this way of infusing malice into her words that had nothing to do with her touch. Every inflection was a knife, sharp and ready to cut, splitting her words on the syllables with the precision of a chef slicing muscle from bone.

  “I will say one thing, and then you are dead to me.” Nola mimicked Winnie’s tone as best she could, but she was an amateur in the presence of a master.

  “I’ve died before; that’s no threat.”

  “Have you thought about what this will do to him? His health is worse than you remember. You don’t know what life’s been like up here since you left.”

  “Would you like to compare scars and see who fared worse?”

  Winnie shoved the sleeves of her nightshirt up past her elbows, putting her skin on display. Its usual brown color was mottled through with the evidence of Warden Arcineaux’s experiments. One patch at her wrist looked nearly like cedar bark because there were so many layers of damage, and I knew that these were only the smaller reminders she carried from the Ground Center. There were wider, thicker scars that cut from her collarbone, over her shoulder, and onto her back, and more that I’d barely glimpsed.

  Nola wasn’t prepared for any of them. She choked on whatever she’d planned to say. Her face turned sallow, and Winnie fastened her sleeves back in place.

  “What happened?” Dev asked, concerned and saddened the way children often are when they’ve seen something horrible. Winnie chose not to answer him.

  “Either open the door or I’ll knock, and you can explain to Baba why you didn’t let us in,” she said. She’d lived too long among the wardens to back down when an opponent showed weakness. That was the time to go in for the kill.

  Nola pressed the latch release on the door, standing in the opening so we couldn’t pass until she let us.

  “Whatever happens is on your head,” she told Winnie.

  “Isn’t it always?” Winnie brushed her aside and let herself into the house.

  Nola went inside with Dev. Anise followed, taking Birdie with her.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” I asked Birch.

  “This is her grandfather’s house,” he said, but Winnie had told us that much.

  “You knew about this place?”

  “No, just about the blue door. Her parents died right after she was born. Baba raised her and her cousins. Greyor, too, I suppose.”

  “Dev and Nola are her cousins?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then why does Nola treat her like that? She acts like she hates her.”

  “Because Winnie isn’t supposed to be here. She was exiled, and I shouldn’t have told you that. Don’t ask me to share secrets that aren’t mine.”

  He slipped through the door before I could press him for more answers.

  How could a kid be exiled from anywhere, much less her own home and family? What could she possibly have done?

  “I still don’t like him, but he’s got the right idea,” Jermay grumbled. “We should go inside. She’s still there.”

  Across the street, the woman in black was still watching us. She stood completely still, allowing her shawl to twirl around her. None of the people who had ventured out of their homes and businesses stood close to her.

  “Creepy,” Jermay said.

  I agreed but didn’t say it out loud. I was too busy fighting thoughts of torch-bearing mobs chasing us all off the rim, lemming-style. A feeling that only got stronger when Klok beeped a question for me on his screen.

  “I could inquire as to their intent. Should I?”

  “I think it’s best if we leave them alone for now,” I said.

  The last thing we needed was our own Frankenstein’s monster spooking the locals into pulling out their pitchforks.

  The inside of Baba’s house looked nothing like its shipping container origins. It was homey, warm, and full of light and life, a welcome change from the cold outside. It reminded me of the living compartments on our train.

  The entryway opened into a living room where one wall was nothing but pictures. Some of them didn’t even have frames; they were just taped up in layers like wallpaper, reminding me of the comic-book pages I’d used to paper my room on the train. More photos filled shelves and tables, giving a better idea of just how many people Baba had been responsible for raising.

  There was a kitchen to the right, with a windo
w cut into the wall so we could see inside. Two closed doors were set to the back, where extra shipping containers had been soldered together, and a staircase led upward into the stacked containers that formed the upper portions of the house. All around the top of the room ran tiny creeper lights that would fit in the palm of my hand. They scurried up and down the walls, startled into action by the presence of visitors.

  Baba had already been summoned from wherever he’d been in the house before we arrived. He was shorter than Dev, even without the stoop that made him lean on a metal crutch, and very frail. He wore a tightly wrapped navy-blue turban and had a beard so thick I couldn’t see his mouth. His eyes likewise disappeared below his brows, but the way he moved, feeling his way forward with his crutch, told me he was blind.

  “We have visitors, Baba,” Nola said.

  “From the ground?” The old man perked up, hobbling forward until Dev took his arm and led him into the middle of the room. “Did Magnus send someone new? Is there any news?”

  “No. They’re not—”

  “Magnus was our father’s name,” Anise cut in.

  “Was?”

  Baba reached for her face; she bent down so that he didn’t have to stretch. He patted her cheeks and nose, ran his hands over her eyelids, felt out the boundaries of her hair.

  How strange it must have been to lose a sense so central to his perception. I was being constantly bombarded with new ways to quantify the world around me. Heat signatures. Electromagnetic fields. Vibrations triggered by subatomic particles. All realigning my understanding of space and matter into more than three dimensions. I couldn’t imagine going the other way and losing color or visual texture, the immediate knowledge of size and shape.

  “We’re not sure where he is, but it’s possible that he’s dead,” Anise told the old man.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, my dear. Which one are you?”

  “Anise.”

  “Miss Middle Ground.” He chuckled, like that was meant to be a joke. What it meant to me was that my father had been here and spoken of us.

  “We don’t want to upset you or your house,” Anise said. “A friend told us we might find help here.”

  My sister glanced at Winnie, who had positioned herself outside the circle surrounding her grandfather. She’d pulled her hair up, instead of letting it hang like usual, and wrapped a scarf over the top to keep it in place, making her look even more like her cousin.

  Baba tottered my way and searched out my features the same way he had with my sister. His hands smelled like a lifetime of boiled tea and mint muscle cream.

  “We don’t know for sure that he’s dead,” I said. My lack of pants was suddenly all I could think about. I tried to pull the bottom hem of my nightshirt down farther. “We actually hoped . . . er . . . I hoped that you’d heard from him, or that you might know where we could look.”

  “You favor your father,” Baba told me. “In feature and in mindset. He never gave up on a lost cause, either. Is the rest of your family well, at least?”

  “Two of our sisters are in custody,” Anise said. “The other we lost, recently.”

  “I’m sorry. What of your extended family? Were there . . . were there any survivors?” He was fishing for a name, but Winnie tucked herself deeper into the shadows at the room’s edge, near the photographs on the wall.

  “This is Jermay and Birch and Klok, and the little one is Birdie,” I said.

  Baba moved from person to person. He was cordial with Jermay and Birch, and shocked by Klok’s size and the feel of his armor beneath his coat. Birdie pulled back from his hands and hid behind me.

  “Did I shock you, child?” Baba asked. “I’m afraid that our buildings are full of static.”

  “She doesn’t like to be touched by strangers,” Anise offered, and he smiled.

  “Then she shall remain the mysterious lady in our midst. Much more interesting, I think.” Ironic that the only one Birdie couldn’t really hide from was a man who couldn’t see anyone else.

  “Baba!” Dev cut in. “Tell them they can stay. They can, can’t they?”

  “Of course. Of course. There are no closed doors for Magnus’s girls here.”

  “Winnie, too?” Dev asked eagerly.

  “Wi—” Baba startled. He stretched his free hand out, looking for her. Winnie backed up, but Dev wasn’t having it. He pulled her closer.

  “Dev, no,” she whispered, but he ignored her. He placed Baba’s hand against her cheek.

  Slowly, the old man outlined her face from top to bottom and side to side, rolling her hair between his fingers where her scarf hadn’t contained it. He lingered at the scars on her mouth, trembling when she flinched in pain and cried out.

  “You favor your father, too,” he said in a weak voice. He embraced her awkwardly, falling forward off his toes to wrap his arms around her neck. Winnie was so surprised that she didn’t reciprocate at first. He was so fragile looking, she could have shattered him. “I didn’t think I’d live to see this day. Welcome home, child.”

  “Baba, you can’t!” Nola had been quiet during her grandfather’s introductions, but his emotional outburst broke her. She snatched his arms away from Winnie’s neck and made sure he couldn’t touch her face again, effectively removing Winnie from sight. “They didn’t use Magnus’s coat to get here; they flew in plain sight, knowing they were being hunted! What if they were followed?”

  “We weren’t,” Anise said.

  “And we’re supposed to risk the safety of everyone in this outpost on the word of an outsider?”

  “Magnus was not an outsider, and neither are his daughters. Winifred certainly isn’t.”

  “The warning hasn’t changed, Baba.”

  “Worrying about portents and signs has cost us enough already. I’ll not throw a gift in the garbage for fear of what’s inside.”

  Still shaking, he looped one arm through Winnie’s.

  “Do you remember where the kitchen is, child?” he asked. I guess he’d been blind long enough to forget about the window between the kitchen and the living room.

  “Y-yes, Baba.”

  “Good. I was just about to start breakfast, and I’d appreciate the extra hands.”

  “The others saw them,” Nola argued. “They won’t stand for—”

  “Bah!” The old man cut her off, stabbing his crutch into the air dismissively. “This much discord before eating isn’t healthy. Too many words and there won’t be room enough for food!”

  “This is not going to end well,” Nola warned us. She resumed her crossed-arm stance and stomped into the kitchen.

  “Am I the only one who thinks we should watch to make sure she doesn’t slip any mysterious powders into our food?” Birch asked. “Because I’m thinking that’s where we’re headed, based on the face she just made.”

  Birdie slipped one hand into mine and hung onto Jermay with the other, implying that she agreed.

  “We don’t have anything to worry about.” I gave her hand a squeeze. “Nola’s part of Winnie’s family, and family helps each other, right?”

  “Right,” Birdie said.

  We were both good enough at performing under pressure to act like we believed that.

  CHAPTER 6

  The first neighbor knocked before we reached the kitchen.

  It was a small room with narrow sides, and the ceiling was low enough that Klok could touch it without straightening his arm. The walls had been painted an orangish color that was too weak to cover the corrugated alloy underneath. Factor in the four-seat table, the stove, and the counters, and we barely all fit with enough space to breathe. How did Baba expect us to sit down?

  Dev squeezed through to open the back door for a pinch-faced woman who seemed permanently perched on her toes. Her blue-black hair curled at the bottom of a loose braid that twitched over her shoulder.

  “Good morning,” she said absently. She’d stepped forward automatically when the door opened, but couldn’t find a place to stand, so she
stayed outside.

  “Good morning, Esther,” Baba said. How he’d known it was her, or made it to the door without jostling the rest of us, I couldn’t say, but he was standing beside Dev and I never saw him move. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “No, no, no. Don’t trouble yourself on my account. There seemed to be some unusual commotion on your side of the street, and I wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”

  “Never better.” When Baba smiled, his moustache tilted. He moved his head to match.

  “I wouldn’t mind taking a look to make sure nothing’s out of place,” Esther offered. A little too fast. A little too sweet.

  Voice modulation was a skill I’d learned early on while working at The Show. To pull off a convincingly detached conversation, your body language had to match your words. Esther relied too heavily on Baba’s blindness. She leaned through the opening with a balanced, ball-bearing sway that allowed her to examine the room in all directions without crossing the threshold, and assumed that he was oblivious.

  “What is she doing? She’s going to fall flat on her face,” Jermay whispered.

  “She’s counting,” I told him. I’d dropped to my “inside” voice, too. The setting seemed to call for it.

  Esther’s lips kept moving, even when she wasn’t speaking. She rounded the room several times by sight, only to look away when her eyes met mine on the last pass.

  “Just tell her there’s seven of us, so she’ll stop. This is embarrassing.”

  “I’m not sure she can see all seven. I think that’s why she keeps checking her count.”

  No one was hiding—we wouldn’t have had room if we’d tried—but while Birdie still had me by the hand, her newly developed nervous tic was in full force, leaving her at times translucent or invisible. Esther might have seen her, or she might have seen a ghost. She might have seen nothing more than my hand clutching thin air. There was no way to know. And there was no way to tell if Birdie had hidden any of the rest of us from sight without constantly checking. Little Bird could obscure anything or anyone she touched. Several someones, if we were all in contact, so it was entirely possible that Esther was watching us blink on and off like Christmas lights.