The Whisper (19 page)

Countless sunsets passed before she came upon a tribe, and when she did, she wasn't sure she had found the right people. Deep in the woods, at the foot of some mountains, a group of about fifty was living in homes carved out of the cliffsides. When Kira made her presence known, they weren't hostile. Only curious. And when she said the one word from their language that she knew, when she repeated the word that had driven her nearly to madness—“Banar, Banar, Banar”—they led her to a collection of boulders.

Faded paintings decorated the boulders, and the paintings told stories. Men chasing animals. Woman climbing mountains. Gods meting out judgment. On one boulder there was a painting of a turtle with a boy's head.

“Banar,” the people said, pointing at the turtle.

There was also a girl in the painting, her face poking out from behind a shrub. Kira pointed at the girl.

“Una,” the people said.

Kira started to cry.

The sun slipped behind the trees and the paint glowed in the dark. The tribe returned to their homes, but they let Kira stay among the boulders all night. She studied the stories, gorgeous narratives of the Earth and its inhabitants. When the sun came back up, she left.

Her journey home was excruciating. She found herself emotionally overwhelmed more often than not. Her appetite was virtually nonexistent. She was wasting away, and by the time she stumbled onto the beach near her village, she had barely enough energy to carry on.

The villagers found her and brought her to Salam. His skills at healing were strong, but he wasn't sure he could save her.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

Her voice dry and soft, she said, “Banar was a boy with a turtle shell. He had a sister named Una. She was a liar.”

“Ah yes,” Salam said. “The stories. Now I remember. That was an old story that went back countless lifetimes. Unfinished, if I recall. It was from the great prophet Cabal. The stories poured from him like a waterfall, even up until the moment they executed him. But they would not let him finish that one.”

“I don't understand,” Kira said, “because I know the end to that story. The girl, Una, finally realizes her mistakes; she realizes all the trouble she has caused, and begs Banar to eat her. He agrees, but he only eats her body. He leaves her head so she will always remember what she's done.”

“A fitting ending, I suppose,” Salam said.

“And how can it go back many lifetimes?” Kira asked. “I am Una. I am sure of it.”

“You are delirious,” Salam said.

“I am Una,” she said again.

“You must rest,” Salam said. “Or you won't be with us much longer.”

Kira's family came to see her, and her son, Oric, crouched next to her bedside. “Tell me again about this place you created,” she whispered.

Oric's eyes narrowed, he placed a hand on his mother's hot cheek, and he said, “I don't know what you mean.”

“The place with the bird and the fortress and the sea beast. Where you trick people, where you scare people. You confessed it to me.”

“I must have been sharing a dream,” Oric said. “A dream I have forgotten.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Eight summers,” Oric said, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world.

“Am I going mad?” Kira asked.

“No,” Salam said. “You are sick. I will try to make you better.”

He did try, but he did not succeed. She would not eat. She would barely sleep. Her mind was slipping away.

So Salam told her stories. It was the only thing that seemed to give her comfort. He told her all the stories he remembered from his days with the warrior tribe. He told her the stories of their village by the sea. He even made up new stories as best he could.

Something miraculous happened. She got better. The stories restored something in her, giving her the desire to eat, the ability to sleep. Soon she was back to normal health. When her family asked her why she went to visit the warrior tribe, she told them a lie.

“I went looking for new streams to fish and I became lost,” she said. “The warrior tribe found me and guided me home.”

She didn't tell her family about the
Banar
that was still stuck in her head. She didn't tell them what she had told Salam. She never mentioned the name Una again.

Life rambled on. Oric grew into a man who had dreams and nightmares, like all men do, but he was never again concerned with the place where he did bad things. At night, the village would gather and eat and tell stories, which kept Kira going. As long as she had these stories filling her head, it supplanted the eerie feeling that she had lived another life, that long ago she was a girl named Una.

Kira eventually became a grandmother and time pinched wrinkles into her skin. She was content, but she could feel that her body didn't have much time left in it. Spearing fish wasn't possible anymore, but she could still swim. Every morning she waded out past the waves and floated in the ocean, giving her aching joints some reprieve.

One night, after a round of stories, her body ached so much that she decided to take a moonlit swim. The star-pocked sky was so clear, so vibrant, so inviting that she decided to swim to the horizon.

And she swam out farther and farther, to see what lay beyond the horizon, behind the stars, in the land of her lost memories.

 

A WHILE LATER

 

CHAPTER 15

Alistair was lost in a prairie of stars. The capsule was on autopilot, cutting through the dark expanse of space with determination and purpose. Its mission? Unknowable. Alistair was still suspended in the middle of the egg and he could see out, but there was no screen, no computer display, nothing to say,
Your destination is …

An asteroid as big as a house hurtled past, and the egg changed course. A chase was on. It seemed determined to catch the icy hunk.

“Abort mission!” Alistair shouted, not knowing what else to do.

The capsule didn't take orders. The original command of
Cow, Chicken, Goat, Goat, Pig, Rabbit
had sealed the capsule's—and therefore Alistair's—fate. That fate seemed to involve crashing into an asteroid.

Crystals of ice stuck out from the asteroid's surface like spines on a sea urchin, and as the capsule closed in, Alistair could practically feel them jabbing his skin. He clutched the atlas to his chest and gritted his teeth, because that's what people do in such situations, but when the crystals touched the edge of the force field, they didn't pierce it. They didn't shatter. The ice melted and the water it became clung to the egg, enveloped it in an extra shell, a liquid shell.

So much water, so quickly, gathering like snow on a rolling snowball. Soon the stars were squiggles of light and there was no asteroid to see, only quivering liquid. And soon the weight of the water must have been too great, because the force field imploded and the water collapsed in on Alistair, drenching every inch of his body.

Then he was in a pool.

Not a pond, not a lake, an actual pool. A big one at that, Olympic-size, with lanes sectioned off by buoyed ropes. Banners hung overhead.
DISTRICT CHUMPS. STATE CHUMPS. NATIONAL CHUMPS. WORLD CHUMPS. UNIVERSE CHUMPS.

“Kill … me … now,” came a voice, goofy and tuneless. Two dark lines, like lampposts, sprouted from the deck of the pool. “Gawd. A kid who can swim. Like a stinkin' guppy,” came the voice again, a boy's voice, but all Alistair could see were those dark lines.

So he swam toward the edge, guiding himself with one arm while holding the atlas with the other. When he had a grip on the concrete, he got a better view. More dark lines, but together they formed a stick figure, a crudely drawn boy in a bathing suit with inflatable swimmies on his flimsy arms.

“Man oh man. Now look what you've done,” the stick boy said. “Coach M is gonna see this and he'll be all like, ‘Well this kid can swim, so why can't any of you chumps?' And then we're all gonna have to go in there.” The boy skittered back and forth like he was excessively caffeinated, until a notion stopped him in his tracks. “Unlesssss … you're one of those. Tell me you're one of those?”

Chlorine fumes tickled at his nostrils, and Alistair sneezed and said, “One of what?”

“One of those aliens, one of those dudes or dudettes from another world who pops in and tries to impress us with your skills. Not drowning, for instance. You're all amazing at that. Just so you know, we appreciate that one alien dealing with that bully Tyler, we really, truly do. But usually you make us feel lousy. You
are
one of those, aren't you?”

“I … guess so.”

“Knew it,” the stick boy said. “Well, silver lining is I can tell Coach M that aliens don't count as kids, because I am
so
not getting into that pool. And after that's straightened out, I'd be happy to lead you to one of your wormholes or whatever.”

The kid reached down his hand, a scribble of five lines. It didn't seem like something to grab—it seemed like a drawing—and yet Alistair grabbed it, and the stick boy had a firm grip and enough strength to pull him out of the water.

“Is this a school?” Alistair asked.

“Unfortunately,” the stick boy said. “I'm Kenny, by the way.”

There were bleachers, a scoreboard, and doors marked
EXIT
and
LOCKERS
. It was very similar to the pool back home at Thessaly High School, where Alistair and Charlie took swimming lessons for a few months when they were eight. Only there weren't walking, talking stick boys back home.

“Why are you…?”

“My looks weirding you out, huh?” Kenny said with a nod. “I get it. You aliens aren't used to seeing natural human forms.” He spread his stick arms, twirled around. He was three-dimensional, but only barely. What was most disconcerting was the contrast with his surroundings, which appeared entirely real. The boy was a sketch come to life, a kid made of black pipe cleaners who lived in a world of depth, color, and texture.

“Do you mind if I have a moment to myself?” Alistair asked, shaking water off the atlas.

“Actually, I should be going,” Kenny said. “We have an assembly in a few. Super secret special guest. Coach M thought he could get me to swim a few laps before it started, but now I'll go tell him,
No can do, Coach, we've got an alien infestation in the pool
.”

With that, Kenny spun around and jogged through a door to one of the locker rooms. Alistair hustled to the bleachers, sat down, and opened the atlas. Along with its other magical qualities, the thing must have been waterproof, because it wasn't soaked. A shake was all that was needed to get it dry.

Alistair wished he could say the same about himself. Water dripped from his soaked clothes as he flipped through the pages, stopping on the one for Quadrant 43. In a dark corner of the paper, he spotted an asteroid tagged with a golden ring and the label
SCHOOL FOR INSUFFERABLE LOSERS
.

He pressed the golden ring and the pages flipped until he was looking at a map of a school. There was a pool in the center and a maze of hallways and classrooms. There was a red ring in the center of the gym, but it had an
X
over it. Alistair pressed the ring and a tab shot up.

A square-jawed cipher known as Tyler used to terrorize this school of annoying figments, shattering their bodies with Mach 2 dodgeballs and atomic wedgies. A swimmer named Carl tricked Tyler into eating a veggie burger, which stunned him long enough for Carl to tie him up and deliver him to Quadrant 43, where he is currently on display. X-rays reveal he has the bones of a guinea pig.

Alistair surveyed the rest of the map. There were at least ten golden rings. One was in the pool and labeled
QUADRANT
43. Another was in a fountain at the front entrance and labeled
SCURVYTOWN
.
Scurvy
equaled pirates, or so one would assume, and that was bound to be dangerous. In a bathroom on the second floor was a more intriguing ring labeled
MACROTOPIA
. Macrotopia meant nothing to Alistair, but it sounded like a word he should know. Something scientific, something he might have learned about in science class.

Before he could press that golden ring and give Macrotopia a closer look, a group of kids tumbled into the room. Not stick kids, though. Not like Kenny at all, and not like one another. There was a googly-eyed comic book kid all decked out in primary colors. There was a kid made of dough. A stone kid. A kid that seemed ripped from the canvas of a painting. A kid who looked like a normal kid, like Alistair, but he was much, much larger, three times as big. The only quality these kids shared is that they were all—for lack of a better word—nerdy.

“Kenny was right,” said a chubby boy covered in fur like a werewolf. “And this one is even uglier than the others.”

“You think he's here for the assembly?” said a bespectacled girl made of a mishmash of doll parts.

A zombified one replied, “Another toilet diver, I bet, probably fishing for floaters.” And the crowd rippled with cackles. With all the decomposition, it was hard to judge if this zombie class clown was a boy or a girl. It hardly mattered. Alistair didn't plan to stay long.

Atlas tucked under his arm, he headed for the door marked
EXIT
. The band of misfits followed, their numbers now in the teens. By the time he was in a locker-lined hallway, the mob had tripled, quadrupled, quintupled, and they were pressing against him as if he were a celebrity on his way to a limo. The fluttering eyes of sighing girls, the respectful nods of rough-and-tumble boys—he craved those things as much as anyone. But he didn't crave this. As the mob pressed into him—pawing, shouting—it felt like a slow form of murder.

“Tell us about the other dimensions!”

“Let us touch your hair!”