Free Wordless by AdriAnne Strickland

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    “Gods,” I whispered.
    Khaya didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look eager anymore. Her intensity had turned to something closer to hatred as she stared at the gun.
    I didn’t feel hatred. With a gun, I could actually do something. With a gun I could blast a hole in Herio’s stomach like he had Drey’s—Gods, what was I thinking ? How could I even imagine taking on the Word of Death?
    I hurled it back in the bag, followed by everything else in a jumble, zipped the whole thing closed with a jerk, and put my head in my hands.
    Khaya didn’t say anything for a while. She still didn’t wait long enough.
    “We really should be moving,” she murmured. “We’ve slept almost the whole day, but at least night is better cover. If we don’t leave the city now, they’ll find us. I need your help—”
    I held up a finger without looking at her. “Don’t. Not right now. For once, stop thinking about yourself.”
    “I’m not thinking about myself.” She didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask her to.
    I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Well, I did. I wanted to eat an enormous bowl of Captain Crunch and go back to sleep.
    Basically, I wanted to do nothing.
    I’d rescued Khaya once already, but that was before I knew I was getting myself into a long-term thing. The legends never mentioned what happens after the hero saves the lady, especially if neither of them has anywhere to go. Well, sometimes they get married, but I sure as hell didn’t want to do that, and I was pretty sure Khaya would gut me if I even tried to kiss her. She only wanted me to take care of her, like her nursemaid, until she got better.
    Problem was, I might be killed in the meantime.
    I was all of seventeen years old—maybe—and the responsibility of having someone depend on me was some hefty shit. I couldn’t believe what Drey had done, taking me in when he didn’t have to. He’d had enough to worry about, if he’d been hiding from the Athenaeum. He could have left me where he’d found me. Just like I could leave Khaya now, taking the backpack with me. Part of me wanted to go off on my own and part of me didn’t. I wanted to be responsible, but I didn’t want this responsibility. Not when I wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep for the next year, then wake up to someone taking care of me.
    It struck me like a kick to the gut that Drey would never again wake me up with bad coffee.
    His words suddenly came to mind, like he was talking right next to me: It’s always easy to start something. The hard part is following through.
    Yeah, well, if Drey had been so wise, maybe he’d still be around to help me follow through.
    “Why should I keep helping you?” I asked, dropping my hands and startling Khaya in her chair. “You haven’t been the nicest person on the planet. Convince me.”
    She blinked at me, as if I’d awoken her as she’d been nodding off. “What else can you do at this point?”
    I stared at her.
    When I didn’t respond, she answered my question with yet another one, which was even more infuriating. “Don’t you trust me? If you didn’t, there’s no way you would have come this far.”
    “You make me sound like a brainless idiot, and yourself so all-knowing. You didn’t know anything about me, either, when you threw yourself on top of me.” Her eyes narrowed, but I kept going. “In fact, you knew less about me than I knew about you, since you’re a Word. How could you have been so sure that a total nobody-stranger would risk his neck for you?”
    “You helped me, didn’t you?” After she got only silence in response to yet another one of her question-answers, she added quietly, “I trusted you, too.”
    “Why?” I was glad I got to ask the question first, since my answer to her would have been something like, Because you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen .
    “Because you’re beautiful,” she said. “That was my initial reason, at least.”
    I gulped, choked on my own spit, and