Free Wordless by AdriAnne Strickland Page A

started coughing my lungs out.
    She kept talking. “You were almost beautiful enough to be one of us—a Word. Yet you were free, like I wanted to be.”
    I didn’t see how her description could apply to me, but my throat was burning too much to comment. Mostly I wanted to put my clothes back on.
    “But, of course, that would be impossible,” she said. “The Athenaeum keeps very good track of all of us.” She lifted the hand that no longer had the bracelet. The line around her thumb was now only a tender pink. “Plus, your nose is slightly crooked”—from a fist fight with a street kid when I was thirteen—“and there’s a scar on your forehead”—from yet another spill off the garbage truck. “Words don’t have flaws.”
    I was oddly grateful for my imperfections. They were like protection from that other stuff she’d said, the crap about being beautiful, which was distracting me from what was actually important: that she had been trapped in the Athenaeum, with that monitor bracelet like a collar.
    I still didn’t understand how it was possible. She was an all-powerful Word.
    “It was such a coincidence to see you outside,” she continued, “when I’m so rarely allowed to see anyone. Then I saw you with a trash bag, and I realized you had access to a disguise no one would ever expect … and a way out. I had to seize the chance, ask for your help in secret, wait to see if you came back, then get rid of the monitor. I didn’t have much time to plan, and of course I’m always being watched, so I had to take a leap of faith. Literally.”
    I cleared my throat. “How did you chop your thumb off, anyway?”
    A wince flickered across her face like an involuntary twitch. “An axe. There’s one for fire emergencies in the hallway of my apartment. It would never have been there if they thought I would actually use it for that purpose. In fact, they’ll probably get rid of all the axes in the Athenaeum just to keep the others from doing the same thing.”
    Normally, the thought of someone hacking off a thumb with an axe would have made me pause, especially since I’d seen the results, but I had too many questions. “So, all of you are like … prisoners, with these monitor bracelets? The other Words would want to escape, too?”
    “Not all of them.” She seemed to be holding something back.
    “Why you, then? What made you jump out of your apartment, aside from my irresistible beauty? Or, better yet, in spite of my flaws?” Maybe I shouldn’t have sounded so sarcastic. Beauty seemed like any other measurable quality to her, not a compliment to others or vanity on her part. It was just a fact—not that I agreed with her when it came to me. I took a deep breath. “Why should I keep helping you?”
    She leaned back in her chair and put her hands in her lap, regarding me with level, dark eyes. “Because you’ll keep the world a free place by helping me escape from here. Or, as free as it is now. Trust me—it could be much worse.”
    “Oh,” I said, scratching my bare knee. Nothing she said could really have touched me through my numbness, but that came close. Because, for some reason, I did trust her. “The world, huh? I guess that changes things.”
    I looked around the room. There was only myself, Khaya, the backpack … and my clothes. I stood up, making sure my boxers weren’t gaping, shook out my stiff pants, and stuffed my legs into them. Then I tugged on my dark blue shirt. All of the encrusted blood made my chest itch. “You ready to go?” I asked.
    “Now?” she asked, leaping up from the chair. She sucked air through her teeth as her ankle hit the ground, then put her weight on it more slowly and was able to stand on two feet. Apparently she’d only needed sleep to heal—and maybe a shit-ton of cookies. One day’s rest had been far more recuperative for her than it had been for me.
    “Good. You can walk, at least,” I said. “You can tell me your story about the world on the