Page 1 of The Quiet
CHAPTER 1
THE YELLOW DRESS
NO ONE NOTICED the ghost in the yellow dress. Her lips were sealed by a damaged tongue and blood-soaked breath. Buckled like a doll against the splintered siding of an alley wall, she stared vacantly into the turbulent river of people on the street.
The Imperia summers were known for their blistering heat. The sun beat down on the capital’s hills like the eye of an angry god, pale walls at the city’s base pulsating with reflections of harsh and indignant light. They were relics of an ancient war, now only warding offthe encroaching forests whose leaves flickered in masse, mirroring the sounds of the ocean.
Ella didn’t know why the sound felt so familiar when she failed to coax out any recognition of the world she knew so well.
Galaxies of blue and purple bruises stretched over her body in a cryptic telling of last night’s story. She remembered the hoarse panic of her breathing against the drone of the forest’s cicadas. She remembered the loneliness, bone-deep loneliness as if she were the last human being on earth.
She shivered in the heat and attempted to swallow, but her throat was full of friction. Blood splatter followed the gentle crescent of tanned skin on her neck and painted sharp rings around her elbows where the sleeves of her uniform had stopped.
She pushed against the doorframe to test if her legs were ready to carry her. Caked tendrils of matted hair slid like a curtain offher shoulder as she stumbled onto the road and disappeared in the anonymity of the crowd.
She felt vacant, driven only by a seed of restlessness that sprouted and now grew in the pit of her stomach.
Her body loosened under the sweat as she trekked through the impoverished West End. The street was cast in the shadow of the cathedral that split the blue sky like a hatchet. Huts transformed into cottages, and cottages into villas, Ella pushing through the layers that so eloquently displayed the strata of the capital.
She followed the imposing path of the cathedral’s shadow, knowing she’d emerged from poverty when her laboring collected stares. Patrons peered from the shade of their vanilla umbrellas to catch a better glimpse. Noticed at last by others, she began to notice herself, her restlessness catching flame and burning inside her body like a clay furnace incapable of anything else.
Her movements were severe and mechanical, the yellow dress churning like a flag in the wind as she blazed a path to the steeple. It sat nestled among the buildings of the Academy, behemoths of brick and stone that stood like a gate between the senate houses and the rest of the city.
Her legs pounded forward like pistons across the trimmed grass of the campus and the cathedral courtyard. By the time she reached the oak doors, she couldn’t distinguish frozen bystanders from the statues of the divine Spirits they’d come to worship. The world blurred around her, cast in the heavy smoke of formless, rushing thoughts.
Her bare feet tracked across the polished floors with stamps of filth. A servant left the ornate double doors at the end of the hall, carrying a tray with half-eaten plates and several tall wine glasses.
Ella snatched a glass from the tray as she flashed past a startled servant like a powerful gust. The wine filtered back and forth between her teeth, loosening her voice with the sting of alcohol. Little else tied her to the sensations of the physical world, and she was numb to everything but the rage that burned like the cuts in her mouth
Demands echoed down the hall to grab her, but she was already too close. Force reverberated from her muscled back through her shoulders as she gave the last entrance a violent push. Red wine lapped high out of her glass and flushed down the front of her chest. Her eyes snapped up as the doors clapped like gavels against the walls on either side behind her, silencing the room.
The cylindrical chamber channeled the echoes high above the elevated balcony that held the seats of the Imperia’s Chief Listeners. They were the leaders of a society trained to receive and interpret messages from the Spirits. Ella’s eyes followed the path of the reverberations as they bounced across the richly painted walls, depicting a history of the war against Madness and how the Spirits had saved humanity from it ages ago.
There was so much kinship in the paintings. Human beings danced joyfully as they reached for the hands of the personification of the spirit of Love, warriors trained under the spirit of Courage, and babies clasped under the gaze of the spirit of Life. Light filtered in through a stained-glass ceiling that captured a gold and white depiction of the sun, the samesun that proudly burned on the Imperia’s flag as a beacon of progress and truth.
It was under that light that Ella’s eyes fell back to the five Chief Listeners, wearing elaborate robes of a similar color. People came to this place to seek wisdom and voice their cases, but Ella’s soul was strangled by messages that were too sharp to mold into words. Instead, they bit harder with every contraction of her heart.
The chiefs did not speak, staring as if she were vengeance personified, her body painted in carnage and the glass of bloodied wine clasped in her fist and marked down her breast.
Feeling tortured by the silence, she slammed the glass down. Pieces crackled across a vast spread of liquid that flushed over the marble floors and kissed through her toes.
“What happened?” her words sawed imposingly into the room.
Chief Angelina’s black eyes flickered with recognition. She was sitting center among the five, a crown of white and black hair wrapped so tightly against her head that it looked painted across her scalp.
Jose, a barrel-shaped man with a shimmering head, pushed himself up from the banister desk they shared. Short in stature, he now appeared several feet above the rest as if he couldn’t see her well enough from his seat.
Ella didn’t look away from Angelina’s questioning stare, hoping the woman could know her soul without Ella having to shape a message with words—weak, empty, frustrating sounds that only ever built crippled pictures of the truth.
“The medic from Crow’s team,” Jose’s astonishment bounded through the room in deep, full swings of sound. The other council members shifted uncomfortably at the proclamation with a cresting wave of indistinct murmuring.
“That’s impossible,” someone objected.
Ella hissed toward the comment, the room silenced by her animalistic brashness.
Her shoulders were curled back, muscles coiled so tight it was as if she could leap to the balcony in a single bound.
“She needs medical attention,” Jose said, trying to wrestle control of the room.
