"How can you be saying two things at once?" She made no effort to use the soap. "You're saying scrub but you're also afraid I'm going to hear…" She looked at my face, and her eyes focused on my mouth. "You aren't talking," she said in surprise.
I stared back at her for a moment, then turned off the water and quietly walked out of the hut. I really couldn't say what I was thinking or feeling at that moment; but I was sure Helena knew.
The parrot was no longer on the dressing table in my hut, but there was an ugly wet smear on the floor. I could guess where the Singer found the parrot that he'd used on Helena. He must have come back after taking me to Roland, then ground the poor beast under his heel.
A nasty Way to kill the little animal…but a safe one too. The Singer's boot protected him from the brain-flash that stunned Roland when the other parrot died. Even the Singer must fear instant self-knowledge.
But why kill the parrot at all? And why wipe the blood on Helena? A prank? Or an attack? Roland said the onslaught of voices made him want to commit suicide. Did the Singer want to drive Helena mad too?
And what about the other people in the camp?
Out into the night again—I rushed across the compound toward the main hut. I found myself trying to move quietly, hoping the Singer wouldn't hear me…as if the sound of my footsteps mattered when my thoughts were howling with fear. Bright girl, Lyra; but it was still a comfort to be stealthy.
The main hut was lit brightly and I could see in through the windows. Music still played, but not "Orange Puppy"—something much softer, the volume so low I couldn't identify the tune from outside the building.
The roadies had gathered in a circle to watch something in their midst, the way onlookers might surround two people arm-wrestling at a table. A few nights ago I'd seen the same thing, when our stage manager and my roommate Violette had challenged each other to a drinking contest: rum for rum, gin for gin, beer for beer, then back to rum again. We'd all crowded around, cheering and applauding. No one cheered tonight, but it was still comforting to see them together, up to their usual antics, and I was eager to join them…until I recognized the music.
"Ghost of the Tattered Heart." The title track.
I stopped cold, just outside the door. No roadie on the crew would ever admit to playing Alex's music for pleasure. Call it roadie pride—playing the boss's music is sucking up. Unprofessional. Not cool.
As I stood there, frozen with my hand stretched toward the door latch, every head in the hut turned in my direction. All of them, like puppets in a show. Each had a smear of brown parrot blood on the forehead.
The Singer stepped out from the middle of the group. He held up his hand and waved to me. A teardrop of brown trickled down his palm and dripped off his wrist.
I ran.
I ran through the night, wondering if they would chase me. Ugly images danced through my mind, all the roadies possessed by demons who were exactly like the Singer, howling after me in pursuit. "Lyra, you've been watching too many late-night broadcasts," I muttered, and kept running.
In time I had to slow to a hard-breathing trot. No one was following me, not the roadies, not the Singer. If the Singer wanted to blood me like the roadies, he didn't have to track me in the dark; he could just wait for me to return to camp. I'd go back eventually. I had no choice—Jerith's protein synthesizers made the only human-edible food on the planet.
And when I went back, the Singer would hear my thoughts coming.
Maybe it didn't matter, I tried to tell myself. If I got smeared with blood and started to hear people's thoughts, was that so bad?
Yes…when the thoughts belonged to the Singer. If his voice invaded my mind again, I truly might kill myself to get away.
Passing through a narrow gully between two hills, I heard a voice call, "Lyra?"
I looked up to the hill on my left and saw Jerith. Sweet, unintimidating man. "Jerith!" I cried. "Jerith!" I scrambled up the hillside and wrapped my arms around his neck. Awkwardly he put one arm around me. The other was thrust deep into his pocket.
A moment later he took his hand out of the pocket and pushed me away. "You know about the parrots."
"Don't worry," I said. "I was mad at you for a while, but I got over it."
"Don't lie to me."
I took his hand and pushed it back into his pocket. Then I put my arms around his neck again, stared him straight in the eye, and said, "Jerith, I am really, truly glad to see you. Okay?"
He looked away. "You're annoyed I don't believe you. That's all I hear."
"Then your goddamned parrot is broken, Jerith! The stupid thing broadcasts a tiny bit of annoyance and completely ignores the relief I feel…"
I stopped shouting, started thinking.
"Whoa, slow down," Jerith said. "Your thoughts are all jumbling together—"
I interrupted him. "After Roland collapsed, Alex felt sorry for him, but Roland couldn't hear it. And you can't hear how glad I am to see you. They don't broadcast good thoughts, Jerith! Little irritations come through loud and clear, but not the positive stuff."
"Lyra, that doesn't make sense," he replied, shaking his head. "It's hard enough to believe parrots evolved the ability to broadcast thoughts. I mean, there's no evolutionary advantage to their kind of telepathy, is there? Caproche's animal life is so primitive, other species scarcely have thoughts. So don't ask me to make another leap of faith and believe parrot telepathy is selective. Evolution is strained to the breaking point as it is."
"Then screw evolution," I said. "The little buggers didn't evolve. They were summoned from hell."
"Come on…"
"Don't dismiss me! The things only eat Silk, right? Silk is a weapon, Jerith, you said so yourself. Eating Silk is like dining on dynamite. If they were normal animals, they'd eat grass or something."
Jerith sighed. "Yes, it's unusual they only eat alien plant matter. But that scarcely means they're demons."
"Okay, they're aliens then," I said. "They're aliens brought in during the war, the same time as the Silk. Come to think of it, Alex and I found a carrying crate for them earlier in the evening. One side for Silk, the other side for the parrots. A one-two punch: a biological weapon and a psychological one."
"What do you mean, a carrying crate?"
I described the box Alex and I had found: one compartment lined with Silk dust, the other littered with parrot bones. It was easy to imagine the box being parachuted in and crashing down harder than expected, killing a few parrots,
Of course Jerith wanted to see the box immediately, but after my flight from camp I wasn't sure where I was now, let alone how to get back to where Alex had dug up the box. "You can find it eventually," I told Jerith. "If we get out of this with our brains in one piece, I'll help you look."
"You really think we're in danger?"
"Remember how I worried that some weapons from the war might still be active? Well, they are. The parrots."
"Other races studied the debris of the war before humans got to Caproche," Jerith pointed out. "If parrots are weapons, why didn't the other survey teams notice?"
"Maybe telepathy has different wavelengths, I don't know. The other races didn't pick up anything from the parrots, but humans just happen to match the wavelength of the original targets."
"Maybe," Jerith admitted. "Telepathic races like the Laysens say they can read some species but not others. Still, the idea that parrots might be weapons…"
I grabbed his arm and said, "Think about it. They're all over the place, they're brightly colored, they're happy to be picked up and kept in your pocket…I bet they even looked cute to whatever species fought here. They were bioengineered to attract attention and be adopted as pets. So the troops picked them up, and suddenly they could hear what their fellow soldiers were thinking: all the angry stuff, all the bland stuff, but nothing good. Can you imagine what that would do to morale?"