Wordless Read Online Free PDF Page A

grinned again at the security guard. “Can I go, now, officer? I have a higher level of clearance, after all.”
    The guard scowled and punched, rather than pushed, the button to open the outer gate.
    I almost forgot to empty the bags into the containers outside after I passed through the gate, and to leave the keys on the driver’s seat for the security guard. And I nearly failed to stop myself from running instead of walking across the sun-baked parking lot to our garbage truck.
    “Are you all right?” Drey asked as soon as he laid eyes on me. “You sick?”
    I jumped in with only a shake of my head. I kept silent while he maneuvered the truck’s beefy mechanical forks to lift the containers, tipping the contents into the compactor. If I started talking about what was happening, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from admitting I’d sneaked into the Word’s courtyard and found her note. This job had been a favor from Drey, an opportunity , and I was most likely screwing it up spectacularly. The crumpled paper felt like a lead weight in my pocket. Never mind the laminated card in my other pocket.
    I finished up the rest of our collection run without saying much. The old routine was colorless and boring after the excitement—too much excitement—of the Athenaeum. I was all but jumping out of my neon-green overalls with impatience, and maybe something closer to panic, by the time the day was over.
    I closed myself in my room as soon as we returned to the garage, telling Drey I felt sick—which was actually true. As soon as I locked the door, I tore the piece of paper out of my jacket pocket and hurled it onto the metal desk like it was a live scorpion. Maybe it was even more lethal; I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t have an easy way to find out.
    I spread the sheet flat on the desk. The near-perfect handwriting was still visible through the wrinkles. The page looked out of place in the room; Drey didn’t keep much paper around. Part of me just wanted to get rid of it, and fast, like it was incriminating evidence. There was a lighter underneath my cot, which I’d used for smoking a couple of times before I’d lost interest in making my mouth taste like a garbage incinerator. I could burn it.
    But what if the message was important? What if it was meant for me? What if it was from her and it wasn’t some sick test of my loyalties to my new employer?
    Maybe I needed to get rid of the paper, but not the message.
    There was a postcard taped above the desk, the only decoration on the concrete wall. Drey said he’d found it in a trash container long before he’d found me in one. Matterhorn, Switzerland, the letters over the picture apparently said—Drey had asked someone who could read before he gave it to me. It showed a craggy mountain and a more wide-open sky than I’d ever seen. As much as I’d stared at the front of it, wishing I could be there, I knew the back was blank.
    I tugged open one of the drawers in the desk, cursing when it protested with a shriek. The thing needed to be oiled—not that now was the time. Drey might be wordless, but he knew numbers and used to scribble down simple calculations for the garage, back before he started using his phone. My fingers scrabbled past a broken calculator for a dirty nub of a pencil that looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade. I certainly hadn’t been using it.
    I slapped the postcard face-down next to the glaring white page and hunched over both, studying the incomprehensible message, the pencil gripped in my hand like a knife.
    The first letter looked like scaffolding with only one shelf in the middle. I carved it as delicately as I could—though my dexterity was definitely lacking—into the postcard. The second letter was a little more difficult: a vertical line with three shelves sticking out to the right. The third was easy: a right angle like the square ruler out in the garage, which I almost wished I had for this project even though it would be