YA fiction: Here, speakers have to buy words, but things change when Asha and Zeb try graffiti

A flag from the ink-blue streamers above fluttered over. Asha picked it up and frowned at the message: There are no free Words!

The paint can was whipped out of her hand all of a sudden, and a playful whoop from Zeb signalled that the can had a new owner.

Daubing her nose with one fingertip, he flipped the R in Ryter 21, so that there were two R’s now, standing back-to-back. Together, they looked like a ribbon bow – or the way Zeb had drawn it, a tree.

Grinning, Asha extended the trailing tails of the letters to twist together like the roots of trees once did, back when there were more trees in the world. With a nod of approval, Zeb added leaves and two stick figures in the branches.

“You and me?” she asked, pointing to them.

Zeb only cocked his head…he’d heard something. Grabbing her stuff, Asha scurried out of the alley to scope the area while he finished up.

Out on Gunther Glib Maidan, the havaa blew, though no one knew why it was called that anymore. Asha wrapped her raincoat tighter. Here, the grass had been torn up, overlaid with spikes and concrete so Speakers would have nowhere to assemble – or to protest.

There was nothing on the square from the old days now, save for what was left of the Library, with its tattered awning and its Closed Indefinitely sign in the window. And an enormous Gunther Glib statue, in a state of constant sprucing, around which the endless traffic wrapped itself on regular days.

Asha craned her neck; the gigantic stone figure of Word Bloc’s supreme leader towered over her. His mouth half-open, as if to say, “A Word for every Speaker and a Speaker for every Word!”

It had hardly turned out that way, had it?

Something splintered inside Asha, or perhaps something that had long been broken found a new way to fix itself. She shimmied up the scaffolding.

From here, she could look into the alley clearly. She clambered upon the black pedestal, driven by an ache that had no words to it.

Straightening slowly, Asha sprayed Ryter 21 across the statue’s chest. They were hypnotic, the large looping letters, crimson and forbidden, and Asha found herself surrendering to the sweep of paint on stone. When she was done, she noticed that Zeb was packing up. Her gaze wandered up the next street radiating from the traffic circle and she stiffened – two umbrellas had appeared as if out of nowhere.

Two more. How did she miss them coming?

A rogue gust of the havaa turned one umbrella inside out. Below it, Asha discerned the dreaded black uniforms of the Chasers, with their golden-yellow WB insignia. Word Bloc’s militia was meant to be at the parade, she thought, not here. Their jackboots struck the asphalt with a sickening certainty that dispelled all doubt. Somewhere, a stray dog yelped.

Another sound yanked Asha’s head in the opposite direction. She recognised them as they advanced towards the square; they were Speakers demonstrating against the rising prices of Words without the words to do it. They must have drawn the Chasers here. Her stomach wrenched. Their protest would soon be crushed, like every protest before it. But what of Zeb and her – caught between the two, breaking curfew on Gathering Day?

Asha’s panicked thoughts chased each other like leaves in a storm until, at last, habit intervened. She brought two fingers to her lips. An untrained ear would have mistaken it for a bird call: two twitters, one chirp. But Zeb snapped to attention.

He shot out the alley, his eyes widening briefly when he saw her perched on the statue. Then he slid into the ditch and lay there, deathly still.

“Who’s there?”

A single Chaser torchlight came on, its beam a machete slicing the darkness. The torchlight picked out something on the walls. Wavered. Stopped. The Chaser umbrellas bumped against each other like crows on a crowded ledge. One by one, they snapped shut. A Chaser helmet jerked, then another, till an invisible string had pulled all their heads to look the same way.

The yellow circle of the flashlight caught every detail. A howl of anger rose from one Chaser. Something about the tree Zeb and Asha had drawn unsettled them. Or was it Ryter 21, those two words having no business being up on a wall, the paint still fresh?

What would Zeb tell her to do now? Run!

A Chaser spotted Asha, still perched on the statue, his finger tracking her in slow motion. Asha’s heart kicked about wildly as his flashlight found her. The paint can slipped from her fingers like a grenade about to go off, her mouth opening in a scream. All sound, no words.

And then Zeb exploded from the ditch, his legs firing like pistons.

Excerpted with permission from Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words, Payal Kapadia, Hachette India.