I tried to put my mother’s popeicide out of mind as I looked up at the beautiful old buildings. I felt a hint of excitement to be here: the bulk of Vatican City was usually walled off to all outside visitors. Besides employees, only high-ranking clerics, gurus, and prophets were normally allowed access—it was a thrill to enter as a private citizen. Although, I reminded myself, I was still technically a prophet of sorts.
My mother pointed to a tall building—a steel skyscraper built atop a magnificent stone domed structure, almost like it was growing out of it. “That’s St. Peter’s Tower. That building beneath it is St. Peter’s Basilica, but during the Revelations, we had to expand so we’d have more room for joint military operations.”
“Exactly what the popes intended,” I couldn’t help but snark back.
My mother shrugged. “The ancient popes conducted plenty of wars here. Something like five different crusades? Popes were generals just like any kings or dictators, fighting battles to gain and defend their territory. We’re just carrying on the tradition.”
I rolled my eyes at her sanctimonious justifications. No amount of destruction that had come before could justify the destruction she’d done since. I struggled to keep pace as she marched toward St. Peter’s Tower. Something about her demeanor left all the little hairs on my arm on end. She wasn’t sad enough, wasn’t trying to convince me of anything. Despite her best efforts to pretend otherwise, she was still acting superior, like she held all the cards. Our ploy was supposed to take those cards away from her . . . what was she hiding up her sleeve?
“You know, my video will go live no matter what,” I warned her.
“So you said to Zack, I’m aware,” she said stoically.
“And my friends know I’m prepared to give my life if that’s what it takes.”
“We’ve got time left, I’m not worried.” Why wasn’t she worried? Why was she so sure that removing the nanotech from everyone’s heads was going to go off without a hitch? Why was she so complacent about giving up her life’s work?
She wasn’t planning to. That much was obvious. How she was going to outplay us, I couldn’t guess. And I had no choice but to follow her through the gleaming arches of St. Peter’s Tower. Whatever plan she’d concocted, at this point I could only be a passenger, watching it go by.
As a kid, on Take Your Child to Work Day, I’d always wished my mother were still alive to take me somewhere more interesting than our worship center. In a sick way, my wish was finally coming true. I followed her into the skyscraper, up a glass elevator. As we rose, I could see all of Vatican City stretching out beneath us: gardens filled with the prophets’ acolytes, doing their evil bidding. I hoped I’d be able to finally stop them.
When we arrived at the fiftieth floor, Esther had to swipe a card to get the elevator doors to open, and we emerged on a mezzanine looking out over a bustling command center, dozens of people sitting at computers below us. A wall with hundreds of screens extended two stories high, displaying scenes from all around the world. “What’s all this?” I asked her, a little breathless at the scope of these images.
“We keep an eye on things. Make sure world leaders are following the rules, not abusing their power.” She nodded to a screen, which showed a war in the Australian bush I hadn’t realized was being waged. “Not all of them do. We put a stop to it, and we keep things quiet. Make sure secrets don’t slip out.” She caught herself. “Until now, at least.”
I watched the dronelike key pushers, watching their monitors with dead eyes. “Who are these people?” I asked, wary. “CIA agents? People you’ve brainwashed or blackmailed to keep your secrets?”
“A job like this, it’s too sensitive to trust to just anyone,” she said, avoiding my eyes.
“So how do you keep them from spilling the truth?” I asked, curious.
“We have our ways,” she deflected obliquely. Looking at those thousand-mile stares, I had a feeling her “ways” might be neurochemical, same as how she kept the rest of us in line. Dr. Marko had suggested the prophets had dozens of different kinds of nanotech, each able to manipulate the brain in a different way. Those “dronelike” workers I was looking at might really just be drones, their personalities and real emotions tamped down in the service of the prophets. Whatever they were victims of, I knew it wasn’t pretty.
As I watched the drones type, my worry reached a fever pitch. All these button pushers, continuing to push their buttons . . . it didn’t seem like my mother’s brave new world was about to change at all. She wasn’t going to acquiesce to our demands; clearly she had something else planned.
“This way,” Esther said, pulling me away from the hive of worker bees. We passed a long, dark hallway lined with armed guards who had the same faraway looks as the brainwashed folks at their computers. It seemed Vatican City had a whole new level of security than I’d encountered before—biochemical enforcement of their foot soldiers.
My mother brought me into her corner office that overlooked the city: we could see all of Rome from up here, a beautiful 180-degree view. I glanced at her desk—there were no pictures of me or our family anywhere to be seen. Expected, though my own disappointment at their absence caught me off guard.
My mother moved to a computer, typing furiously. “What are you doing?” I asked nervously.
“I’m accessing your files, the ones that show what’s happening in your brain. I want to make sure your friends are still hacked in. They need to see I’ve ended this, so they can assist the plan on their end. Once the nanotech is out of everyone’s heads, we’ll have the prophets release their own video, explaining what happened.” On her screen, I saw lines of text describing everything I was seeing . . . new paragraphs being written in real time, as I read those very words. Surreal. And terrifying, to see exactly how explicitly my deepest thoughts and feelings were being displayed to everyone I cared about.
Could Esther be telling the truth? Though it seemed unlikely, a tiny bit of hope peeked through. “You can really remove the nanotech from every person in the world, from this office?” I asked, a little skeptical.
“Of course not,” she said. “But I can make the phone call that will do it.” She watched me carefully. “I can tell without looking at that screen that you’re scared. Scared I’m going to let you follow through on this plan, kill all those people.”
She was trying to wear me down. I eyed her, a challenge. “You think you could really convince yourself that it’s my fault everyone died?”
“It would be your fault, wouldn’t it?” she said, savoring her own argument. “Wouldn’t you feel guilty beyond what you could survive? And I don’t mean some metal in your head would kill you, I mean you’d want to kill yourself, for what you’d done.” She was speaking like someone who could read my mind.
“You’re the one with the power to stop it,” I reminded her. “You put that technology in people’s heads in the first place. You handed your daughter a loaded gun, I just found a way to pull the trigger.”
She paused, contemplative, then mused, “You know why I picked guilt as the mechanism to control people? Because it works so well already. Think how ashamed you feel of all the mistakes you’ve already made. Think of one, any one little transgression, and how it ate you up inside. The cruel things you’ve said to people. The lives you’ve taken.”
Though I wanted to resist her manipulations, I couldn’t help but remember the guard I’d killed in the hospital in New York. Mohammed’s death. All the people I’d lied to in the name of my fake prophetship. And she was right, that guilt weighed on me. Even my smallest high school mistakes still made me ache with shame years later. If I was responsible for the deaths of millions, that guilt would crush me. I’d deserve to be crushed.
I steeled myself. This was why I’d come here, why I’d allowed her to keep reading my thoughts. We were in a staring contest, and I needed her to know I’d never blink, never waver. “You’re right. But you know I’m willing to risk that pain, that punishment. That
video’s going public.”
“I know that,” my mother said in her usual, icy way. “But by the time anyone hears it, they won’t trust a word out of your mouth.”
I realized it then, staring at that computer screen. The live feed of my own thoughts. My mother hadn’t been trying to convince me of anything. She’d simply prompted me to remember all my darkest moments, my deepest regrets. I’d accidentally armed her with everything she needed to destroy me: my own imperfect past.
“No,” I said, tears rolling down my cheek, realizing what was coming next.
Esther’s eyes were sad. “I warned you. I warned you what would happen if you kept defying us . . .”
Two large men entered the room, grabbed me and held me down, as my mother reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a syringe. “Mom, what are you doing?” I asked, terrified.
She bristled to hear me use that word—to be identified as my mother in the midst of doing something so cruel. But she kept going, stuck the needle into my vein with a sharp pinch, and a moment later I blacked out.
3
The next thing I remember, I heard voices around me, happily chattering away in what sounded like Italian. My mother hadn’t taken me too far, at least. This place smelled of sweat, and I felt strangely disoriented, in a pleasing sort of way. Everything was dark, and even as I opened my eyes, something seemed to be covering my face. My vision was blurred, and it took me a moment to realize I was sprawled facedown on a couch of some kind.
I sat up to realize I was in a booth, at some kind of restaurant, wearing a totally unfamiliar outfit—a sequined, low-cut minidress. Nothing like I’d ever worn in my life. This place was cavernous, lit only by bare overhead bulbs. The Outcast faces I spotted around me suggested I might be somewhere seedy, and the contraband alcohol I spied on nearby tables confirmed it. This was an outlawed establishment—a bar.
As the world spun around me, I realized I was recovering from more than just a sedative . . . they’d put something else inside me as well, I could feel it. I tried to imagine what new tech this might be, until I noticed a red dot on my arm—an injection point, from where my mother had stuck a syringe. Maybe this was nothing more than street drugs, heroin or something like that—plenty embarrassing as a prophet, to be seen wandering in a sedated stupor.
I adjusted my awful, too-revealing dress and got my bearings. I was alone. Was this all part of her plot to discredit me? Who knew what kind of paparazzi might be staged around here, to capture my embarrassment on film. They might not even need to. Random strangers at this bar were snickering, snapping my picture—sending it via texts and social media posts.
I tried to put my thoughts together into a useful shape. A plan. Where were the exits? Was there anyone here who still believed in me, whom I could ask for help? One Outcast girl leaned over, and her camera flashed in my eyes. Disoriented, I reached out and grabbed her hand. “How did I get here?” I mumbled to her.
She recoiled, pulling her hand back—a kind of gesture I hadn’t experienced in so long: disgust. My influence had dwindled to nothing. She stifled a giggle. “You don’t remember?”
She looked to her friend, standing next to her, and they both cracked up. “I was drugged,” I tried to say, but the words were slurred, and in this loud place, no one could hear me. I tried to say it louder, “I was drugged!” Now the whole crowd was laughing at my fumbling speech.
I tried to stand, to get out of there, but my legs were woozy. “Help,” I whispered, but no one could hear me over the buzzing crowd. All these people who’d worshipped me only days earlier were now laughing at me. They’d once clamored to touch me, to look into my eyes, to commune with any shred of the sacredness they thought I embodied. Now they kept their distance, mocking me from afar. What had happened, what had my mother done while I was unconscious, to turn everyone against me so quickly?
I found a stranger’s phone abandoned on a table nearby and quickly googled my name. In place of the usual worshipful think pieces, now I found takedowns. My mother had found every possible witness on earth who could discredit me. She’d sifted through every one of my worst memories and found a way to display them to the world. Even my old classmates, who’d once sung my praises, were now humming my death march.
I devoured news articles, reading every terrible word being printed about me. “She really wasn’t that nice,” one former classmate said. It was a girl named Ann, my former partner on a school project back in high school. She’d once heard me talking about her behind my back, and I’d apologized, which I’d thought had been the end of it. But she still resented me, all these years later, especially watching me become a beloved prophet. “I didn’t want to burst everyone’s bubble, but yeah, she was kind of a self-absorbed mean girl. Really full of herself, sanctimonious. Like someone who’d never really experienced any hardship but felt like she could tell you how to live your life, you know?” Her words stung, because I knew they were true. I felt every bit the failure everyone saw me as.
“Hey! Give me back my phone!” someone said, grabbing it roughly from my hand. My days of being showered with free gifts were over. These Outcasts had loved me for my lies, and now they hated me because of the truth. Everyone’s loathing boiled together into a sick sludge, and I felt like I was sinking into it. I needed to find a way out, to contact my friends in the resistance.
I glanced around, certain that my mother would have sent someone to keep an eye on me. I needed to evade whomever she’d assigned to be my tail and find another way out. I spotted a door on the other side of the room that seemed to lead to an exit. Could I make it there, with all these roving eyes on me?
I feigned passing out and dropped beneath the table. It felt almost instinctive to collapse, and once I hit the cool tile floor below, I was strangely comfortable. I didn’t even mind the grime; in fact, its grittiness and stickiness on my fingers felt almost pleasant. But I resisted the urge to go back to sleep down here. I ignored the gawking voices, laughing at my fall, and looked around.
I squeezed between the tangle of legs, crawling for the exit. The owners of those legs occasionally cried out, confused, but I pressed on, determined, finally finding an empty booth in a corner to hide beneath.
“Where’d she go?” I heard someone say in English. I’d managed to evade notice; I was safe for now at least, hiding in this tiny little crawlspace beneath these tables. Maybe I could wait here until the bar emptied out, confuse my tail into thinking I’d escaped. Sober up, at least.
But just as I felt my head clearing, to my dismay, a strange face ducked beneath the table. A dark-haired man in his twenties, smiling wickedly. “No, you can’t wait here until the bar empties out,” he said.
It was such a perfect echo of my plans, it took me a moment to process exactly what he’d said. How had he known what I was thinking? And then I remembered—my mother’s nanotech was still in my brain. My enemies had a perfect representation of all my thoughts, which meant this man must be an enemy. There was no escape; I couldn’t plot one even if I tried.
I stayed put. As long as I was under this booth, they couldn’t kill me. No one could make me look like a fool. Or at least, no more a fool than I’d already made of myself, and I was doing plenty of that on my own. “Come on,” he said, low enough so that only I could hear. “You did a good job. You’re done for the night. Let’s go back.”
Woozy, I wanted to acquiesce. But I braced myself against the sides of the booth. If he wanted to take me out of here, he’d have to drag me. “What’s going on?” I heard a stranger ask.
The agent answered the stranger, playing a part. “The prophet chick? I don’t know, she just came up and started trying to make out with me earlier. I was worried about her. Then she ran in here, I think to have another drink. She was talking about some guy she broke up with, Zack.”
“Her boyfriend?” someone said, delighted to hear such juicy gossip about a disgraced prophet.
“Turns out, he never believed in her. He always thou
ght she was just some silly kid—he knew she was full of crap before the rest of us did.” Hearing the truth mixed into his fabrication hurt worse somehow. He could have made up a lie, and I wouldn’t have cared . . . having everyone know the truest, worst things about me filled me with a new kind of shame I’d never experienced before.
Instinctively, I moved for the exit. I knew escape was unlikely, but at least I was going to try. I popped up among a few confused patrons and noticed my dress had ridden up to my waist, exposing my underwear. Embarrassed, I pulled it down and elbowed my way through the crowd, making a beeline for the door on the opposite side of the room. I had a significant lead on my tail, and for a moment, it seemed like I was getting away.
But suddenly a figure stepped in front to block me. Another guard? As I looked up, a wave of shock washed over me—the man blocking my path was my father.
4
I hadn’t seen my father since I’d left him in the stadium in South Africa, and he looked older now, sadder, tired. How had he found me here? I hoped that he knew me well enough to see through my mother’s ruse, that he’d know I was being set up. Could he be here to rescue me? But the look on his face proved that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Dad, how did you . . .”
“I saw you on the news,” he said tersely. “I’ve been seeing you, all over Europe.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.
“The car you stole in Paris? The drunken cursing fit in Barcelona? It wasn’t hard to find you tonight, the paparazzi outside were a dead giveaway.” The breadth of my supposed crimes startled me. Had my mother staged all that with a double?
“It’s not real . . .” I begged him, but he wouldn’t listen.
“I don’t want to hear it!” he roared. “Another lie, you can’t stop lying, can you? You’ve committed blasphemy and worse, and you don’t even show any remorse!”
Ruthless Page 20
