by Tosca Lee
* * *
I unzip the carrier bag, carefully retrieve a cool vial and wrapped syringe. I slip them into my coat pocket, reach behind me for a bundle in the back.
Lastly, I pull the cap and wig from my head, peel the beard from my face.
But the woman who emerges is not the same one I knew before.
The gibbous moon is out tonight. The snow has mostly melted from a road that cuts like dark ribbon between hoary fields. I lock the car, slide the keys on top of the front tire, and start walking.
The gravel crunches beneath my boots, the sound crisp, brittle as the air. It feels good to walk after so many hours, though I have to cover my ears with one gloved hand and then the other to keep them from aching in the cold, switching the bundle from arm to arm.
Forty-five minutes later, I crouch near a copse of trees along the edge of an old creek bed and study the steeple of Percepta Hall where it rises above the wall less than two hundred yards away.
I can just make out the Guardian parked in his black truck this side of the wall. But there’s something else I didn’t anticipate: a shadow moving near the corner. A second Guardian on foot.
They’ve doubled the guard.
But of course they have; the Enclave is loaded with food. Not just that but clothing, fresh well water, propane, generators, and enough living space for a thousand people in a pinch.
I circle back the way I came, drop the bundle into the ditch at the base of a skeletal tree. My cheeks, nose, and ears are frozen by now, and I’m shivering inside my coat as I start down the long drive I walked out by that day in late September.
For a place that barely evolved during the fifteen years I was there, a lot’s changed in two-and-a-half months. Not only are there two Guardians in front, but one of them sits in a brand-new guardhouse outside the Narrow Gate. And there’s a new tower looking out over the wall from inside that reminds me of a state penitentiary.
I’m maybe fifty yards away when the guard standing outside speaks swiftly into a walkie-talkie. He’s wearing a ski mask, his mouth a fleshy hole in the darkness.
A second later a spotlight flicks to life on the tower overhead, its beam pointed directly at me.
“Stop! This is private property!” the guard on the ground outside shouts.
I keep walking.
The Guardian on the ground speaks into his walkie-talkie. “Yeah. We have another one.” A few seconds later, he comes striding out. At the sight of me, he stops.
“Wynter?” he says, strangling on my name. And though I don’t recognize him in his ski mask, he obviously knows me. “What are you doing here?”
“I have n-nowhere else to go,” I say, my teeth chattering.
“You’re cast out,” the second guard says. “You need to leave!”
“That’s against Testament,” I grit out. “New Earth’s g-gates are open to the penitent.”
“They’re closed to you.”
I fall to my knees in the gravel, lift up my hands. “I repent!” I shout. “I r-renounce the fallen world!”
“Stop!” the second one says, and for a minute, I think he might backhand me or worse, grab the new Taser gleaming from his belt and drop me rigid.
“You really want to t-tell Magnus you turned me away?” I say. “He wanted to marry me once.”
“You look like a whore,” he spits, looking me up and down.
“I repent!” I repeat loudly. “I forsake my life before and renounce the fallen world!”
His fist flies at me, crashes into my cheek. I go sprawling, my head ringing. Gasping against the dirt.
Two thoughts occur to me at once. First: for once, New Earth isn’t sheathing its policy toward women in polite language about protecting them. No more mincing words.
Second: I wonder if this happened to Kestral.
“What are you doing?” the first Guardian demands of the second, obviously horrified. “You heard what Magnus said!”
At that, a look like terror crosses the second Guardian’s face.
I push up slowly as the first Guardian jerks his walkie-talkie from its holster and turns away. I hear my name, the crackle of static. A minute later, he’s shouting up to the tower.
The lock clicks in the Narrow Gate in front of us.
“You’re relieved of duty,” the first Guardian informs the second. “Wynter, get up.”
“Thank you,” I murmur as he waits for me to walk ahead of him, too pious to touch me if he isn’t forced to.
“Don’t thank me. He’s right. You look like a whore.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
* * *
The Guardian escorts me down the stairs beneath Percepta Hall. I stumble in the darkness and he’s finally forced to grab my upper arm to steady me.
The Admitter on duty rises at the end of the hall. A kerosene lantern sits off to the side of his desk beside an open ledger. He looks confused and then concerned—probably at the reddening mark on my cheek—until recognition transforms his features and his eyes widen in surprise.
I lower my head, fasten my eyes on the floor.
“Did you call in a female for her reckoning?” he asks the Guardian. Clearly I’m pushing the limits of protocol. Even I have never seen an apostate returned.
“Please don’t wake anyone,” I say. “Here—” I open my coat and start to dig through my jeans pockets, producing a few dirty coins from one, a crimson lipstick from the other, both of which I drop onto the desk.
I lift my palms to show that they’re empty.
All the while, the only thing I can think about is Truly. Of her asleep, this very minute, in the girls’ barrow on the other side of the compound.
The Admitter glances up, questions naked in his eyes. What made me return. What happened to me in between. Questions he will, of course, have to ask in extraordinary detail. Until then, I swear I can hear him imagining what I had to do to survive, his explicit reconstruction of my sins.
I lower my head and unzip my coat. Lay it over the empty chair in front of the desk. Turn to face him, palms open at my sides.
He hesitates and then comes around the desk and begins to search me, too thoroughly, checking the pockets of my jeans, digging out a couple more coins and a chewing gum wrapper I didn’t even know was there before feeling for anything concealed within my sweater. I toe out of my boots and he gives a cursory glance inside each one.
When he grabs the lantern and a ring of keys from the wall cell, I reach for my coat. He snatches it promptly from my hands.
“Please,” I say. “I’m still really cold.”
He opens the nearest cell and I move inside. But when I reach for the coat, he holds it out of reach.
“Please! ‘Give mercy to the traveler,’ ” I say, quoting the Testament, volume three.
“You’re not a traveler if you’re back,” he says and slams the door.
• • •
THE EYE STARES over the toilet in the corner, red and unblinking, kept alive by batteries. There might not be any power, but there are still priorities. And observing the shame of others will always be one of them.
The cell is cold, but there is, at least, one new concession: an extra blanket on the cot.
I wrap it around me where I sit on the floor, back against the wall.
He put me in my usual room where, I noted by the dim light of the hallway, the altar cloth is missing and the picture of Magnus has been replaced. It is familiar and alien to me at once, like the Enclave itself. Because although Ara, Magnolia, and countless others I lived with and saw every day are out there, sleeping in the same barrows, vying for the same things—Heaven, perfection, and, barring that, to be just a little more perfect than the person beside them—Jaclyn is missing.
But Truly is here. And if it’s even remotely true, what Magnus said about all time existing at once, then she and I are already gone.
I think this even as I’m aware of the fact that I’m locked in a cell.
I drop my head against the concrete
block behind me, stare up at the ceiling, and wait.
Almost an hour later I hear it: the purposeful step in the hall. It passes by my door. Stops near the desk.
A few seconds later a key turns in the lock.
I glance up.
The red light is off.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
* * *
The lantern lights up my cell. I get to my feet and the blankets fall away as Magnus locks the door behind him, pocketing the keys.
I remember the day I first saw him in the yard. The way he impressed me. Not just because of the deference everyone showed him but for the fact that he didn’t even notice. Unlike my father, whom I’d watched chase attention with dropped names, big ideas, and bad jokes, with his flattery, his money, and his eyes. Who had a knack for carrying conversations on too long with everyone but us.
I can still see in that silhouette, if I try, the Magnus I met as a child. Important because others said so, filled with divine whispers, cloaked in the glamour of God. He’s wrong; he’s not two people. He was never that man to begin with.
He sets the lantern on the altar and then, as though just noticing it, picks up the Testament beside it and studies the cover.
“I wrote this when I was twenty-eight,” he says quietly. He turns it over in his hands, traces the letters of the title as though it were an alien thing. “I had just had an affair with a woman who felt, for the time we were together, like the answer to everything in my universe. She awakened my senses like a drug, crowding out all thoughts except for those about her. I was obsessed. I couldn’t get enough. Until the day I realized that, like a drug, her effects had waned, leaving me bored.
“That same year I realized that everything I’d ever pursued—money, success, women, influence—had failed to fulfill me. I felt cheated. Unable to find pleasure. I left my home and rented a dingy apartment in Chicago hardly bigger than this cell—which became the basis of the Penitence you know now. For three months, I ate only as much as I needed to survive, drinking nothing but water, as I divested myself of every desire until the suffering I went through to find it became a high and its own form of addiction.”
He pages through the volume, head tilted. “I wrote this entire Testament in an effort to capture a way of life so stringent and tightly controlled that I could spend myself trying to follow it the same way I had exhausted myself with the world.” He closes it quietly. “And when I finally emerged, everything was fresh and beautiful to me again—for a while.”
He tosses the book onto the altar. “I used to think that we’re all just looking for something to feed us. For our next addiction. Something to call a greater purpose. But now I realize: deep down, we want to suffer.”
He leans back against the wall, regarding me at last. “You may not realize it, Wynter, but you’ve given me a great gift. In wanting you, I knew I was pursuing something that couldn’t last. Not you, but my desire for you. I knew it and craved you anyway. Then when you left”—he shakes his head—“I was angry. I felt betrayed. I pitied myself.
“You see, I had forgotten how to suffer. How much clarity it brings. I began to write again and a whole new Testament started to pour from me. I’ve worked tirelessly on it. I barely sleep. When it’s finished in a few days, I plan to have all my previous volumes burned. All of them.” He makes a sweeping movement with his arm. “Trash. But this new volume—my final Testament—will serve as the foundation of New Earth to come as we welcome thousands to our sacred ground.”
I blink. Is he insane? “You can’t bring thousands here! There’s an epidemic going on and even if there wasn’t, there isn’t enough room!” I say, gesturing in the direction of the stairs outside.
He crosses his arms and tsks. “Wynter, you’ve missed out on so much. I don’t mean here, but our new facility. We broke ground in October. We’ve designed an entire center to take in those in need, to quarantine them until they can be integrated or segregated for medical help, counseling . . .” He waves his hand, seeming bored already with the details.
I squint at him in the light of the lamp. A second Enclave. A growing congregation. A horde of new followers arriving out of desperation, hunger, sickness—to find meaning in a world gone insane.
But of course.
“New Earth will be a beacon of light. A new way. A city of hope in a world that has been waiting for just such a time as this. We’ll create a new tier of Elders. Build a formal school.”
Anyone outside, hearing these words, might shout “Amen!” I’d watched it happen for years—in service, in the yard. The Select straining to catch his words like crumbs. And I know a part of him is waiting for me to praise his new vision. To stand in astonishment, even now. To proclaim it the will of God.
“You framed me for Jackie’s murder.”
He regards me with a frown. “I framed no one. I simply reported that my wife was found dead and that our most promising property had gone missing. As I understand it, you’re still at large. I could send a Guardian into town for the sheriff, and the entire country would be grateful—until they learned you no longer possessed our promising property. You think you’re cast out here? The world is a cruel and unforgiving place. It will never take you in again. You will have no friend, no shelter, no safe haven.” His lips pull back from his teeth.
He crosses the space between us and reaches out to cup my cheek, thumb brushing across my lips. “But that need not happen. So long as you’re willing to provide me some much-needed new inspiration. To prove me wrong about how long desire can last. Though I’m afraid you’ll have to remain in this cell. It wouldn’t look right for you to return to us now. It’ll be our secret,” he whispers, straightening with a wink. But there’s nothing playful in his expression.
“Let me see Truly,” I say. “And I’ll do anything you like.”
He pulls something from his trouser pocket, lifts it to the light. “So you can give her this?”
The vial.
I lunge at him, and he holds it out over the concrete floor.
I freeze.
“Ah, ah. These little glass vials are so fragile. And so mysterious. You never can tell exactly what is inside. Should I guess? Let’s see. I think you got this from someone you gave my samples to. That it is derived from something that was mine. But you didn’t bring it back for me, did you?”
“Please!” I say, lifting my palms and then pressing them together before me the way I have so many times. “People are getting sick.”
“Yes, I know,” he says, giving the vial a little shake. “We had to release three to the world last week. Like animals, back to the wild.”
I go still. Sick people—here. Already?
Am I too late?
He walks several steps away and pulls the syringe from his pocket. I rush after him, to fall at his feet, palms clasped high above my face. “Please! You have to save her. Truly’s all I have left!”
“How do I do it?” he says, pulling the cap from the syringe with his teeth. “Like this? How much?”
“No! It’s only one dose. It can’t be split. Please, for the love of God—she’s your daughter!”
“For the love . . . of God?” he says, expression darkening. “Have you not read the Testament? A daughter does me no good.”
He plunges the syringe into the vial.
“Magnus, I’ll do anything you want. I can give you a son!”
“You didn’t hear?” he asks, filling the syringe, his gaze lazy. “Ara already did.”
I blink—and then scream as he jabs himself in the forearm and pushes the plunger all the way down.
I don’t move as the contents of that vial disappear into his veins, the serum Ashley labored over for hours gone within seconds.
“You’d endanger your own child,” I whisper.
“Of course not,” he says, withdrawing the needle and setting it, and the vial, firmly on the altar. “Truly and the baby have been moved to the guesthouse to keep them safe. Meanwhile, what would the world say if Go
d’s own Interpreter got sick?”
He straightens, fills his lungs with a long, slow breath, and exhales, as though a new man.
“Now then,” he says.
In an instant, he’s on me. Grabbing my arms, pushing me toward the cot—until my head snaps in the direction of the door.
Following my gaze, he pauses, extricates himself to check the lock.
And then I’m leaping up and onto his back, arm wrapped around his throat. Snaking a leg round his waist, I grab my opposite bicep and shove his head forward with the back of my hand until we’re ear to ear.
He thrashes, takes us both onto the floor. But I hang on like a spider monkey as he goes limp in my arms.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
* * *
I wonder what’s happening in Nebraska. If tests might be running on Ashley’s vaccine even now. If Ashley himself is crashed out on the sofa of an office or a chair in the UNMC doctors’ lounge.
It occurs to me that none of us should have entered these walls. That we have never been “in but not of the world” here but in another world completely. That this was never faith, but seclusion in a place so safe that faith need never be tested even as we lived our lives of duality. Tempting new initiates with food that was forbidden, promising love but doling out judgment, giving away the clothes we deemed immoral at our ministry in the name of God.
A groggy groan issues five feet away on the floor.
Magnus grimaces, seems to be trying to focus his eyes. Works his jaw as though I punched him, which I might have accidentally done while he was out.
“What . . . did you do?” he mumbles. His face is flushed.
It’s about 3:30 a.m. by my guess and my butt is sore from the cold concrete. I gather the blanket closer around me. The other one’s thrown over Magnus’s bare torso. I don’t need to look to know that he is sweating. I can smell it.
“What I did is come back for my niece. What you did is inject yourself with an extremely virulent dose of the caribou flu. Mixed with a sedative. Though I’d like to take credit for the sleeper hold.”
