by Ted Dekker
The woman welcomed me with a graceful wave. “Come.”
The little girl popped out from behind the lean-to again. “Come, come!”
Compelled by such an eager reception, I slipped off my horse and walked up to the camp. The girl grabbed my hand and led me around the side, grinning ear to ear as if presenting a great trophy.
There on the ground by a small fire sat Talya, nursing a clay mug of herbal tea. He chuckled at the girl before lifting his soft eyes to me.
“Good morning, 49th. So nice of you to join us. This is Soromi.” He motioned with his mug to the woman. “And her daughter, Maya. Say hello to Rachelle, Maya.”
“Hello, Miss Rachelle.”
Thoughts of scolding Talya for leaving me took a back seat to the sight of such a delighted girl. “Hello, Maya.”
“Talya says you are very special.”
I glanced at him. “He does?”
“But that you can’t be special until you see that you aren’t special because you aren’t any more special than me.”
They all smiled at me.
“Well, if Talya said that, it must be true,” I said with a slight bite in my tone.
“Now, now, 49th, they’ve come a long way to help a poor Scab in distress, so be nice.” Talya motioned to a small boulder opposite him. “Time for a little course correction, my dear.”
The mother, Soromi, settled to the ground and leaned on one arm. Her daughter sat beside the boulder Talya wanted me to sit on. I lowered myself to the rock and the girl scooted closer, smiling up at me. Half her teeth were missing, as any young child’s would be.
Talya cleared his throat. “I was just sharing some wonderful news with Soromi and Maya, but first you should know what’s happening.”
“That would be nice,” I said.
“We will see.” He shoved his chin at the tree line fifty paces away. “Just beyond the ridge lies the Marrudo plateau. On that plateau camps the Circle, the Albinos who’ve come with Thomas Hunter, just an hour’s ride from here.”
I stared at the trees. Thomas, the one who’d dreamed of the other world like I did. “He’s there?”
“No, but his son is. And in desperate want of some guidance. You’re needed, 49th. We leave as soon as we finish our tea, fair enough?”
My heart skipped a beat. “Samuel’s there?”
“In the flesh. The one who’s smitten with you and refuses to admit it. That Samuel. But I’m afraid you’ll only make a fool of yourself in your current state of being, so I’ve asked Soromi and Maya to share the good news that might help you out.” He winked at the little girl. “Maya, tell Rachelle what you’ve learned.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Talya says that before we came into these . . .” She glanced at her mother, who helped her out.
“Earthen vessels. But you can use your own term.”
Maya turned back to me. “Before we were in these clay bodies, we knew Elyon, who made us. And we still know him, but our clay brains don’t know it.” She beamed proudly at her mother.
Soromi nodded. “Well done, Maya.” She lifted her gray eyes to me. Kind eyes despite her diseased skin. “Talya tells me you need to be reminded that we were foreknown by Elyon before this world, as written. To be foreknown is to have had experience with, not knowledge about. You were in union with Elyon before this world, you understand this?”2
Did I? Of course I did.
“Yes.”
“Also that all who were foreknown have been glorified. This is also written in your Scriptures. And yet most are still blind to themselves as that glorified light.”
She said it with such grace that I wondered if this really was news she’d just heard. But if she’d known Talya from before, why was she still Horde?
“If everyone who’s foreknown is glorified, are all foreknown?” I asked, feeling anything but.
“That isn’t our business or within our comprehension. Only know that you were and are.”
Still, it sounded totally foreign to me now.
“Maya,” Talya said to the little girl, “see if you can tell the 49th why we are here in this world of clay bodies with so many problems.”
“To see ourselves as light in the darkness so we can be that light,” she announced, clearly reciting what had been taught to her. “Justin made us light, like him!”
“Excellent! Now tell Rachelle why we experience so much darkness in this world.”
“Because we wear masks that blind us to the light.” Maya beamed. She promptly stood and pretended to rip a mask off her face. “We must take them off!”
Talya chuckled, completely taken with her. “Such a smart little girl!”
And I had to admit, in that moment I didn’t see her as Horde but as . . . well . . . a delighted little girl.
“When you grow up, Maya,” Talya said, “the whole world will listen to you. You’re so very good with words.”
Maya grinned and squatted back down, suddenly a little shy.
Talya stared at the small fire and spoke gently. “Now tell her the rest of the good news, Soromi.”
She lifted her kind gray eyes. “We all put our faith in something.” The words slipped from her mouth easily, surely long known. “Those beliefs have more power than we can possibly imagine. With our thoughts—our perceptions—we create our lives. Everyone is doing this all the time, in every moment. It’s called binding, which is another word for faith. You know this, daughter?”
It was Talya’s teaching when he walked on water. I glanced at him. “Yes.”
“What we bind on earth is bound in heaven. In the same way, what we loose on earth is loosed in heaven, Yeshua taught.3 To bind is to attach or align to. To loose is to let go of or to forgive. The power of forgiveness is yours. What you forgive is forgiven, and what you don’t is not forgiven and masters you still.4 Binding and forgiving are your greatest powers, experienced in every moment of life. They create your experience of life on earth.”
I felt Maya’s little hand settle on my thigh and I closed my fingers around hers, eyes on Soromi, wondering who she was to know so much.
“Your earthen vessel is bound to this world of judgment. It has many special relationships with itself and with this world, and it searches for love and approval in those relationships. All these are the gods it has deep attachments to. These are all the things your earthen vessel thinks should be based upon what it has been imprinted with over many generations. So it seeks meaning and salvation in those things. The earthen vessel is like a bird born into a room, blind to the great sky beyond the room, knowing itself only by what it sees within the walls. Do you follow, child?”
Her words reached into me, and for a moment I wondered if she was Justin, coming to me as a woman. If not, her words could be his, I thought.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Then you’ll understand when I tell you that your great inheritance in this life is the kingdom beyond the room. But to enter it, you have to leave the room, yes? You can’t know your risen, glorified self unless you surrender your need for approval and significance in that small room that you think defines you. It’s the cost of freedom, yes?”5
“Talya says most Albinos only talk of the sky but don’t know how to fly,” Maya interjected, excited again. “We are free to fly in the sky like a bird!”
Soromi smiled at her daughter. “Like a bird. In the perspective beyond the room, everything will look very different. New sight is found. All things are new. But to enter the door that opens to freedom, you have to leave behind your attachment to the room and embrace your true identity as the one who can fly in the sky.”
Emotions clogged my throat because I felt like that poor tethered bird, flapping hopelessly in its small, dark prison. A diseased bird. I looked at Talya.
“But I’m . . .” I stopped, not wanting to offend little Maya with complaints of my condition.
“You’re Horde,” Soromi said. “And in your judgment of yourself as Horde—your binding—you make for yo
urself a prison. But if you let go of your judgment of your flesh—if you forgive yourself—you will be free to see that you’re neither Horde nor Albino. You’re the daughter of Elyon and you love who you are, made in his likeness.”
“That’s why you made me Horde?” I bit off, looking at Talya. “So that I would have one more thing to let go of?”
“Not one more thing, 49th,” Talya said. “The whole room.”
He held my gaze for a long time, and I felt frightened, wondering if he was losing faith in me.
“I’m sorry,” I began. “I just—”
“No need to condemn yourself for the fear you feel, child,” Soromi said in her soft voice. “Condemnation is only trying to fight fear with fear.”
She picked up a stick and poked the fire.
“Among my people, I’m an outcast. My husband was a great warrior. Cruel. He threw me out three years ago because I found love in the arms of a more gentle man. I was desperate, you know. Talya found us in the Elong desert and brought us food. Even more, he showed us truth over the years. He asked us to remain Horde.” Her eyes lifted. “I see now that it was for you.”
Talya had known even then that this would happen? And to what end?
“Don’t you want to be healed?” I asked.
She smiled. “Am I diseased? You mean my body. But you must see, being in this body of pain has allowed me to know myself beyond it. I may very well be Albino one day, but my life is happening now. And in this moment, my practice is to align my sight to love. This is how my binding to the world of judgment falls away on its own. I think that’s wonderful, don’t you?”
Maya looked up at me and grinned. “You can see too,” she said. “Don’t be sad, I have gray skin and I still love you.”
Hearing those words, I hung my head as tears slipped from my eyes. For a long time no one spoke. It was just me feeling sorry for myself and Maya holding my hand. And for those few minutes, hers was the hand of Justin to me.
I finally lifted my head, sniffing, and I chuckled to cover my embarrassment.
Maya jumped up and brought me a yellow fruit from a bag in the corner. “Nanka! It will make you strong!”
“Thank you, Maya.”
“You’ll have to bring it with you,” Talya said, setting his mug down. “Duty calls. The worlds await.”
Maya immediately ran to Talya’s stallion, grabbed the reins and tugged the beast toward us. “I go with you!” she announced.
“Yes, Maya has generously agreed to lend assistance in the event you run into trouble,” Talya said. “I’ve assured them both that only you will face danger.”
“You aren’t coming with me?”
“I’ll take you, but I think it’s best if I stay back, don’t you? Maya can be your guide.” He swung into his saddle, reached for Maya’s outstretched arm, and gracefully pulled her up in front of him.
I looked at Soromi. “You’re not coming?”
“This is Maya’s adventure,” she said, hurrying up to her child. She took Maya’s hand. “Now remember, do as Talya says. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“I’m a big girl, Mama.”
Talya clicked and Judah stepped out of the trees. “Come along, 49th. An opportunity for salvation calls you forth.”
22
STILL TOTALLY UNAWARE of my dilemma in Other Earth, the me on Earth was rebuilding my identity from scratch, just like anyone first coming into the world.
That’s not to say I was a child. Only my mind was, and it was learning fast.
My body, on the other hand, was more adult than any other adult, Steve said. Faster and more skilled than a ninja—a black-clad fighter who used special martial arts to overcome her enemy.
I had enemies, you see. That was the main thing my child mind was learning fast. The whole world was divided between friends who agreed and enemies who disagreed. Friends were good. Enemies were bad.
But enemies weren’t only people. Tooth decay was an enemy. Disease was an enemy. Gravity could be an enemy. Enemy was actually everything that was wrong, anything that needed to be fought. It had to be stopped with force.
That’s why Steve broke me out. That’s how he was saving me.
All of this I learned from Steve as we made ourselves busy at the cabin the next day, figuring things out. Things like how to get to Karen Willis’s house after dark, then into her house in the dead of night without anyone knowing.
Karen was our enemy.
Actually, the greatest enemy is yourself, Steve said to me. Or more accurately, who I thought I was or wasn’t. Most people covered up their fear of failure by pretending to be who they weren’t. But I didn’t have decades of evidence that told me lies of who I couldn’t be, so I had a huge advantage.
That’s what he said, and whenever I brought up the subject of Vlad being my biggest enemy, he shook his head. “We can only deal with what we know.”
“But what were those creatures? And what if there are more of them?”
“Which is why we have to get to Karen. That’s what we know. If this really is all about Vlad, and I think it probably is, she’s the one who knows. Don’t think about Vlad right now. Think about Karen. She’s the next step. The only step right now.”
Made sense, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop thinking about Vlad and why those two things had come for me last night. Really, I thought Steve didn’t want to talk about them because he still couldn’t figure out how they could have been real.
So I left it alone.
Figuring out whether the church bombing had been real turned out to be a simple thing. We couldn’t use Steve’s phone because it was traceable, and he didn’t trust the internet in the car either. He wasn’t sure about the TV anymore, so he’d dug up some batteries and got the old radio to work. There was no way DARPA would have isolated an old broken-down radio and fed it fake news.
There, on that radio, we heard the real news. The bombings were real. So was the fact that the whole world was scrambling to find us. Which meant the two Leedhan I’d killed weren’t tied to DARPA, because if DARPA knew where we were, they’d be all over the cabin.
We were safe, for now.
That afternoon we heard about a third bomb, which destroyed a mosque fifty miles south of the second bombing. Hearing my name repeated over and over on the news was strange. Like it wasn’t even real. But everyone was believing it, and I was tempted to believe some of it myself when I heard my own words from the church being played back.
“I think most religion preaches a form of false law, blinding people to who they actually are as the light,” my voice said on the radio. “The law’s a system of fear and control based on punishment, because fear has to do with punishment. It’s like the sky in Eden. Something has to give or people will never be free to know who they really are.”
The first time I heard it, I was stunned. “I said that?”
“Totally out of context, but something like that. You said it at the church before the bombing. Before they wiped your memory.”
“I really said that? No wonder they think I’m the devil!”
“You’re an angel, not a devil,” he said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
We climbed into the car at nine o’clock that night, old paper map from the cabin in hand. No GPS. My stomach was in knots. This was it. The knots were as much anticipation as fear, I thought. We were going to set everything straight.
Both of us were dressed in black, I in a hoodie he found in one of the closets. It was too big, but with the hood up, I wasn’t easily recognized.
I bit my fingernail as we drove, mind spinning through everything over and over like a stuck song. I had no idea where we were going, other than to Karen’s house—that was Steve’s business. We weren’t even sure she’d be there, but she’d eventually go home. When she did, we’d be waiting. That was the plan.
What is seeing beyond what you think should be, Rachelle?
I looked at Steve. “Did you just think something?”
“No, about seeing? I just heard a voice.”
He glanced at me. “You can hear thoughts again?”
“I don’t know. I heard, ‘What is seeing beyond what you think should be?’”
He looked surprised. “Really? Was it my voice?”
“No. I don’t know whose voice. Like . . . I’m not sure if it was male or female. Just a soft voice, but I heard it.”
“You sure?”
“Yup,” I said. “Is that not good?”
“Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. Just the way you looked.”
“Sorry. I have a lot on my mind.” He glanced at the mirrors and pulled off the highway. “So far so good. We should be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Already?”
“It’s going to be fine.” He gave me a brave smile and turned onto a side street. “Just remember the plan.”
Right. And I knew the plan because it was simple.
“About you hearing voices,” he said. “Actually, there is something I’ve been thinking about. Remember what I told you yesterday about not letting fear get in your way?”
“Because it restricts the higher stations.”
“Something like that, yes. But the way you moved last night, when you went after . . . Richard. I’ve never seen anyone move like that. It was incredible.” He eyed me. “There’s a rare genetic condition called myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.”
“So that’s what I have?”
“No, your DNA confuses even our best geneticists, but I think what’s happening to you is along the same lines. The human body’s capable of far, far more than what we experience. We’re learning how to modify genetic expressions without throwing systems out of balance, but we’re not there yet. You are. Something triggered an epigenetic shift in you.”
“My dreams.”
“Some level of consciousness you’re accessing in your dreams, yes, so it seems. Let me ask you . . . What were you feeling when you went after him last night? What happened?”
