by Hugh Howey
Mortimor shook his head, just barely. He started to say something, then another coughing fit seized him. Flecks of foamy red flew past his shaking fist. Some of it spotted his beard.
“Can’t,” he croaked. His lids fell shut slowly, then reopened. “Hurts to talk,” he whispered.
Cole rested a hand on the old man’s chest and tried to think of what to say to keep him engaged. Mortimor turned to him, his eyes half shut.
“Talk to me,” he said, as if sensing Cole’s thoughts.
“Everything’s gonna be okay,” Cole told him feebly. “We’re queued up for the rift. Once we get through, we’re gonna get you some better help.”
Mortimor closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t wanna be lied to,” he whispered, his voice barely audible.
What he said next was even closer to silence—his lips moved, but Cole couldn’t understand a word.
“What?”
Cole leaned closer. “What did you say?”
“Tell me—”
Mortimor grimaced, his hand moving to his pink-stained stomach. “I want to know about her,” he whispered, “before I go.”
“Who?” Cole asked. “And you’re not going anywhere. You just hang in there.”
Mortimor coughed, sending up another crimson shower. He shook his head feebly. “No more lies,” he whispered. “I don’t have time for them.”
“What do you want me to say?” Cole asked. He looked to Penny for help, but her attention was fixed on Mortimor. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Mollie,” Mortimor croaked. He said her name again: “Mollie. Tell me about my daughter. Talk to me about what she’s like while I rest my eyes just a little—”
Part XVIII – Cole
“To those who make them, everything’s conspiracy.”
~The Bern Seer~
6 · Portugal, Earth · Six Years Earlier
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Gods?”
The words startled Cole, that last one especially. He glanced from the bailiff to the judge sitting in the elevated dais to his side. The judge nodded at him, urging Cole along.
Cole looked down at his hand, which felt heavy on the black Bible. He could feel the bumps and ridges on the book’s cover, like the skin of something that might bite him. He was suddenly aware of the hundreds of gazes and cameras aimed his way, all the judgment pouring out of them. It was the book, he realized. It all came back to that scaly book.
“Do you swear to tell the whole truth?” the bailiff asked again.
A lawyer turned to the judge and let out an exasperated sigh.
It was a simple question, Cole knew. Probably the simplest anyone would ask of him. If he couldn’t answer this one, how was he going to survive the rest? He swept his gaze out over the sea of faces in all those rows of benches and up to the packed balcony. Spectators were even pressed tight along the back wall, jostling with one another to see. The double doors at the end of the center aisle opened, and Cole watched a uniformed officer wave off whoever was attempting to enter.
“Do you swear to tell the truth?” the bailiff demanded, his impatience laced with venom.
Cole nodded.
“We need to hear you say it, son,” the judge told him.
“I swear,” Cole said. He lifted his hand from the Bible and rubbed the pads of his fingers together. They were warm, or maybe he was just imagining it.
“Please be seated.”
Cole sat. There was something comforting in being told to sit or stand, and when. He looked down at his feet, wondering if there was a place to kneel as well.
“I’d like to start with the… event,” the lawyer said. He stressed the last word, his voice regaining its honeyed quality as it was projected out more for the audience than for Cole. “Can you tell us where you were on the day the research institute was destroyed?”
Cole swallowed. He ran the question back in his mind a few times, wary of making any mistakes.
“I was in the barrio,” he finally said.
Laughter rolled through the crowd, perhaps at the outlandish idea that a slum rat such as himself would be anywhere else.
“Where were you exactly?” the lawyer demanded. He crossed his arms and turned to the benches, which Cole suddenly realized were arranged very much like church pews. Everyone was facing him, rapt and expectant, with wide grins still pinned to the faces of those who had been laughing. He was practically on an altar, Cole realized. One of the altars of old, where defenseless things were sacrificed to higher powers. That’s where he was—not in a courtroom.
“Answer the question,” the judge intoned.
I was in the barrio, Cole repeated to himself. He wasn’t sure what to say, but the people in the pews had laughed because they knew he couldn’t have been anywhere else. They had laughed because in the barrio meant nothing to them. It was an imprecise sprawl, and yet it was Cole’s entire universe. He thought the question over again, wondering what the lawyer wanted, wondering how not to give it to him. He looked out over the congregation, their eyes and mocking smiles wide.
“I was up on the water tower,” he blurted out, the truth spilling from him before he could contain it.
•• TWO WEEKS EARLIER ••
Cole gripped rungs still wet with the morning’s dew and began his long and routine climb up the metal ladder. Chipping paint uncoiled from the old steel beneath his hands, revealing muddy gold rust beneath. He climbed quickly, and the water tower above rang with his movement, almost as if sensing his arrival.
When he finally reached the grated platform high above, Cole saw that the sun had not yet risen to light up his small patch of Portugal. Its first rays barely leaked over the horizon to give the swollen belly of the water tower a pale glow. He ran his hands along the curved and riveted panels as he circled the giant container. There was no need to rap it with his knuckles; his footfalls made the entire structure rattle with an obvious, tinny emptiness.
When Cole reached the East side, he plopped down on the metal grating, the cold and wet steel pressing up through the seat of his blue shorts. He dangled his thin legs out over the edge, wiped the moisture from the rail ahead of him, and leaned forward to gaze out over his unlucky home.
The barrio.
Land of filth and muck and muddy sorrow. A slum crowded with people bustling and jostling to be anywhere else.
Cole’s eyes wandered up twisted alleys barely visible in the pre-dawn darkness. The tight streets appeared as black cracks among the dull gray of wooden and metal shacks, all of it a maze of winding anarchy. Twinkling everywhere above this maze was a wet web of electrical and telephone lines entangling the rooftops in a confused snare. It was like a net cast from the heavens to trap any of the floundering, flapping, filthy poor who happened to worm their way out of the labyrinth below.
Cole looked further up Angústia Hill where the sides of leaning shacks caught some of the looming day’s light. Twisted planes of steel glowed as if still molten. They brought into clear relief the jumbled nature of the ad-hoc town: the shared walls and overlapping corrugated roofs; the rebar bones poking up through abandoned second-story dreams; the wisps of smoke from cooking fires that cascaded from under eaves instead of travelling up proper stovepipes. For as far as his twelve-year-old eyes could see, the surface of his cursed Portugal was covered with slip-shod shanties. It was a landscape of jumbled cubes, like a sack of individual little dice poured into the mud by gods playing some crooked game, a game where all the pips came up craps every time.
Cole rested his arms on the railing and swung his feet out over it all.
“This world doesn’t suck—it’s just stuck.”
He chanted the sing-song phrase to himself, trying to sound as convincing as the Sisters.
“All that’s due is a miracle or two—”
The rest of the rhyme’s hopeless optimism was interrupted by the soft clang of hands and feet slapping steel rungs far below. The
tower swayed slightly as someone else reached the platform and came to take away his solitude and depressing vista. Cole turned and gazed down the curving walkway as light footsteps rang his way.
“Holá Brother,” someone out of sight called too loudly. “It’s just me.”
Cole’s heart practically pounded straight through his ribcage when Joanna, his sister in name only, came into view. She rounded the belly of the water tower, squeezing her way along the narrow walkway just as the sun broached the horizon with the sudden intensity only a valley could know.
A warm glow bathed Joanna’s walnut skin and gave her straight black hair an obsidian sheen. The timing of the day’s dawn and her arrival were spectacular. It was a combination nearly as potent as it was torturous. Cole’s new awareness of the opposite sex had coincided perfectly with his adoption into the religious order of Miracle Makers. For obvious hormonal reasons, joining a sect that promoted abstinence had seemed a painless no-brainer just six months ago. Now, it was excruciating.
“Holá, Sister Joanna,” Cole said, stressing her name more than the cursed honorific. “What are you doing here?”
The smile on Joanna’s face melted, and Cole swore the sun itself dimmed. He felt like an ass for the way his question sounded, even to his own ears.
“Am I not welcome?” Joanna asked.
“No,” Cole said. “It’s not that. I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m surprised. I never knew you came up here.”
“I never have,” Joanna said. She took a few more steps toward Cole, her hand brushing the wet railing as she went. The action sent a cascade of dewdrops plummeting and twinkling from the rail and down through the rays of new sunshine.
Cole swallowed and went to stand up, but then Joanna’s hand was on his shoulder, fixing him in place. His head swam with confusion and nubile hormones, his mouth about to leak shameful admissions—
And then Joanna simply sat down beside him, having used his shoulder to steady herself on the narrow walkway. She scooted side to side a little, then wiped at the back of her shorts, the same shade of blue as his.
“It’s wet.”
“The dew,” Cole pointed out like an idiot. He leaned away from her and felt his own wet shorts, as if confirming it, or maybe highlighting something they had in common. He wasn’t sure.
“It’s pretty up here.”
Cole watched as Joanna brushed more wetness from the lower railing ahead of them, sending another straight line of dewdrops raining down, some of them splashing wide against her bare thighs. She leaned forward and rested her arms on top of the cleared surface and gazed out over the barrio.
“You think this is pretty?” Cole whispered. He had to fight from telling her what he thought was pretty. It sure wasn’t the barrio.
Joanna turned to him and smiled, and surely the sun crept higher over Angústia Hill, soaking the older girl in extra honeyed light and Cole in more heat. “Of course,” she said. “Just look at all the people starting a new day.” She swept a perfect arm out over the slums. “Smell all that fresh food and that crisp air.”
Cole begrudgingly tore his eyes off her arm and looked beyond it to the rolling hills soaked in shacks. He focused on the people this time, not remembering if they were even out and about before, though he was sure they must’ve been. He matched the rhythmic hissing sound of a straw broom with a shopkeeper sending horizontal wisps of dust into the street. The distant clatter of a screen door was followed by a barely audible call for some animal or child to come inside. The scent of fried plantains stirred weakly in a morning air that Cole had to admit was crisp and cool. As the light of the rising sun spilled down alleys he knew like the lines of his own knuckles, Cole saw how much activity there was up and down them. He looked out over the vista through Joanna’s eyes, or perhaps through the eyes of a young boy, newly smitten.
“I’ve always come up here to look down on this place,” Cole admitted shamefully.
“It is a nice spot,” Joanna said, obviously missing Cole’s point and taking the “down” as literal instead of figurative. “I’m glad Marco told me about it.”
Cole peeled his eyes away from two kids chasing each other through the streets, laughing and screaming, and turned to Joanna. “Marco told you about this spot?”
Joanna nodded. “He said the sunrise up here was magical. Said I should come up today because it was gonna be a good one.” She turned her head to the side and rested her high cheeks on her smooth forearm. “He was right.”
Cole blushed. He ran his finger along the underside of the railing, knocking the hanging dew loose. He knew for a fact that Marco never got up early enough for a sunrise in his life, but he’d have to thank the old bastard for divulging Cole’s secret spot. Maybe his Group Leader wasn’t such a bad guy after all.
“Hey Cole?”
Cole saw that he was idly peeling paint from the railing. He stopped and looked to Joanna.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got something I want to ask you.”
Cole lost himself in Joanna’s eyes, which somehow looked so much younger than her fourteen years, and so much older as well. They were the eyes of a girl who had survived a bunch of days without seeing anything bad enough to scar them. They were a woman’s eyes untouched. In the back of Cole’s boy-brain, he knew she was waiting on a response from him, but he lost himself in the black and brown ridges around her pupils. He felt like he could dive straight into them, cleansing himself of the filth and muck of the barrio, escaping away to some more beautiful place—
And then a twinkle burst in Joanna’s eye.
It grew into a flash, a shattering of brightness, a yellow starburst spreading out through the brown. Her eyes twitched to the side and focused on something in the distance, and Cole realized he was seeing not some internal twinkle, but the reflection of some bright light. He turned just as a great rumble arrived, followed soon after by a too-warm breeze. Out in the center of the barrio, right in the middle of the new government district, a terrible ball of orange was dissipating in the sky.
Cole watched, stunned senseless, as the fire morphed into a cloud of black smoke. It churned up into the sky, flattening and growing dirty white as it did so.
The rumble grew, and soon the water tower was trembling in harmony. Cole felt Joanna’s hands settle on the back of his, squeezing. He in turn gripped the rail in raw terror as the empty tower swayed in an unnatural breeze.
“What in the Almighty’s name?” Joanna breathed.
The cloud slid through all the hues of gray to the color of ash, then rose up and blended with the natural puffs high in the sky. Sirens called out like startled birds, wailing in the far distance where wealthy people paid to be protected from whatever had just happened.
“Was that a bomb?” Joanna asked.
Her hands were still on Cole’s, even as the tower settled back to stillness.
“It didn’t sound like a bomb,” Cole sputtered.
Joanna finally pulled her hands away, creating a fathomless distance between herself and Cole measured in mere centimeters.
“Have you heard bombs before?”
Cole shook his head slowly. He noted the odd way the shacks along the hillside all around the blast were pushed flat in concentric circles. Something about that was screaming at him to be understood. To be recognized as familiar.
“Just in a few movies,” Cole admitted, not taking his eyes off the scene. The crying and shouting of people added to the screaming din of the sirens.
“Are we safe up here?” Joanna asked. She gripped the rail and stuck her chin out over her knuckles, peering down. “Maybe we should go see if we can help. I bet the Miracle Makers need us right now. They’ll be worried and looking for volunteers—”
Cole nodded. He could see tiny silhouettes creeping up the alleys toward the blast, picking their way through rubble, hands on stunned heads with elbows sharp to either side, some of them doubtlessly adding to the cacophony of mad sounds screeching over the barrio.
/> “C’mon,” Joanna said. She scrambled to her feet and shook Cole’s shoulder. Her voice was full of fear and anxiety, and yet she seemed to have more wits about herself than Cole. “Let’s go find Marco,” she said. “He’ll know what to do.”
“Marco,” Cole repeated. He bit his lip, remembering vaguely some conversation he’d had with his fellow Miracle Maker a few months ago. “Yeah,” he said, tearing his eyes away from the horrific scene, the smoky aftermath of a blast that must’ve claimed so many. “Let’s go find Marco,” he said.
7 · The Courtroom
The lawyer smiled at Cole’s answer. “And wouldn’t you say that the water tower provided a most excellent vantage of the day’s events?” He continued to smile, but Cole saw the lawyer’s teeth as more for biting and gnashing and tearing out flesh than for evincing pleasure.
He nodded. Cole knew there was danger in the question, but his mind was a fog, the truth billowing in him like a suffocating smoke.
“Speak up.”
“I could see everything,” Cole said. He looked to his own lawyer behind her table and wondered when he could start answering her questions. Each step felt like a trap with this guy.
“And at this time you were already an initiate in the—” The lawyer shook a piece of paper stiff and seemed to read the next, as if anyone could now get it wrong. “—The Holy Order of God’s Miracle Makers, is that also correct?”
“I’m actually a full member,” Cole said.
The lawyer smiled and handed the piece of paper to one of the team of people behind his desk. Cole didn’t follow the paper all the way. He didn’t want to face the other people sitting there—
“At least, I was a full member,” Cole added. He wasn’t exactly sure what his status with the Order was anymore. He noticed his lawyer frowning at this and wondered if he’d made a mistake.
“So, let’s be clear about this.” The lawyer turned and faced the two rows of jurors. “You, Cole Mendonça, were a full member of these Miracle Makers.” He stressed the words and wiggled two pairs of fingers in the air. “You were, on the morning of the—let’s just call it an explosion for now—you were perched on what you yourself admitted was the perfect vantage point for your handiwork—”
