by Stacey Berg
“Soft,” Gem judged.
Hunter shook her head impatiently. “The Saint’s brain needs many complex connections for the interface. The energy goes into that instead of physical development. And she must be exactly like the original.” It was impossible to imagine the courage of that first woman, putting on the crown when no one could have known whether she would succeed or her mind would be burned to cinders, and all the hopes of the city with it. “If not the Church will reject her, as it does intruders who try the doors. She would die the instant she ascended the altar.”
“Is that why she ran away? Because she was afraid she would die?”
“She was braver than you or I could ever be. And remember, Gem Hunter 378: it is blasphemy to doubt the Saint.”
CHAPTER 6
When the power failed it had brought down more than just the homing beacon guiding Hunter and the fugitive Saint. Junctions had exploded in the surge, collapsing buildings, hard to know how many amidst the chaos. A crowd milled in aimless panic. Someone had gotten a light working, its faded beam sweeping in an unsteady arc. Others were climbing precariously through the unstable wreckage, desperately pulling at the debris. This was only a minor spasm compared with the calamity of the Fall, yet the damage shook Hunter deeply. She heard the cries and moans of those trapped beneath the wreckage. The crowd itself seemed shocked into an eerie silence.
The Saint looked on in horror, face twisted with the pain of the city tearing itself apart before her. Hunter grabbed the girl by the shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”
“I can’t!” The girl tugged away. “I have to help them.”
“Help them by fulfilling your purpose.”
But the girl tore away before Hunter could stop her, walking into the open. In the bluish sweep of the searchlight, her uncovered face and hands glowed green. Someone shouted, “It’s the waiting Saint!” At first fractured among a hundred voices, the call coalesced into a reverent chant that raised the hairs on Hunter’s neck. “Saint,” the crowd called, and the Saint went towards them.
“Saint!” A single voice rose above the others, whose murmur abruptly dropped into expectant silence. A figure separated from the others. A man, carrying a small, still bundle. “Use your power! Heal my son.”
The Saint’s hand dipped slowly towards the broken child. The man drew back in fear, but a gentle murmur from the Saint and he steadied, holding his small burden out like a sacrificial offering. She laid a hand on the boy’s still chest.
For a long moment they stood just like that. Hunter forgot to breathe.
Nothing happened.
The charge ran out of the air. The saint staggered back. The father hunched over his dead child, weeping.
The crowd howled its despair. Hunter turned and grabbed the Saint, and then they were running, fleeing the desperate mob through the failing city. After a while the cries and pleas behind them faded beneath the sound of their own harsh breathing. Around another corner, and Hunter ducked into a deep shadow, dragging the Saint after her. She could hear the distant noises of destruction, but no close pursuit. She eased cautiously back into the street, trying to catch her bearings after their headlong flight.
She whirled at the sound behind her, thinking they had been caught, but it was only the Saint, fallen to her knees, weeping, nothing more now than a frightened girl with nowhere to turn. The girl who had been supposed to save them.
She couldn’t even save one child.
“It’s not your fault,” Hunter told her wearily. “There’s nothing you can do. I’ll take you somewhere safe.”
The girl stood up then, her tear-stained face hard and angry. “Take me to the Church,” the Saint commanded.
Hunter sat on a hard wooden bench, the silence echoing in her head. She had delivered the smith’s information, such as it was, to the Patri, but it was the memories that troubled her. She strove to match her thoughts to the silence, empty, waiting. Even the occasional murmuring of the priests as they tended to the Saint barely rose past a whisper so as not to disturb the mind that spun all along the great net to the city, and upon which they all depended. The body itself withered, consumed by the strain despite the tubes that brought nourishment to it and carried waste away, the priests who hovered, studying panels and adjusting minute dials, tending her with the same dedication as their forebears had done for Saints every day since the Fall. This shriveled thing had been that girl who stepped bravely to her fate only a few annuals ago. Since her return from the desert, Hunter had come day by day to honor that sacrifice.
She knew she would never be worthy.
In an alcove off to one side, a priest sat at an ancient box, its front covered with dials that were no longer lit from within. Wires snaked from the back of the box to the wall, where they ran like a vine up the tower, until they tied into the metal dish at the top of the spire. The dish sent out its signal faithfully as a beating heart, to the arrays Hunter tended in the desert and beyond, and it listened. It had been listening since the Fall. A priest sat always at the receiver, like the one Hunter watched today, praying for a sign that the city was not alone in the desolate world. He wore small speakers over his ears, but Hunter’s sharp hearing picked up the static of the carrier, empty and gray as a winter sky.
After a time she rose to leave. The priest at the receiver ignored her, intent on his listening, but she knew that no voice spoke to him. If other cities still lived they did not call out.
Her hand was on the door latch when the priest cried out. She froze, transfixed, for the space of a quick-drawn breath before she saw that he was tearing the speakers off his ears in pain, not astonishment. The other priests jumped to help but she got there first, wincing as a high-pitched squeal screamed through the speakers. “Are you injured?” she shouted, trying hold his head still. He pushed her away, grimacing, at the same moment she smelled the first smoke.
She whirled in a full circle, scanning the sanctuary for fire, seeing none. Priests babbled at each other, inaudible over the obscene noise. The smell grew more intense. It was sharp and bitter, not like wood smoke. She clamped her hands over her ears as the speakers kept on shrieking, and finally saw it, a black tendril rising from the back of the dialed box, with a lick of orange at its center.
She leapt unthinking between it and the altar, as if her body could block the flames. Then she tore her shirt off, beating at the fire while the smoke steadily thickened. A priest, braver than the others or quicker witted, dove behind the box, tearing at wires until he had it disconnected from the other panels. Her ears rang as the speakers went dead all at once. She gestured violently and he rolled out of the way so she could kick the box on its side. It burst open, spilling charred wire intestines onto the floor. She beat at them until she was sure there was nothing left to spark anew.
The priests were already back at their panels, even the one with blood running down from both his ears. Fingers flew over dials and switches. Intent on their work, the priests ignored Hunter as she pulled her sooty shirt back on, watching the Saint fearfully. She had no way to know what harm might have been done.
The Patri burst in through the vestibule door, breathing hard, a sanctuary priest right behind him. The Patri ran to the largest panel, studying its lights and symbols, then began barking orders in a tight voice. Hunter heard the words circuit, amperage, flux, but the sense of what he said eluded her. It seemed to be working, though: his shoulders, rigid at first, began to relax as the blinking grew steadier, less frantic. Finally he sighed, satisfied with the patterns. Then he saw Hunter.
“What are you doing here?”
“Patri, the Saint. Is she—”
“Get out of here. Get out!” He strode towards her as if he would push her through the door.
She backed away. “But, Patri, is she—”
“The Saint is my concern, not yours. A wire failed. Tell no one you saw more than that.
No one! Now go!”
She fled through the vestibule, down the steps into the gated yard. The lights must have flickered, or there’d been some other sign of trouble; a small crowd of nuns and hunters had gathered there. They seemed more curious than alarmed, though a murmur rose at the sight of her, disheveled as she was. Indine approached her, nose wrinkling at the clinging smoky smell. “Echo Hunter 367, what is amiss?”
Hunter rubbed a hand across her stinging eyes. “Bad circuit,” she said.
She tried to see the Patri the next day, and the next, to make amends for whatever offense she had given. But each time she approached his chambers she was told he was unavailable, communing with the Saint and unlikely to emerge that day. Finally, with a sinking in her gut she decided that there was no choice but to wait for him to send for her. She could not risk angering him further with her impatience.
Tana had been in the city with a training cohort during the incident. The priests made barest mention of it in teachings, and the lights and all the other systems seemed to be functioning normally. The dish still circled steadily on the mast. But a bad circuit in the refectory was one thing. A failure in the sanctuary, where harm might come to the Saint . . . And the Patri’s alarm had been so great. His demand for secrecy worried her, almost as much as his anger. She wished she could discuss it with Tana. That was impossible, given the Patri’s prohibition. But on the fourth day after the fire, while Hunter helped her inspect the static wands that the juveniles had been learning to rewire, Tana said, “Indine told me she saw you coming from the sanctuary again.”
The battery case in Hunter’s hands came apart with a sharp snap. The weapons area was in the lower level, at the opposite end of the hall from the priests’ laboratory. Despite the subterranean cool, the room felt airless. “Why did Indine feel it necessary to report to you on my activities?”
“She didn’t, particularly. I asked her to report everything that took place while I was away. Don’t look so surprised, Echo. I’m the oldest hunter in the compound. People tolerate my eccentricities, even that I’ve become curious as a new nun. Besides, you go to the sanctuary as often as a priest. Indine hardly needed to tell me that.”
The trigger wire had come loose. It was a frequent finding in beginners’ work, as the flexion when the case snapped closed stressed the connection. Hunter set the wand aside as an example. It wouldn’t fire in this condition. If a life depended on it, someone would die. “Your information is old, Tana. I have not been to the sanctuary in days.”
Tana inspected another wand. Her bony fingers were still deft as a priest’s, though the thickened knuckles made her slower than she had been when she’d taught Hunter this skill all those annuals ago. Tana squinted at wiring, adjusted something, then said, “For a long time I went every day too. The priests got so used to me I could study the boards without their noticing. But I don’t imagine that’s why you go. Or why you’ve stopped.”
Hunter searched for a permissible response. “Did Indine say anything else about the sanctuary? Or report any other—concerns?”
“A few. A 385 broke her arm attempting to scale the wall. She is expected to make a quick recovery. One of the gravid nuns has developed an insatiable taste for redberry. The priests have caught her three times in the garden. Fortunately, the crop is expected to be generous this year. I’m glad, because I like redberry. Do you have a pry bar there? This case is jammed.” Hunter took the wand from her and twisted the sections apart. Tana grunted in disgust. “Thank you. As you can tell, Indine’s reports are very thorough. She didn’t say anything about the sanctuary other than that an unimportant piece of equipment failed and was easily replaced.”
There was nothing unimportant about the listening devices. But even if the dial box couldn’t be replaced, Hunter could think of no reason for the Patri to withhold such information.
Tana frowned at a tangle of wiring. “Things fail more often these days than they used to, or at least I think so.”
Hunter felt a prickle of alarm. “Surely the Patri would say if something were amiss.”
“There are things even I do not ask the Patri, Echo.”
“If you did . . . do you think he would tell you?”
“If it served.” Tana huffed a breath out through her nose. “A hunter would say that that would be the only reason for her to know.”
“What do you say, Tana?”
The old woman’s face was as inscrutable as the Patri’s. “I say you are still a hunter, Echo.”
They returned the repaired static wands to the storage cabinet, next to the projtrodes. Those were all the weapons the Church had to protect the city, besides the hunters. It seemed a thin margin for survival.
Tana locked the workroom door behind them. “One other thing Indine told me,” she said, glancing down the hall. “The priests finished with Ela. The recovery was adequate. There will be a few more batches of us to make.” Her lips quirked in that peculiar, crooked fashion that was not quite a smile. “Another way I’m not of any use.”
CHAPTER 7
Hunter cycled through a teaching round, working in a different area each day to refamiliarize herself with the way the various skills were taught. The irregular schedule disturbed her sleep, already troubled enough. The dreams would fade eventually, she hoped; meanwhile she lay in her cell in the domicile each night and counted breaths. That was what they taught the juveniles to do, when difficult parts of their training kept them up at night. It didn’t work. Behind the numbing drone of numbers, her mind still churned. Tomorrow she would be in a classroom, leading the 388s through their first real day of training. There were fourteen of them, a good-sized batch.
She hoped none of them would have to be culled.
There had been fourteen 378s as well, Hunter recalled. Her thoughts turned darkly to Gem.
The girl performed flawlessly in every exercise. She attended teaching and duties without fail, absorbing information, working efficiently with batchmates or other hunters. If she asked a question, it was a good one, and given an order, she complied quickly, without complaint. If there was any challenge in her demeanor, it was only that her excellence demanded the same of everyone around her. Only Hunter, when she met her eyes, saw the cold arrogance there, patient, measuring, waiting for Hunter to fail.
And not just Gem. Hunter knew the others watched her, as Criya had, and Indine. Oh, they still included her, still made room at the table or in their training exercises, but she felt the distance that had come between them, as if she had been marked somehow and they too waited to see what it meant.
She skipped the morning meal, leaving the refectory directly after teachings to walk the circumference of the compound. It was hot already, the height of summer approaching fast. In the desert, she would be considering the day’s shelter, ensuring that she had sufficient water and shade to wait out the stifling noon. Sometimes as the slow hours passed she would indulge herself by picturing the daily routine of the Church, what she’d be doing if she were there. The best parts of those reveries involved her lessons with the Patri, the anchors that held her to a hunter’s purpose.
She had been closer to him there than here.
After an hour she was back to the arc of wall winged from the cathedral. It was tall enough to shade the path; a few nuns and priests were strolling here, enjoying the relative cool. She left the path then, intending to cut through the gated yard to the domiciles, where the 388s awaited.
And there, as she came around the corner, stood the Patri. He was standing on the steps to the vestibule, speaking with the Materna, frowning over something she’d said. They noticed her only a fraction after she saw them.
The abrupt stilling of their faces made her stomach drop. Even so, she lengthened her stride, determined at least to try to speak with him. The Materna limped up to the vestibule, leaning heavily on the rail. But the Patri, standing on the step, waited, his face unr
eadable.
“Patri.” Now that she stood before him, everything she had rehearsed dropped into the dust. “My service to the Church in all things.”
“As it should be.”
“Please, Patri, I must speak to you.”
“I am here, Echo.”
A pair of nuns waddled past, nattering about the heat. Hurry, she urged them, before he changes his mind. She burst out, “Patri, whatever happened in the sanctuary, if I was at fault in any way—”
“We agreed not to speak of that matter, Echo.”
She stood mute, more baffled by his cool politeness than by his earlier anger. She couldn’t let him go with only this. She asked stupidly, “Are you well, Patri?”
“Yes, Echo, thank you.”
“And the Materna?”
“She is finding the heat more difficult to bear these days.”
“I’m sorry,” Hunter said.
He inclined his head. “It is the natural order of things.” Then he said, “Is there something else you wished to speak of?”
Facing that placid stranger, she almost told him no. But then she asked: “Is all well with the Saint, Patri?”
She braced herself for anger or dismay. But she didn’t see even the least change in his expression. He only said, “There is nothing you need concern yourself with. I must go, however. The priests are waiting for me. You have duties as well.”
“Yes, Patri,” An emptiness took root inside her chest. She said again, “My service to the Church in all things.”
He looked at her. “Remember that obedience is the foundation of service, Echo.”
After that her sleep was worse than before.
A few restless nights later, she was called to aid the infirmary priest with a gravid nun who had grown ill. “The child was malformed and died inside,” the priest said. “There’s contamination in her abdomen.” He stabbed tubes into blood vessels while the woman lay staring at the ceiling, cheeks streaked with tears that seemed as much from grief as from the spasms that rocked her heavy body.
