by Stacey Berg
Gem looked, for once, unsure. “Do you think something could have gone wrong in her making?”
“Maybe.” The word was a betrayal, dishonoring that brave girl. Hunter averted her eyes from the sanctuary as she spoke. “Something can go wrong with any of our making. But there was no sign. She did what she was made to do. She was strong.”
“You had to bring her back. She was afraid.”
In the end she was the one who chose to return. I would have let her go. She would not blaspheme against the girl’s memory by confessing that aloud. “You would be afraid too, Gem Hunter 378. Don’t think otherwise.”
Gem said, “I wouldn’t run from my duty.”
It stung, that echo of the long-ago lesson, in a room not far from here, on the day after Ela had died. The shadow of anger touched Hunter from far away. “If you had ever truly been frightened, you would not be so certain. I hope one day you will know what that fear feels like.”
“Do you, Echo Hunter 367?”
Her dead watched from the shadows, waiting to see how Hunter would answer. She wondered if Gem ever saw Tana in her nightmares. And now the Patri asked Hunter about Lia, asked her to— She shook herself, sorry for the anger. Even you do not deserve that lesson, she almost told Gem, as if the girl were a child she should protect from herself. But it was not a child who regarded her now, and to that hard, unsmiling face she could not offer such a thought, only shook her head dumbly.
Gem studied her openly, curious, perhaps a bit troubled. At last she said, “It is time to go.”
Limping across the compound again was like being in a dream so vivid it might be real. Hunter blinked, trying to compose herself. There were no signs of difficulty with the Saint this bright morning. Priests and nuns walked the paths, a few young hunters strode towards the training grounds with no other concern but their objective. A cohort of very small juveniles practiced stalking each other like canid pups at play, while the nuns watched from the shade of the gated yard. All of it seemed to be happening far away, as if Hunter viewed them through a priest’s magnifier turned backwards.
“The 388s,” Gem said, following Hunter’s glance.
“Of course,” Hunter snapped. But her eyes lingered on the nuns. One, brown haired, shorter than the others, laughed, a bright sound out of place against the dull buzz of Hunter’s thoughts.
Gem eyed her sideways. “Do you wish to bathe?” she asked, her neutral tone rebuke enough. “There is time. The Patri is in communion with the Saint.”
Hunter almost said no out of spite, but though someone had seen to her arm and it no longer bled, her sleeve was crusted with old blood, her clothing filthy. And she stank, she realized as her nose wrinkled in protest. She inclined her head as graciously as she could manage. “Yes, thank you.”
She wished she could soak for hours, letting the heat work the aches from her injuries, the tension from her neck. Instead she cleaned herself efficiently, taking only the necessary time to scrub through the layers of filth, probing carefully to assess the damage. Her left ankle was swollen and blue, but she could move it well enough. She eased the bandage off her arm, finding the wound no worse than it should be, the flesh tender but the margins beginning to heal. The remainder was nothing more than scattered scrapes and bruises, not worth her attention. Why then did exhaustion still course through her, weakness dragging at her bones? As she brushed back wet hair grown far past hunter custom, her fingers missed the tiny weight of Lia’s gold dangling from her ear. She must have lost it somewhere in the desert. No matter; it had no place here. She cupped water into her eyes again, washing away a sudden sting.
Gem studied her body without embarrassment as she rose reluctantly from the pool. “You have not been caring for yourself properly. You should eat.”
As if the words activated a circuit, Hunter’s stomach gurgled loudly. The day before yesterday, the fest. It seemed so much longer, as if time had stretched in unreliable ways as Hunter crossed the barrier between outside and inside the Church, one more formidable than the forcewall. She shook her head. “I should see the Patri first.” Best to avoid even the smallest provocation.
“It is a minimal delay. Do not be stubborn, Echo Hunter 367. Your injuries require nutrition to heal. And,” she added as Hunter set her feet wide to keep from reeling in the heat rising from the pool, “the Patri will not be pleased if you lose consciousness in your interview.”
Sense, from the girl, if not kindness. It was an improvement to emerge from the grotto in clean hunter clothing, her ruined city garb left behind to be burned, she hoped; no one deserved those cast-offs. The refectory was quiet. One of the fans had stopped; the other turned slow circles, like Hunter’s thoughts. It was past the morning meal; all the nuns and weanlings were already gone, though biscuits and water remained for the tardy. But three hunters still sat at the table to the side. Perhaps they had patrolled all night; Hunter saw fatigue in the set of their shoulders, the way they propped their elbows as they ate. She veered towards them, drawn to hear their reports. Gem shook her head. “Over here,” she said, indicating an empty place. Reluctantly, Hunter sat. The bread tasted strange, so bland after the rough fare she had grown used to in the city, and the metallic tang of the filtration system seemed to taint the water.
The hunters, noticing them, conferred briefly. One rose and approached. “Respectfully,” Gem said to Brit, “the Patri wants to be the first who speaks with her.”
Brit ignored her. Expressionless, she said, “I brought the Patri your message, Echo Hunter 367.”
Hunter inclined her head. Something swelled inside her, painful and glad at the same time. “I am grateful.”
“He asked my opinion of its truthfulness.”
Hunter’s breath caught on a stabbing pain. “How did you answer?”
“I told him I could not know.” The faintest line creased Brit’s forehead. “But I hoped for your sake that it was.”
They arrived to find the Patri’s door slightly ajar. “ . . . Every word,” Hunter heard him say. “Anything about the original Saint.” A harried priest, arms laden with prints, stumbled out the door. The Patri gestured impatiently. “Yes, enter. Gem, you may go.” The click of the door behind her seemed to cut Hunter off from everything outside.
She could not make herself say the ritual words.
“I hope that you feel more like yourself this morning.”
She remembered the last time she had sat here, the Patri troubled by some vague threat within the Ward, the hunter across from him thinking only how she could regain his favor. She barely recognized that stranger in her memory. “Yes, Patri.”
“Good. I have often revisited those last days in my mind, Echo. I cannot be sorry, for I did what I must; but I can wish there might have been another way. We are both lucky to have this chance to start again.”
For an instant, she yearned to confess everything to him. What had happened that long-ago night with the Saint; the fear and doubt that had stalked her ever after. He would forgive her, as she had dreamed in those first awful days in the desert. He would give her back her place with Brit, Gem, the other hunters, and together they would do what must be done to preserve the Church. The city. All would be as it had been so long ago. She almost spoke. Then, impossibly, she felt a spark of anger. Did you believe the things you said of me? “I have fulfilled the mission, Patri.”
He sat back, steepling his fingers in a gesture that recalled the Warder. “Who went with you through the forcewall, Echo?”
She sat completely still. “I’m sorry, Patri. I don’t remember.”
He pursed his lips. “Begin at the beginning then. Perhaps that will aid your memory. But make it brief.”
Where to start, that didn’t lead to Lia? This was the most dangerous kind of lie, one that involved details that would have to make sense. He would pick out any inconsistency. Careful, she told herself, carefu
l. And underneath that, a voice keening in dismay, How can you think to lie to him? She didn’t know, only that once she had imagined Lia here, happy, well cared for as a nun; but there was something about the Patri’s interest, the acuity of his attention, that Hunter felt as the stare of a desert predator before it took a small, unsuspecting animal. She fought down a spasm of guilt, trying to find the faintest glimmer of a way to make this right for everyone. If she told the story properly, if he believed her . . . “When I was in the desert, after—after you sent me on this mission, I found some children. They were living there, abandoned.”
He nodded, unsurprised. “Did you take them to the city?”
“I—no. Just a baby, that was too young to survive on its own.” She swallowed. “I left the others. They didn’t want to come,” she added, then paused. That was beside the point. She refocused, trying to make a coherent report, owing him that, at least. “I used the baby as a means to approach the Warder. I hoped to gain his trust, and it worked. I gathered a great deal of information that was new, at least to me. There are factions among the cityens, including some that oppose the nun tithe. They have projectile weapons.” She lifted her injured arm. “I intended to inform you after I acquired more details, but someone tried to kill me with one, and I was afraid that if I delayed, they might succeed before I could report at all. I decided it was best to return immediately, even with incomplete information.”
“Then why,” he asked mildly, “did you detour for the boy?”
Because it was the boy, and I couldn’t leave him to die. “One of the other children came to get me, to bring me to him.” The girl’s face rose in her vision, scowling in outrage. You are not betraying them, she told herself. The Church will care for her, just as they helped the boy. They’ll be angry that she isn’t who they’re looking for, but it won’t be directed at her. She took a deep breath. “It was a girl who came for me. That must be who you saw cross the forcewall.”
His eyebrows drew together. “Are you certain?”
Something in her story sounded wrong to him, she saw that from his frown. The girl was too young, or otherwise not what he expected from the patterns. No matter now. He would catch her flat out, or he would have to verify the details. That would take some time. Meanwhile, she would—
What? Defy the Church?
Saints, if she had faced the doors with that thought in her heart they would have struck her dead in an instant.
Find Lia. Warn her.
“There are gaps in my memory,” she told the Patri. That might help cover any mistakes. But she still had a duty too. “About the weapons, Patri. You must not send hunters to collect the tithe now. The cityens are angry and frightened. The slightest misunderstanding may spark disaster. But they can be reasonable too. If we give them time, perhaps enlist the Warder’s help . . .”
His frown deepened. “I am not asking your counsel about the tithe, or weapons. The important thing is what I saw in the patterns.”
Her control began to fray. “Patri, I am speaking of preventing the threat you foresaw. Of protecting the Church and the cityens, even from themselves. How can anything be more important than that?”
He measured her with a hunter’s cold eye. She could only imagine what he saw, an old tool damaged beyond usefulness, a ragged scrap like the clothes she had left to be burned. He stood abruptly. “Come with me.”
He took her by the injured arm, inadvertently, perhaps, or a kind of lesson. She schooled her face not to show the pain.
Their abrupt entry into the sanctuary flushed priests from their chairs in a billowing of robes. “Sit,” the Patri ordered them, and they subsided, but the disturbance remained. The Patri led Hunter close up to the altar, closer than she had ever been. She smelled decay, sickly sweet. The priests’ hands flew over boards, stabbing and twisting controls. “Look at her, Echo. You know what is happening.”
What she could see of the body was withered more than ever, worn to only the most superficial resemblance of a human form. A hand, gray and shrunken, had fallen to one side, wasted to a claw. It was much worse than it had been. Hunter had to force her voice past a constriction in her throat. “She’s dying.” The words left behind a burning pain. No wonder he didn’t care about the weapons. “How long, Patri?”
“We don’t know. A year, a few, if we can minimize the strain. Tell me, Echo. How many Saints do you think there have been?”
Baffled, she counted backwards. Two in her lifetime, four hundred annuals, maybe . . . “Thirty?” she guessed.
“Six, Echo.”
Six Saints, ever?
His mouth quirked at her confusion. “They should last a hundred annuals. That was how the first Patri planned it, to minimize the number of times they had to be copied. But the last one, only thirty. And this one—who knows. We only know the process of making them is not working anymore.”
She stared at him. He had not aged like the Saint, but she could see the signs, nonetheless. The skin hung loose around his neck and sagged beneath his jawline, and his hands were spotted dark where the sun found them at the edges of his robes. From one day to the next, he had become an old man. Some day, she realized with a shock, some day not too far distant, there would be a new Patri. It was harder to envision than a new Saint.
He saw the dismay in her face. “Yes, Echo. That is why I must have answers now. I cannot leave the Church to fail.”
She could not answer. Taking her silence for assent, he said, “I found something within the original prints. Words from an old priest, one of those who created the first Saint. Somehow he foresaw this disaster coming too. There were just a few lines in his writings. ‘Scatter the seed,’ he said. And I think that’s what he did. Small bits of denas, perhaps introduced through an illness, something that spread rapidly among what was left of the population—there were many plagues in the early days. The pieces wouldn’t be able to recombine until the cityens were finally able to start reproducing rapidly enough, if ever. But now, four hundred annuals later, his plan has come to fruition. The pieces have come together, finally. What he prayed would happen finally has.”
His voice rose with a fervor she had never heard. “There’s a Saint out there among the cityens, Echo. A Saint not made, but born.”
The air in the sanctuary congealed into some foreign substance her lungs could not take in. “I don’t understand, Patri.” But inside herself, at a level deeper than words, she did. All manner of things began to make sense; she had seen the signs that foretold this, assembling themselves piece by inevitable piece. The truth, falling from the air in tiny motes like settling dust, building a whole edifice from nothing. She closed her mind, refusing to believe, before the belief became a certainty she could not evade.
“The child who was with you—or someone—” The Patri’s gaze came back to her, and it took all her strength to meet it evenly. “Whoever crossed the forcewall with you had the denas of a Saint. Who was it?” She could only shake her head stupidly. The Patri drummed fingers on the altar, over and over, like a code. The sound drilled into her head. “Who was it?”
She flailed for sense. “There was no Saint with me. Patri, you must know that. The Saint is right here, in front of us. Gem told me you might be growing a new one, but that one would still be in the womb. I saw a woman give birth in the Bend but that was to a cityen child. . . .” The words piled one on top of the other, incoherent, meaningless babble. “It is impossible, Patri. There couldn’t be another Saint.”
His fingers stilled abruptly. Then he reached into a pocket, and laid a small scanner on the desk. When he spoke his voice was quiet, but as hard as it had been that night he had cast her out. “Listen to me, Echo. There is nothing more important in this world. You must remember who she is. You are the one hunter who can retrieve her. You must find the way.”
She stood there, paralyzed as if a static wand had burned her nerves.
She sat all night in the sanctuary, staring at the wizened body there, ignored by the priests as they went about their worried work. The boards winked and flashed in patterns in the corner of her eye. It wasn’t for a hunter to understand the Saint’s thoughts, but there was very little of hunter left inside her now. Tana had learned to read the patterns, she’d said once. Hunter closed her eyes, seeing the play of lights through her lids. The rhythm wove itself into her brain. She reached past the Saint, towards the girl she had known, who had sacrificed herself to save the city. Surely that girl would not let it all go to waste.
Help me, Hunter begged her. Help me see the way to serve.
In the silence between breaths she imagined she heard an answer: Look with your heart. You will know the truth.
Then the silence crashed down around her. The truth was that Hunter had failed them all.
The Saint lay wrapped in the silence, but Hunter felt her judgment. When she finally walked out the doors onto the dusty road, it was with a pain far greater than the shields had given her.
She would never be forgiven now.
CHAPTER 22
The sun was barely rising as she made her way back into the city. Even so, she was not alone, a few cityens already moving about despite the early hour. She walked as fast as she could but, despite the clawing urge for haste, didn’t run, not wanting to draw attention that might end up delaying her further. She had no illusion that she would be the only hunter the Patri sent. No one followed her yet, but that time would come. She had to move fast. She was beginning to formulate a plan, one that involved the children and the desert and finally Lia, on whom everything depended.
