The media barely had time to speak the name Joshua Villegas before my father got the call, and instructions to show up at a construction site a few blocks from the White House—what would become Walden Manor, Prophet Joshua’s famous residence. Joshua was working from a makeshift office in the back, away from the commotion. The prophet had one assistant keeping his schedule, Samuel Jenkins—you may have heard of him. By 2033, Samuel would have the honorific of “Guru,” and as Joshua’s right-hand man, he’d become one of the most powerful people in the country—almost a deputy prophet in his own right. This was the voice my father had spoken to on the phone. Samuel regarded my father with great deference and led him past all the heavy machinery to meet a handsome man, his nose buried in a thick volume. The man’s dark eyes darted quickly over the page; he was so engrossed, he barely noticed as my father approached.
“Prophet Joshua? This is Paul Luther.”
Even at the time, my father was impressed by Joshua. The man had a great spiritual presence, which would only grow with time and practice—he had an almost magical quality about him. Joshua had a thoughtful way of speaking, and a kind of social awareness that made it seem like he was reading your mind. Like his first words to my father, which were, “Apologies for the mess. We’ll get real furniture next month, after the American Revelation.”
My father was shocked at the casualness with which he said this. “Next month?” he asked. “It’ll happen that soon?”
“Two fifteen p.m., East Coast time, on July 4,” the prophet said. “Great Spirit figured we’d remember that one.”
My father wanted to ask how he knew. My father prayed often, but God rarely gave him such specific instructions. Instead he said, “I’m honored you chose to contact me. But I can’t figure out what you could want with a small-town pastor.”
“You’re a talented man,” Joshua said. “And you understand what people want to hear.” He said he’d visited churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams. He’d scouted every religious leader in D.C. (and watched videos Samuel had recorded from thousands more all over the country), and he thought Paul Luther was the most talented speaker he’d seen. “In a week, there are going to be a lot of terrified people. You’ve seen how the Revelations have happened in other nations? The destruction, the loss of life, the terror and panic and mourning?” My father had. “It doesn’t need to be like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Great Spirit is Forgiving. He doesn’t want to Punish a single one of us. At the Moment of His Revelations, all of mankind is Forgiven, as long as they follow a specific set of instructions.”
“That’s not how it’s looked.”
“Because people have doubted. People have been afraid. To build this new world, only the faithful can remain. You understand?”
“Of course,” my father said.
“I need your help to build that faith.” Those were intoxicating words to a man who lived only to serve God.
“How?”
“We can save lives with the right message. I know your Christian faith already uses this word, ‘saved.’ But it means so much more now. I don’t know if you know this, but I began my career studying the way people relate to God. And what struck me both now and then is how cocky we are. How we assume, with our tiny human brains, that we have any idea what He’s thinking. How we look at this world of spiritual teachers and say, ‘I know for certain which one of them is speaking the truth.’ There’s so little that the human mind can truly and fully comprehend in this world. But we have to find a story to make sense of things, we have to pick one truth or the other, otherwise we go mad. The truth is, I am but a vessel. As are you. As are we all. Great Spirit is trying so desperately to communicate with us, and we’re ignoring Him. We ignore the teachers He sends because we are foolish. We are base. We are selfish. We could not follow even the most basic of His commandments, we could not stop ourselves from making war, we could not rein in our own greed and pettiness, and so now, we’ve brought this Judgment upon ourselves. This is our last chance. Mankind needs to listen, or we’re going to vanish off the face of this earth. And mankind is only going to open their ears if the right people are speaking. You’re that right person. And you and I need to find a lot more people like you, because otherwise, a lot of innocent people are going to die.”
My father only had one question: “How can I help?”
The prophet had a message that he wanted everyone to hear, and my dad became devoted to spreading it. Paul Luther flew all over the country leading up to July 4, speaking to religious leaders on Joshua’s behalf, helping them to prepare messages for their congregations. My whole childhood, I remember him speaking of the prophet like a friend, and I knew they worked closely together, but it wasn’t until I was sitting across from Dawn that I realized just how powerful that made my father.
“I know you and your dad are close, and I’m sure you’ve never kept anything from him before”—Almost true, I thought—“but this time you’ll have to. This time you have to make him believe that everything is exactly as it was before you met me. Because if a single word of this gets back to Prophet Joshua, we’re all dead. Me, Jude, maybe even you.”
“I understand,” I said. More than anything, it was the way Dawn spoke about Prophet Joshua that worried me. Normally, people’s voices are full of a kind of reverence when they speak his name, but hers wasn’t. Hers was matter-of-fact, like she was speaking about any historical figure. He could have been William McKinley, he could have been Alexander the Great, he could have been Mussolini . . . no difference.
I could have run straight to my father the moment I was healed . . . yet here I was, talking to a mysteriously irreverent woman, and the more we spoke, the more I worried I’d accidentally aligned myself with the wrong side. But I was already in so deep, and everything she said was so different from everything I’d been told my whole life—her words were addictive. No matter how pious my heart wanted to remain, I couldn’t force my body to leave. Especially not after she said, “Are you ready to learn the truth? About why people are Punished?”
Chapter 2
“What’s happening to everyone, these physical transformations, this Punishment and Forgiveness . . . you’ve probably guessed by now. It’s more complicated than it seems,” Dawn said.
“How so?” I asked, nervous about what the answer might be.
“We’ve been doing research, and we can identify the process causing these changes . . . and it’s scientific, not religious. This is something man-made, not Great Spirit.”
She gave me a moment to process this. I’m sure I must have known, the moment I saw Zack take that pill—that was where all that doubt had come from. But I’d never put all the words together in a row like that. “It’s not Great Spirit,” I said, hearing how they sounded together. “Great Spirit isn’t Punishing us. He never has been.”
She must have seen the horror and revulsion on my face, because she quickly added, “Now that’s not to say that Great Spirit doesn’t exist. Most of the people I work with who know the truth still believe in some god or another. But this so-called evidence of His work, the proof that He exists—it’s just not true.”
“If it’s not Great Spirit, what’s causing it?”
“We’re still working on isolating the exact cause, but we’ve found that changes in appearance directly correlate with feelings of guilt, and the chemicals associated with it that are released in our brains. That’s what that drug we gave you did—it affected your brain chemistry.”
My instinct was to reject her words outright. I’d been taught my whole life that faith could tell me more than science. Already my mind was spinning in somersaults, trying to find ways to prove her wrong. “How do you know? How can you prove that?”
“We’ve done tests. Hundreds of tests, hundreds of subjects, and they all come back the same. Aside from variations in individual biology, of course.”
The pieces were falling into place, against my will. “So every tim
e we do something bad, we feel guilty? And that’s why the Punishment happens?”
Jude chimed in, “Even though the car accident wasn’t my fault, I still felt so guilty for that kid’s death, for hurting that woman . . .” He stopped, choking up a bit. “But it wasn’t a judgment from the outside. It was my own judgment of myself.” I moved closer to him, putting a comforting hand on his very real arm. I still couldn’t believe he was sitting next to me.
“It’s a shame,” Dawn said. “Punishment is often a sign that someone’s a good person, that they’re capable of great empathy. They’ve recognized that they made a mistake and hurt someone, and that ends up being their downfall.”
“So that’s why Punishments don’t affect everyone equally?”
“Exactly. Because everyone’s brains are different. And everyone is raised with different cultural beliefs, which is why we need prophets. At least one in every country, to account for all those differences. Without prophets, people wouldn’t know what to feel guilty for. Punishments wouldn’t look like Great Spirit, they’d just look like random destruction.”
“What about when Punishments are lifted? I’ve prayed myself better. How can that possibly be brain chemistry?”
“But that’s just it. We’ve known for decades that prayer has a huge effect on the brain. You can put someone praying or meditating in an MRI machine and, over the course of weeks, you’ll see the amygdala shrink, higher brain functions increase.”
“So the way my brain changes when I pray . . . that’s what makes me get better?”
“Exactly.”
“What does that mean? Isn’t that Great Spirit healing me?”
“In a way. You know, your brain doesn’t know how to distinguish between an experience it imagines and one that’s actually happening. If you imagine eating an apple—biting into it, chewing it, tasting it, swallowing it—your brain reacts as though it’s a real apple you’re eating. So an atheist might argue that the feelings associated with prayer are entirely created by the brain—that it’s simply a mental state you cultivate, and that the apple, Great Spirit, is imaginary. But a religious person like you would say no, prayer is simply the brain’s response to interacting with the divine. That whatever’s going on in your brain is a response to something real, that you’re actually eating the apple, so to speak. To be honest, it’s not something we have the technology to distinguish yet.”
Jude saw I was still confused, and tried to help. “Basically, science can’t prove if there’s a god. But scientists have figured out that the chemicals the brain releases when you pray can somehow counteract the ones that cause deterioration. That’s what we just gave you—prayer chemicals.”
I shook my head, still confused. “I still don’t understand. How does feeling guilty make me ugly? What’s actually causing the ugliness?”
“We don’t know,” she admitted. “Our research is still in progress.”
“They’re getting close,” Jude said. “I met one of the scientists, Dr. . . .” He looked at Dawn, asking for approval to share the doctor’s identity.
Dawn gave it. “Alexandra Smith.”
“She’s got all these experiments going . . . they’re gonna figure it out.”
Dawn could see my frustration, and she quickly added, “You’re right that we’re missing a piece of the puzzle. And until we find that piece, every solution we can concoct will be a stopgap. We’re able to treat the symptoms—we can stuff people full of happy chemicals—but that’s not a long-term plan. Until we know more, we won’t be able to stop the Punishments of every person on Earth.”
“Why don’t you just tell everyone?” I asked. “Why let people go on believing something that kills them?”
“You think we haven’t tried that? You know what happens when you tell people the truth? The first thing they do is question ‘Great Spirit,’ His power, His very existence. And you know what happens to those people?”
I did know. The same thing that had almost happened to me when I began to suspect the truth, when I was racked with doubt. “They die.”
“They die, before their rational minds can catch up and process what we’ve told them. Fear and guilt take over. It’s brilliant. It’s the one conspiracy you can’t go public with, because it kills anyone who learns the truth. To go on TV and proclaim to the world what’s happening? If you were successful at getting your message out there, it’d be genocide.”
“So what do you do?” I asked, feeling hopeless.
“We give people these,” Dawn said, pulling a bottle of pills out of the brown box. They were different from the ones I’d found in Zack’s suitcase. These were larger, cruder, red instead of yellow, but she promised, “They have the same chemicals that your brain naturally produces through prayer. They help people through that initial questioning stage, until they’ve adapted to a world where they don’t have to constantly fear Great Spirit.” They sounded the same as the pills I’d gotten from Zack.
Jude handed me the bottle. “You don’t have to take them forever. I don’t anymore. Once you’re off them, you’ll still feel guilty when you do something you regret, and your appearance will still change . . . but as long as you don’t feel that doubt . . . that’s what will kill you.”
“Why?”
“We think it works like a feedback loop—the more you see yourself being Punished for your doubt, the more you feel guilty about doubting. That’s our theory. But again, you don’t have to believe in Great Spirit to survive without the pills—I haven’t taken them in years. But it’s been years since I worried that my agnosticism would send me to hell. I used to feel guilty, and I don’t anymore.”
“So the doubt, the guilt, will go away?” I asked.
“Eventually. I promise,” she said. “Your only job right now is to convince your dad you know nothing.”
And then I asked the question that worried me most. “Does my father know the truth?”
“No way,” Jude said immediately. “If he saw how sick you were when I found you, he’d have found a way to help you. He never would have put you in danger. He loves you.”
To my relief, Dawn nodded her agreement. “If he hasn’t figured it out by now . . . I don’t think he wants to.”
“You think he’s just in denial?”
“Your dad’s a true believer,” Dawn said. “Sometimes, it’s easier to lie to ourselves. No one wants to believe they’re wrong about everything they’ve believed in their whole life. When confronted with ideas that challenge their beliefs, most people will find ways to discredit those ideas.”
I still didn’t quite believe it. With the little I knew about science at the time, her explanation was as fantastic to me as any religion—more so, because religion was a language I’d been brought up to speak fluently. But brain chemistry . . . at the time it was just a bunch of big words I had to accept as fact.
This was the point where Dawn grew very serious. “You can’t tell anyone what you learned tonight. You can’t speak about any of this over the phone, or by email or text. Nothing that can be traced. We don’t know yet who might be watching.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Good. Because in the next week, I promise you, you’ll want to ask me questions, and I need you to understand that you can’t. After tonight, you’ll never see me again. So anything else you’re worried about, please say it now.”
I had a couple of questions, I’m sure . . . I don’t remember now exactly what they were. Days, even hours later, I thought of a thousand things I wished I’d asked her. Why was Pakistan first? How did Joshua become prophet? How do you know everything you know? Why should I believe you? Who else can I trust? And most importantly—who can’t I trust, under any circumstances? Not knowing the answers to those questions was going to put me in danger sooner rather than later.
“Normally,” Dawn said, “I wouldn’t send you home. You’d go into hiding, you’d give up your identity and assume a new one.”
I looked at Jude—that mus
t have been what he’d had to do to stay alive. “Why do I get to go home?” I asked.
“Because I think you could be the most valuable asset we’ve ever had. If you can help us, with your position close to the prophet—I think you could do some real good for people.”
Though I had no idea what it meant, I liked the sound of it. Doing real good. But Dawn was right. Changing everything you believe in? It’s not so easy, it never happens fast. No matter how much I nodded along with what she said, I was still trying to find a way to justify everything. Like a white blood cell encountering a virus, my emotional immune system was trying to protect me, to find a way to avoid having been so wrong. Not that I could have understood that or admitted it at the time.
Dawn saw all this running across my face and said, “You don’t have to decide now.” I nodded, relieved.
Jude took my hand. “Come on. I’ll drive you home.”
I nodded. Home. Where little did I know that at that very moment, my father, who loved me very much, was on the phone with Walden Manor, telling them everything.
Chapter 3
My father had always had many questions about the devil. However, the prophets were universally mum on the subject, and they asked their clerics to keep the devil out of their sermons.
“We can all see what Great Spirit does. But the devil’s work is usually invisible,” Joshua would say. “To speak the devil’s name is to imply the fallibility of Great Spirit. If anyone can challenge even a tiny bit of Great Spirit’s domain, Great Spirit cannot be all-powerful. So that’s why it’s up to a few of us, the all-faithful, to fight that battle for Him, so the rest of humanity never has to doubt Great Spirit’s power.” My father understood this, even if he didn’t like it. He had seen plenty of people succumb to the damaging effects of doubt.
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