Sinless

by Sarah Tarkoff

  “Yeah.”

  “But why would He have created the concept of evil in the first place? We all blame Eve for eating that apple, but Great Spirit created a creature capable of defying Him. Which means Great Spirit Himself must be kind of a conniving guy, huh?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So you worship an evil god? One who enjoys toying with humanity, watching us suffer over what decision to make, who enjoys watching us torment each other?”

  “I don’t know.” I was getting tired of this. What was he getting at?

  He sensed my frustration. “So you see the dilemma. For those who know that evil still exists . . . where does it come from? The only conclusion I’ve been able to draw, and I know it’s one that might anger some of my fellow prophets . . . there is more than one power in this world.”

  “The devil,” I said.

  “That is what Judeo-Christian traditions called it, yes. But if the devil exists, and can challenge Great Spirit . . . that stands everything we know about Great Spirit on its head. It means the deity we worship isn’t all-powerful. Which means the actions you and I take are even more important.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we are in the middle of a cosmic war. It’s no coincidence the Revelations occurred recently. They were the sign of greater turmoil to come. Right now, Great Spirit is winning. But people like the Ramseys—they’re the devil trying to make a comeback. And we can’t let him.”

  “But what can I do?”

  Joshua smiled. Exactly what he’d wanted me to ask. He pulled something from his pocket. A business card with no name, just a phone number. “Can I trust you?”

  No. “Yes.”

  “When you’re ready, call this number. Help me preserve this heaven on earth.” He closed my hand over the business card. There was something about being in his presence that filled me with a sense of calm. Something that made me want to do whatever he told me. I nodded, the paper getting flexible in my damp palm. “And you know, it’s best if you don’t tell anyone. Great Spirit’s work is best done in secret.”

  “‘Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,’” I quoted.

  I could tell Joshua was impressed. “I see I’ve chosen well. I’ll see you soon, Grace.” And before I even knew what was happening, Joshua was gone.

  I had just been conscripted into Prophet Joshua’s army.

  Chapter 10

  What had just happened? Was this another test? Or was I wrong from the beginning—had Joshua known nothing, had he simply stared at me while he was healing Macy not as some kind of threat, but because he was planning to recruit me?

  I walked inside and found my father, who was waiting by the door, excited. “Well . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “How did it go?” He’d known ahead of time, I realized. The prophet had told him what he was going to ask of me.

  “Joshua gave me this.” I showed him the business card and confided what Joshua had just said, immediately betraying the prophet’s first request. My father took the card, considered it. “What does it mean?” I asked him. “What am I going to have to do? What if I don’t want to do it?”

  “Great Spirit only asks of us what He knows we can handle,” my father said.

  I wanted to press him more, but we were interrupted as Macy ran up and hugged me. Her appearance, despite my best attempts to look past it, gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I can’t believe that just happened,” she said. Her voice sounded different—her throat was still a little misshapen.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said.

  “I’m going to go to worship centers every day for the rest of my life,” she told me. She sounded like me, a couple weeks ago. If only Joshua had chosen her as part of his army instead. I cringed at the thought that maybe he still would.

  The Cannons attached themselves to my father, who relished this moment to preach Great Spirit’s word to Macy. She soaked up every syllable. Unable to keep a straight face, I crept away to the kitchen, where Zack was lingering. I tried to go past him to go upstairs, but he stopped me. “You can’t drug her now.”

  “Why would I do that?” Her face, obviously. I wanted my friend to live a full life. Get the jobs she deserved, get into the right schools. With a face like that . . .

  “My friends may be watching. Macy will get better on her own, if she prays enough,” Zack said.

  I nodded. “I’m just glad she’s okay,” I repeated.

  “Me, too.” My hand crumpled the business card involuntarily. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t want any of this.

  I moved upstairs, closing myself off in my room. I replayed the way Joshua had touched my cheek. Unsettling thoughts. I tried to drive them away with thoughts of Jude, but those saddened me even more.

  I remembered a box of Jude’s things that his mother had dropped off, almost a year ago now. Things she’d thought I might want, things that pained her too much to keep around her own house, I imagined. I’d been too depressed to look at most of them, when I thought they belonged to my dead friend. But now that they belonged to the living boy I was heartbroken over, I was seized with a sudden desire to sift through them all.

  It turned out to be a masochistic instinct. The box was full of notes Jude had written me in class, items I remembered from our childhood. A time capsule of what Jude had been like before the accident, memories that once had filled me with grief, but now filled me with longing. Going through it gave me reminder after reminder of how wonderful Jude was, and how much he didn’t love me.

  As I waded to the bottom of the box, I saw a fuzzy object: Jude’s red bear, the one that matched my blue one. It had a wear and tear that felt familiar in my hands, and in spite of myself, it made me smile. I wondered what the last thing we’d recorded into it might be—probably one of my elementary school swear words. I squeezed it. But it wasn’t my five-year-old voice that came out, it was Jude’s sixteen-year-old one. Before the accident, he’d recorded: “Will you go out with me?”

  I had to play it three times to be sure. But those were the words. A smile spread across my face. Jude had been lying. That whole brutal conversation we’d had the night before, he’d been lying. To protect me, to protect himself, I wasn’t sure. But I hadn’t been crazy; he’d had feelings for me, even if it was just in his former life. For once, I’d been right about something. Maybe everything was different between us now, after so much time had passed, and after what Jude had gone through—but maybe it wasn’t.

  The celebration was still going on downstairs, but I bypassed it—grabbing my father’s keys and driving out to the Outcast camp I’d last seen Jude walk into. Navigating by memory was difficult, but eventually I saw it: a collection of trailers, tents, and makeshift wooden shacks. Even from far away, I recognized the gaits of its inhabitants. My father had been to plenty of Outcast villages in his ministering, but I’d never set foot inside one. I’d be as out of place here as I was in the black market. But now, I had at least the tiniest bit of wisdom, enough to know that wandering in here with my face could cause a cascade of problems.

  I needed a disguise, and I knew exactly how to create one. I thought of everything awful I’d ever done. I thought of all the Outcasts I’d looked down on in my naïveté. I thought of Macy, who had suffered so much because of me. Of the Ramseys. Of every unkind word I’d ever uttered, of every person I’d hurt. And lastly, of Jude—of the moments before the crash that had destroyed his life, when I’d asked him a petty, distracting question. I decided to Punish myself, to remind myself of all the reasons I deserved to feel guilty. And as I did, I felt my face change, last night’s pill out of my system.

  I looked in the mirror. I was no longer Grace Luther. I was someone else, an anonymous Outcast.

  I got out of the car. I was going to find Jude.

  Chapter 11

  I stepped into the camp, nervous. The other Outcasts eyed me warily. Though I looked like them, they recognized that I was new, that I
was a visitor here. I couldn’t distinguish between them, but they could distinguish between themselves.

  As I walked, an older man cornered me. “What’re you here for?”

  Maybe he could help me. “I’m looking for someone named Jude.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t know a Jude.”

  “Maybe he goes by another name? Motorcycle, blue helmet?”

  He hesitated—clearly he knew who I meant. “Why you looking for him?” Jude was someone important here, it seemed by his tone.

  “He’s my friend.” That was not a good enough answer. I had another idea. “Dawn sent me.”

  He eyed me, wary. Picked up his phone, dialed, spoke to someone on the other end. “You expecting something from Dawn?” He described me, what I was wearing.

  I could hear the other voice, muffled. The man hung up, gestured down the street. I walked to where he pointed, one of these ramshackle cabins, and I knocked on the front door, a discarded piece of metal siding.

  A young woman answered. She had flawless skin, and her outfit signified she was Hindu, I think. She was pretty—at least, pretty for this place. Normal. A teenager with a curious, skeptical face. She looked at me and called into the house. “Ben?”

  An alias, it seemed, since Jude came to the door. He seemed shocked to see me. “What are you doing here? I told you . . .”

  I pulled the red bear out of my purse. “Your mother gave this to me.”

  He took it. Didn’t play it, but must have remembered what it said. “That was a long time ago.”

  “I know. But still, you said it. You can’t pretend you didn’t say it.” I didn’t break my gaze. The other girl watched us, then went back into the house. Jude looked after her. I quickly said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

  “No. You shouldn’t have.”

  But I didn’t walk away. “You know, you’re all I have left.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. Who am I supposed to talk to? About anything real? Macy? My dad?”

  Jude was getting upset. “Don’t say things like that to me. Do you know what I would give to have one conversation with my mother? One? About anything.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So just go home, okay?”

  “I don’t want to go home. What do I have to go back to? Working for the prophet?” I quickly explained everything—Macy, Zack, the prophet’s offer. “If we leave, maybe we have a chance to be happy.”

  “What about me? Maybe I don’t want to leave, give everything up.”

  “You mean your girlfriend?” I asked, gesturing at the empty space the Indian girl had once occupied.

  Jude looked back into the house again. “She’s not my girlfriend. You know people have lives outside of dating, right?”

  That hit me in the gut. He was calling me out for my shallowness, my boy craziness. It hurt because it was true. It hurt because he knew me, he’d seen me for who I really was and found me wanting. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Why are you here, Grace?”

  “Because you lied to me. Maybe you don’t feel anything for me now, but once upon a time . . . you were going to ask me out.”

  “I was.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “Because you don’t know what you’re saying, running away. That’s not how this works.”

  “Yeah? Then how does it work? You talk to me like I’m this naïve, helpless little girl, but maybe I could be more if you respected me enough to tell me the truth. You’ve had years to get used to this. I’ve had, what, a few days? You had people, you had Dawn and Father Dennehy, you had everyone in this place. I have no one.” Jude was silent. “I’m leaving. I’m leaving home, leaving Tutelo. With or without you. Maybe I’ll die. But I can’t stay, I can’t go back and be the prophet’s pawn—I’d kill myself. If you don’t want to go with me, fine. But at least respect me enough to tell me the truth.”

  I was acutely aware of what I must look like in my “disguise.” This was not how I’d hoped to look when coming to profess my love to someone. I watched Jude’s face, wondering what he was thinking, wondering if I repulsed him, wondering if my words repulsed him.

  Finally, he spoke. “You’re right. You deserve the truth.”

  I held my breath. “Which is?”

  He waited a moment. Let the words marinate in his gut. And then finally said, almost in a whisper, “I’ve never stopped loving you.”

  I was so happy I started to cry. Jude took me in his arms, held me. “I love you, too,” I told him.

  Chapter 12

  The inside of Jude’s house was sparsely decorated. His friend, whoever she was, excused herself, leaving the two of us alone. He made me some tea. “Are you really going away? All alone?”

  “What else can I do?”

  He sat next to me. The tea tasted like dirt—clearly Jude didn’t have a lot of money, and his groceries were the cheapest he could find. He stirred his cup, thinking. “We should ask Dawn for help.”

  I shook my head. “Are you kidding? She almost killed me. She won’t help me with anything.” Jude shrugged—maybe he agreed. “I’ve done missionary work before—if I tell my father I’m going on another trip, it’ll buy me time to get out of the country. I think going north will be easier. Once I get to Montreal, I can take a boat somewhere else, maybe over to Nova Scotia.”

  “Why Nova Scotia?”

  “I’ve heard it’s pretty.” He made a face. “And I can get there by car—it’s harder to track someone traveling by land. And it’s isolated, not like a big city where you’re more likely to run into clerics who know my dad. There are lots of tourists there. People wouldn’t be suspicious of unfamiliar faces. It’d be easy to get a job working in a shop or something, I just have to get a Canadian passport that says I’m eighteen and, you know, not Grace Luther . . .”

  Jude smiled. “You know, I have a friend in Rochester. I think he could make us passports.”

  It took me a moment to notice his use of pronoun. “‘Us’?”

  He paused, torn. “Maybe.”

  I looked around the cabin. Despite its bareness, it reminded me that Jude was this entire other person, separate from the fantasy I’d concocted of him during these years apart. Someone with a whole life I knew nothing about. A life I was trying to take him away from. “I don’t want you to go just for me.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  I added, for clarity, “But I do want you to come.”

  “I want to go, too. But . . .” He paused for a long time.

  “What?”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  I tried not to be selfish. “If that’s your decision.”

  Jude hurriedly explained, “It’s not you, it’s . . . I couldn’t do it to them. Dawn, the others. They saved my life, and I promised I’d help them.”

  “Haven’t you helped them enough?” Jude’s instinct to be noble made my selfishness feel that much more glaring.

  “In a couple years, what have I done, really? I owe them my life. I always figured that’s what I’d repay them with.”

  “What if we did one thing that accomplished a lifetime’s worth of good deeds all at once?”

  Jude laughed, a little mockingly. “Sure, yeah, let’s do that.”

  “I’m serious!”

  “Grace Luther, saving the world as efficiently as possible.”

  I persisted. “Come on, tell me, what would be so big, so amazing, that you’d feel like you’d paid your dues?”

  “I don’t know. If I knew, I would have done it already.”

  I thought of something. “The business card.” I pulled it out.

  “That thing the prophet gave you?”

  “If I call this number, I’m working for him. I could be a double agent, the thing Dawn wanted me to be in the first place, the reason she saved me. I’ll do one big thing to help her cause, then we can run away.”

  “You really want to piss off the prophet and then try to cross an intern
ational border?”

  “We’ll leave before he finds out. Make a run for it.”

  Jude was skeptical. “So what happens when you call? Do you have any idea what you’d have to do?”

  I looked at the phone number. “Let’s find out.”

  Book Five

  Chapter 1

  Jude called Dawn and filled her in on our plan. She was thrilled—this had been her hope for me all along. Don’t get too excited, I wanted to say. I wouldn’t be doing this for long.

  I still hadn’t replaced my cell phone since the kidnapping, and I didn’t want to use Jude’s, so we bought a burner phone at a gas station, and I typed in the number. Then paused. “Maybe this is a bad idea,” I said. “We don’t know who’s on the other end.”

  “What could happen? You’re just making a phone call.”

  I couldn’t think of any other objections, so I hit the call button. My nerves jolted as the line rang. A female voice picked up. “Hello?” Nothing else. Had I even called the right number?

  “Hi,” I said, voice cracking. “I got this number from . . . Joshua.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Grace Luther.”

  I heard typing in the background. “Are you free on Saturday morning?”

  I glanced at Jude. “Sure.”

  “The prophet has a package he’d like you to deliver on his behalf.”

  My stomach was doing somersaults. “Okay.”

  “I’ll give you the address. You’ll get the rest of the instructions once you get there.”

  “Okay,” I said, scribbling down the address she rattled off.

  “Thanks so much,” she said brightly, then hung up.

  I looked over at Jude.

  “That was easy,” he said.

  I nodded, still shaking. “But what good is it going to do to drop off a package?”

  “This is just the part where you get them to trust you. Once you’ve proven yourself, then they’ll give you more important things to do.”