“You can talk.” Sterling’s eyes narrow in on Halo. “You can talk, can’t you?”
The Goddess wipes blood across her mouth, wipes more on her bare arm.
“What is she doing?” Bolt is frightened, on the edge of panic.
The Goddess smears blood more over the exposed parts of her body.
I’m bleeding! You’ve made me bleed!
Sudden pain and pressure behind his eyes; Sterling feels every heartbeat in his head like a blow from a clubbing stick. Faster and faster, his heart pounds against his chest as if it’s trying to hammer its way out; he fears that his heart may burst or his skull explode. With a moan, he falls to his side.
“Sterling?” Bolt reaches out to him, hesitantly touches him and whips his hand away. “What’s happening to you?”
“Fuck … ” His initial nausea doubles and redoubles and squeezes his guts in its fist. Sterling dry heaves repeatedly with a horrid, painful retching, his whole body is wracked with convulsions.
“Stop!” Bolt shouts. “Whatever you two are doing, stop!”
As if by magic, the pain and nausea vanish and his heart slows to its normal tempo. He uncurls as his muscles unlock, and he mostly just wants to breathe. His eyes narrow as they lock on Halo; his shiv rests on the cave floor within easy reach, if only he can …
Halo returns her hand to the wound, wipes more blood across her mouth.
“Goddess,” Bolt approaches her, closer than either of them have been since the abduction. “You’re bleeding.”
I’m bleeding.
“Stop talking in my head!” Sterling screams, slams his fist onto the ground. “Quit … quit wiping your blood everywhere!”
You did this to me.
“Bolt,” Sterling swivels to the entrance of the cave. “She’s in my head, kid. She’s in my head, dammit.”
“She’s the Goddess … ” Bolt whispers.
“Time is the Goddess! You hear me? TIME! That’s Halo, that’s a false goddess! All this is damned! DAMNED!”
Halo wipes more blood onto her lips.
“In the name of the Goddess stop … stop wiping blood on your lips!”
How do I return it to my body?
The naïveté of her question surprises him. She cocks her head to the side in genuine curiosity.
“You … you don’t know about blood?”
“Halo?” Bolt asks. “Can you hear us?”
Her head turns to Bolt; she licks her lips, takes in more of the blood.
You can hear me, can’t you?
“I can,” says Sterling. “And I’d be lying if I told you that this fact wasn’t troubling to me. Can you hear her, Bolt?”
He can’t hear me.
“Are you telling me that I’m the only one?”
You aren’t the only one. There are others, one in particular.
“What’s she saying?” Bolt asks excitedly.
“So you can’t talk?”
No, but I can hear.
“Can you see?”
Not like you.
.2.
Sterling approaches Halo. Bolt stays behind him now, leery about moving closer to the bleeding Goddess.
“We should get you cleaned off. It’s going to be tough enough to get to the border unnoticed; I can’t imagine having you covered in blood would make us any less noticeable. As the ringing in his head subsides, Sterling runs his hand through his hair and considers the impossibility of his situation yet again.
You did this.
“Yeah, I know I did it, but you were doing whatever it was that you were doing with your sleep trick.” He glances left and right. “Dammit. I didn’t bring anything, no clothes, no rags, nothing.”
I can tell.
“You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”
She looks directly at Sterling; even though her eyes are covered by Blinders, he gets the feeling that she can actually see him.
“Don’t look at me like that … ”
Come closer.
“Bolt, did you see any depots or anything near here? Before we set off, we need to get some food and some water.” Sterling says this while keeping one eye trained on Halo. He still isn’t sure of how to feel about the ghastly, ghostly girl, her lower half concealed by smoke gray wrappings and her arms and face smeared with drying blood.
There is a depot a few vestas away from here.
“How do you know?” he asks her.
I saw it.
“You can’t see.”
I heard it.
“Why should we believe you?”
Because I don’t lie the same way as you.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Halo opens her mouth as if to speak, and closes it without doing so.
“Okay,” Sterling’s eyebrows draw together. “We’ll all go.”
No, Bolt will go. You and I will stay here.
“For someone who is technically a hostage, you sure are good at making demands.”
I could leave right now if I wanted to.
He says under his breath, “Bolt, do what the Goddess, I mean Halo says.”
“What did she say?” the kid asks.
“Sorry, I forgot you can’t … um … hear her. She said go to the depot and get some supplies.”
“How am I supposed to do that? I don’t have any bits.”
The supplies will be waiting outside the depot when he gets there.
“She says it’ll be waiting for you.”
Bolt glances from Sterling to Halo, who has since returned to her meditative pose.
“Are you sure?”
Sterling walks over to the kid, places his hand on his shoulder and leads him out of the cave. A quick glance at the ruby red sky confirms that night will be here soon. Dusk in the Canyon is always something to behold, dawn is generally dreaded. “Listen, Bolt, some weird stuff is going on here. I … I get the sense that she wanted us to free her. She’s speaking to me in my head.” He taps his finger against his skull. “I’ll be completely honest with you – I don’t know what to think.”
“So should I go?”
“You should go. I think she would have squashed our heads by this point if she wanted – just a hunch I have.”
“She’s magic?”
“Nonsense,” Sterling says. “Well, maybe, but that doesn’t mean anything. Okay, so it does mean something. Look – I’m still trying to process all this, that’s for damn sure.” He clears his throat. “Things may get hairy once we get near the Off Limits. You should … you should leave before then. I know that’s a ways off, but … ”
“I don’t want to go.”
Sterling’s eyes dart from the kid’s nose, to his hairline to his chin and back. He had the same color hair when he was a kid, brownish blonde. Now his is all brown with premature wisps of white sticking out of his sideburns, accenting his beard stubble. It’s amazing what gambling, stress, sex, and life in the Canyon will do. Sterling is a year from thirty and he already looks forty. Bolt will be the same, if he survives that long.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says, “that this will be a grand adventure and that … ”
“That’s not what I think at all.”
“What do you think then?”
Send him to get food, before it gets too dark. I am hungry. There will be clothing there as well. You can discuss his future with him later.
Sterling’s head cocks left, waits for Halo to finish. He doesn’t like the fact that she can simply whisper in his head, but it does beat shouting.
“All right, Bolt, go. Come back as soon as possible. Halo will … um … watch over you, I promise. Take the motocart.”
***
Sterling doesn’t take the moment to collect his thoughts as he had originally planned to do. Instead, he stretches his arms over his head and makes his way back into the cave.
“I can’t see you anymore,” he tells her. “It’s getting too dark in here.”
Halo stands, goes to lift her
absent wrappings out of habit, and walks to the entrance. Dusk darkens the blood smeared across her face and upper arms. She tip-toes around a few jagged stones on the floor of the cave, stopping just at the entrance, but not an inch past its threshold. Though blind, she moves with the assurance of the fully sighted.
“So you wanted to leave?” he asks. The mouth of the cave is far enough above the floor of the canyon to allow Sterling to see some of the homes and depots of the South. He can even make out Bolt, who’s now a rapidly moving dot heading towards the horizon.
What do you mean?
“I mean, if you can … control our minds, or scream inside my head or whatever it is you do, you could have stopped us back at the church.”
Halo barely registers Sterling’s overdue epiphany.
People are praying to me right now. The Dusk Prayer is something that is quite popular in the South. Is it the same in the North?
“You still aren’t answering my questions. You wanted to leave the church, didn’t you?”
A breeze rolls through, carrying with it the dry, dusty smell of the Canyon; Halo’s hair stirs and settles as the sudden gust dissipates and vanishes as quickly as it arose.
“Did you or did you not want to leave?”
I did.
“And that’s why your guards weren’t able to stop me. That’s why this suicide mission has somehow worked out so far.”
Correct. You’re smart for a Northern Upper.
“Yeah. Wait, what? Hey!”
Just an observation.
“Why would you do it then? You are …” Sterling doesn’t want to say what he’s going to say next, but the proof is there and even at an arm’s distance from her, he can feel an intangible something prickling his skin. “You are clearly a Goddess, or … something like one.”
No, I’m not.
Sterling still tries to place her voice. It is a gentle whisper, yet clear and distinct. It is the quintessence of femininity; the voice of sister, mother, lover, friend. It soothes even as it stirs faint flickers of desire. It is soft and motherly, soothing yet arousing.
“Halo … ” He waves his hand in front of her eyes to gauge her reaction; faster than the eye can track, she catches his wrist in an iron grip.
He yelps in surprise, twists his wrist away, takes a step back.
“You are … powerful,” he finally manages to say. “I don’t have a lot of experience with Goddesses, but … you are one.”
Goddesses don’t bleed.
“Anyone bleeds if you throw a sharp rock at them,” he says, rubbing his wrist.
They don’t bleed here.
She places one hand over her pudendum.
I am flawed.
“How old are you, exactly?”
Eighteen years, four months, three days and today, exactly.
“And you’ve never had your woman’s time of the moon?”
According to the people of the South, no.
“I see … ”
To say that this complicates everything is an understatement. Goddesses are no longer Goddesses after their first menstrual cycle. This rule comes directly from the Book. Purity leaves at the first flow of blood. Both the North and the South follow this guideline. Once a Goddess has her first menses, she becomes One of the Discarded, something even lower than the Vultured Few. Many take their own lives within the first few months of their expulsion. Strangely, their suicide is considered auspicious; anyone in the vicinity of a former Goddess’ death is all but guaranteed to be raptured.
“How were you able to hide it?”
The blood smeared across Halo’s face floats into the air forming tiny, tear-shaped droplets. The droplets explode into glitter, which fall to the cave floor like ash. Her Blinders unwrap, draping over her shoulders. Her hair starts to grow. Once it is long, the Blinders tie themselves around her hair while her dress lifts, transforming into a Northern Upper’s clothing complete with a translucent seersucker veil and tight binders around her shoulders. Her hair changes color, morphing from sunburst yellow into jet black.
Halo’s eyes blink open, one blue and one green. Sterling places his hand over his mouth in shock and surprise.
Suddenly, she’s her old self again – tattered wrappings and blood smeared across her arms and her face. He wipes his hand over his eyes, looks at her again. Everything is back to normal.
“You did that … in my mind?”
I did.
“And that’s how you hid it?”
Yes.
“So why … why did you spread the blood from your arm all over your body?”
Goddesses don’t bleed.
“But you said it yourself – you aren’t a Goddess.”
Halo turns to Sterling; he’s bombarded by a million images, all flinging past him in rapid-firesuccession. Enormous structures, metalzips, people with metal bones, an aerial view of the Canyon, an enormous moto whipping through empty plains, hillocks and barren wastelands growing in size as the Canyon diminishes. Finally, water, a huge body of it, shimmering and moving, lifting into the air and crashing down.
He stumbles backwards, tries to escape the images. They end immediately, but the ringing in his head returns.
***
Reality comes to a standstill. Sterling has more questions than he’s ever had in his life, but Halo has stopped talking altogether. She’s frozen in front of him now, hardly breathing. He doesn’t know how long he’s been staring at her, but it’s now full night and he’s pretty sure he’s been in a trance for some time.
“I’ll be back.”
Heading left, Sterling walks along the Canyon wall, his hand lightly feathering against its jagged surface. The stone is cool; warmth leaves the valley at night, especially during certain times of year. He shifts his thoughts to the Canyon – anything to forget what he’s just witnessed in the cave.
Life of the Stayed is always rife with environmental turmoil, yet the people of the Canyon survive. Even with forced number reductions through trimming and a steady stream of events at the War Zone, humans survive as humans always have – somehow.
There’s a constant haze in the air and the sun and moon are always obscured. Windstorms rip into the valley frequently, killing many and blowing down structures that aren’t anchored properly. The worst are called Blackouts, rolling walls of dust and debris capable of lifting a full grown man. It has rained less than ten times in Sterling’s life. Luckily, large reserves of water are kept in the Off Limits, managed by OL Officers and a few Uppers employed there. Sterling has thought about the Off Limits before, from its name to the way it divides the Canyon into two distinct areas. What exists behind the walls separating the North and the South? From what he can tell, it’s at least several vestas thick. What’s in there? Why the secrecy?
Questions lead to answers lead to more questions. The Stayed who keep their heads down go a long way. The War of the Untold was a result of humankind’s curiosity. Listen more, speak less, ask less, pray.
It’s been a while since Sterling has spent time with the Book. He never really liked reading, and there isn’t much else to read in the Canyon. There have been a few smutty things he’s read from time to time, mostly distributed by Lowers in the shadows of fleshrooms, but the Book is more or less the Book because it is the only book.
“Blasph,” he says under his breath. He knows he shouldn’t think it, so he switches back to what Halo has just shown him. His mind can scarcely comprehend the image of the large body of water, let alone the colossal structure and the person with metal bones.
Movement at the corner of his eye.
Sterling freezes, holds his breath as something enters his peripheral vision. A lizard crawls onto one of the rocks jutting out of the Canyon’s sidewall. It extends its head into the air, elongates its neck, tastes the air with its forked tongue.
Normally, Sterling would try to catch the lizard. It may be a racer, something he’d definitely like to use in the North if given the chance. He’s had a few good racers,
his favorite being a lizard he affectionately named Delix. He’d lost that one in a bet, too.
I want to talk to you.
“Dammit, get out of my head,” Sterling says. The lizard sprints away, merging into the shadows.
Please.
“Fine, fine.”
He makes his way back to the cave’s entrance, finds Halo inside, perched on the same flat stone.
Bolt will be here soon.
“Good, I’m hungry and thirsty.”
Your name is Sterling Northrope.
“How’d you know?” He touches his temple. “Oh, right, your mind … um … power.”
A question comes to him, something he hasn’t pondered before – if the Goddess of the South can read minds, what can Time, the Goddess of the North do?
She can’t do anything.
Sterling doesn’t doubt the Goddess of the North, never has. He’s just about to say something nasty to Halo when she interrupts him again.
There is no sense in defending your Goddess. Time isn’t like me; we are as similar as rocks and scorpions.
“You think you’re pretty high and mighty, don’t you? But you … ” He bares his crooked teeth at her. “You aren’t even a real Goddess. You’ve bled. You said so yourself.”
Halo’s lips droop, forming two small dimples on her cheeks.
“You’ve been bleeding,” Sterling says, “for several years now. Blasph. That’s what you are. No better than a Blasph.”
What about you?
“What about me?” He spreads his hands wide to indicate he has nothing to hide.
We all have things that we hide.
“I know, I’ve read that passage in the Book.”
I haven’t.
“Come again?”
How am I to read the book? I can’t see.
“Someone read it to you.”
No, but I am familiar with many of the passages. I’ve heard the songs, the chanting; I’ve experienced the psyche of the Devout in ways that are hard to explain. I don’t need to read the Book to know that we all have something we’re hiding.
“I’m not hiding anything.” Sterling turns away from her, faces the entrance to the cave. “Blasph … ”
I already know what you are hiding.
“Then why are you asking me?”
It is very cleansing to admit the truth, as long as one isn’t coerced.
The Zero Patient Trilogy (Book One): (A Dystopian Sci-Fi Series) Page 8
