When We Wake

by Karen Healey

  I should have been afraid. I know that now. But at the time, I was eager to have it out with my mysterious foe. Maybe I could persuade him to tell the world about what we’d found. He wasn’t a supporter of cryonics; surely he wasn’t in favor of freezing refugees.

  Abdi’s expression didn’t reflect my anticipation. “Be careful,” he said.

  I smiled at him, and Rachel looked modestly away from whatever she saw in my face. “I will,” I told him. “I mean, really, what can he do?”

  You’d think that by that point, I’d have learned to stop asking those kinds of questions.

  The Father was shorter than I’d thought.

  Other than that, he looked just the same as he had in the tubecasts: dark eyes, pale skin, a strong, clean-shaven jaw. His hair, which had been covered by a hat in the ’casts, turned out to be an indeterminate brown.

  The thing that a tubecast could only faintly convey, though, was the sheer power of his presence.

  I felt it like a fist in the face when I walked into his office, my Inheritor guards on each side, and those dark eyes fastened intently on mine. I’d thought Tatia had strength of personality, but the Father had her beat without a fight.

  “Tegan Oglietti,” he said, each word measured and precise. “Are you ready to return to the grace of God?”

  “If by that you mean top myself, no, not so much,” I said. I’d wanted to sound brave and angry, but in the face of his charisma, I sounded childishly petulant.

  The guards made shocked noises behind me; the Father waved them out with a trace of amusement around his mouth. The door closed with a thunk; there’d be no escape that way. I was very aware of the knife in my pocket, but that was a chancy last resort. It would be better to persuade him to see my point of view, if I could.

  The Father placed his chin on his folded hands and regarded me. I leaned back, as nonchalantly as I could, determined not to break the silence first. But he was accustomed to this sort of power play, and I wasn’t very good at being patient.

  “How did you know about the Ark Project?” I said. “The Inheritor who Gregor shot—he mentioned it. You knew, too, didn’t you? What does it have to do with me? Why did you want me to know about it? And why haven’t you exposed it?”

  He said nothing.

  “They’re killing people! Doesn’t that bother you?” I was trying to sound reasonable, but sarcasm crept in. “I guess it’s okay, since you want me to die.”

  “You are already dead, Tegan.”

  “I was. Now I’m alive. Isn’t that the part you guys object to? If you don’t think I was really brought back to life, then you’ve got no reason to hate me.”

  “We do not hate you, Tegan. We object, in God’s name, to the abrogation of his holy privileges, and those of his son. Without God’s grace, no true resurrection is possible. Thus, you are not truly resurrected. Your every breath is a mockery to the God with whom you claim to hold faith.”

  “I do hold faith,” I said. “It’s you who’s got it wrong. Look, maybe you don’t understand. I can explain the revival process; you’ll see that it’s pure science, not—”

  “Tegan,” he said, interrupting me so firmly that I actually shut up. “It is you who doesn’t understand. Would you like to learn about the other half of the Ark Project?”

  My argument caught in my throat. Other half?

  “Yes,” I said, almost whispering. “I would.”

  Unlike his flock, the Father used computers.

  This hypocrisy shouldn’t have surprised me—he had to have made those tubecast appearances with something, after all—but when he opened the wooden cupboard to pull out his equipment, my jaw dropped. Another computer was balled into the corner, and after a moment, I recognized it. Bethari’s computer, the one with the footage.

  “That’s mine!” I said. “What happened to ‘Thou shalt not steal’?”

  He ignored me, settling back into his chair and opening the computer. “Why do you think you were brought back, Tegan? Do you think it was out of mercy? Did you think they took pity on your youth and beauty?”

  “I think they wanted to test the science, and my donation form let them study the aftereffects,” I said. “I’m not naive.”

  “You are,” he said, and spun the computer so that I could see. “Why would they test on you? You know they already have thousands of bodies upon which they can practice their debased corruption of a miracle.”

  My breath caught. Of course they did. If they were freezing refugees anyway, why not carefully shoot them first and use those bodies to practice reviving trauma victims? There was absolutely no reason to use me in particular.

  “Your father was a military man, was he not?”

  The abrupt change of subject caught me by surprise. I said nothing, but he kept going, unperturbed by my silence. “So was mine. He was a general when the Ark Project was first proposed at the highest levels of government. He retired soon afterward, but he maintained his contacts, even as he rediscovered his faith. A few of the Inheritors of the Earth have always known what this earthly authority intended. Several of our young men have made great sacrifices, joining the enemy forces to maintain our watch over their efforts.”

  “You sent spies.”

  “The word is inappropriate to soldiers of God.” He whipped the computer around. “This, Tegan, is the Ark.”

  It took a moment for my eyes to make sense of what I was looking at—some sort of vast structure in a hollow space, like a massive silver egg, partially cracked open. There were girders and plating and machines. And people, tiny as ants against the immensity of the structure.

  “This is the prototype of a starship,” the Father said. “It is being built in a secret military installation beneath Mount Ossa, right here in Tasmania. If all goes well—and my sources suggest it goes very well—it will be rebuilt in space. This first stage is nearly complete.”

  I gaped at him.

  “The Ark Project is designed to send people from Earth to colonize other planets, similar enough to ours to sustain human life. But these will be long journeys.”

  “Centuries long,” I said, stunned at the scope of it.

  “Perhaps thousands of years. No one lives for so long unaided. And the governments of this world have little trust; they will not believe their followers can bring up successive generations to be obedient to their vision. What if they forget their mission? What if they lose their science, grow to believe that their entire world is the starship? No. Better to freeze your elite colonists. Have some awake at given times to crew the ship. Have them sleep when their shift is done. Inch closer to the new world. And once they arrive, wake the sleepers in the hold, to labor on the land.”

  It was nightmarish. It was sickening. And it was all too possible.

  That’s how the British had set up their Australian colonies, after all, with waves of indentured laborers, prisoners compelled to work out their sentences in a land so distant it might as well have been another planet.

  And today’s refugees were all illegal immigrants, breaking the laws of Australia simply by being here.

  The government and army could do it. If they threw out the last two hundred years of human-rights progress, they really could.

  The Father spread his hands when he saw the understanding in my face. “And they will never give a thought to the blasphemy they have created. Now, tell me, Tegan Oglietti. Why did they raise you?”

  “Because I’d been dead for a long time,” I said. It was unfolding out before me, like a composition I’d heard only in fragments. Now the whole score was becoming clear.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “A hundred years dead, and they raised you, healthy in body and stable in mind. Or healthy and stable enough, at any rate, to proceed. You see? There was no need for us to interfere until you were revived.”

  It finally explained the mystery I’d pondered, why they’d bothered with someone prepared for cryorevival so long ago. It explained the battery of psych tests and intellectual
tests—even the way they’d let me go to school. They wanted to see how well I could adjust.

  And I’d performed for them like a trained dog.

  Operation New Beginning had nothing to do with dead soldiers. It had never had anything to do with dead soldiers. It was about allowing the elite, the powerful, and the wealthy to escape to a new world, from the mess they’d made of this one.

  I stared at the Father, and I hated him for telling me the truth at last.

  “I thought you cared about the sanctity of life! You say you don’t kill people, but you just let all those refugees die!”

  “They would have died anyway, of starvation or disease.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps lived, according to God’s will. It is bringing them back to a semblance of life that desecrates God’s sacred will, and that blasphemy I must expose. I have always had faith that my father’s fears were well founded.”

  “Marie said they couldn’t make starships,” I said. “She said the technology wasn’t there yet, that the ships would cost too much, that people wouldn’t stand for their governments’ doing it.”

  “Indeed. So they have done it in secret, because they are full of hubris and greed,” he said, and laid both hands flat upon his desk. He did it with terrible gentleness; I could see he wanted to slam them down, and the self-control it took him to be soft scared me even more than the anger he was suppressing. “They do this, because they are not content with the one world God gave us to rule over.”

  “How do you know?” I demanded.

  I was remembering Trevor Dawson’s face when I’d challenged him.

  What is the Ark Project?

  Humanity’s last chance, he’d said, and ranted about ocean anoxia.

  The end might not come for some time. But this project had started over sixty years ago. They had been looking to the future, to their children’s escape route.

  Humanity’s last chance.

  Maybe it was just a way to justify the project to himself; maybe it was the only way he could cope with knowing what he was doing. But what if he was right?

  “What if they’re doing it because this world is dying? You’ve got a computer. You must have seen the climate news, the drying rivers, the rising oceans. You know that things are getting worse, not better.”

  “God will not allow it,” the Father said. “The world will end as the prophets predict, not by any tools of man.”

  “How stupid are you?” I demanded.

  The Father hit me in the face.

  It was an open-handed blow, almost contemptuous, but with enough force to snap my head around. I was completely taken aback, with no chance to put my basic training into motion. Zaneisha would be ashamed of me, I thought. I got to my feet somehow, and stumbled to put my back against one of the side walls, fists up in case I needed to use them. The Father sat there watching me, his anger carefully put away again. It wasn’t fake. He genuinely hated me, blasphemy in person, mouthing defiance against him. But he’d pull the rage out and use it only when he needed to, like a weapon.

  A weapon.

  I still had the knife in my pocket. It was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing for it. He was bigger and stronger than I was, and it was too chancy. I needed to wait for an opportunity. I shifted my weight and felt the knife move against my thigh.

  “So,” I said softly, “you want me to kill myself because you want to prove I’m unstable, is that it? You want to scuttle the Ark Project by proving that someone from a hundred years ago can’t make it?”

  “I want you to reunite yourself with God,” he said. “I will reveal with your body the blasphemy these secularists seek to perpetuate. And when I do, my people under the mountain will rise up and destroy the Ark starship.”

  “You’re going to use my dead body as a signal for sabotage? Why don’t you just leak the news?”

  “It is God’s will,” he said simply. “You are the first; you must return to him.”

  I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I am so tired of being used. The army tried to do it, Tatia tried to do it, and now you’re trying to do it. I’m a person, not a symbol, not property, and not a prop. If you want me dead, I can’t stop you, but I won’t make it easier for you, either. Dirty your own fucking hands.”

  “Murder is a sin,” the Father said flatly. “And you are not a person. You are an empty shell mouthing excuses in an attempt to delay the inevitable, and I will not allow you to continue.” He raised his voice, pitching it to the office door. “Bring in the boy.”

  My heart squeezed painfully as they brought Abdi in, Conrad and Joseph on either side.

  “Tegan,” Abdi said, his eyes going straight to my face.

  “I’m all right,” I lied, ignoring the stinging in my cheek.

  “Say your good-byes,” the Father ordered, and allowed himself a smile at my outrage.

  “What?” Abdi demanded.

  The Father ignored him. “My followers have been much too kind to you, Tegan Oglietti, misled by their soft hearts.” Conrad and Joseph shifted, looking abashed.

  “This is what will happen now,” the Father said. “You will be imprisoned underground. You will be given sufficient food and water to maintain yourself, no more. You will speak to no one, hear from no one, see no one, for there will be no light for you. Once in a while, I will come, and ask if you are done with this charade of life.”

  I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, a muffled drum. I’d fight it. I could hold out. Maybe Abdi would escape and lead a rescue, maybe Rachel would have a crisis of faith and help, maybe the army would storm the compound and release me.

  The Father’s voice was very soft and utterly relentless. “And how long do you think you can last?”

  Not long enough, I thought dully. The army thought I had escaped, and they knew I had no reason to trust the Inheritors; they’d never look for me here. Rachel was too loyal to her people to assist me, and they’d be watching Abdi closely. There would be no rescue from outside. There was no way to fight from the inside.

  I could resist the Father for a time. But eventually I would give up.

  And giving up, I would die.

  “Now say good-bye to your friend. Forever.”

  With an inarticulate yell, Abdi Taalib, that caring, studious musician, flung himself across the Father’s desk and tried his very best to strangle him with his bare hands.

  It was a futile effort; Conrad and Joseph were shocked but acted swiftly, pulling him off the Father and giving him a couple of punches to the head for his trouble. But they were fully occupied trying to deal with Abdi’s frantic struggles, and the Father was leaning back in his chair, watching him with wide eyes. It had probably been a long time since anyone had tried to smack him around.

  For that moment, no one was looking at me. Abdi had given me the opportunity I needed.

  Slipping the little knife from my pocket, I moved behind the Father and placed its sharp point against his throat. He froze immediately, but the others were still fighting.

  “Stop,” I said. It didn’t entirely sound like my voice. “Stop, or I’ll kill him.”

  I promised to tell you the truth.

  And the truth is, I think I would have done it. I’d never felt that kind of hatred before, not for Dawson or Tatia or Carl Hurfest. Not even for the sniper who accidentally shot me on the steps of Parliament House.

  But I felt a killing kind of fury for the Father, who told people God said I wasn’t a person, who refused to recognize that I had a story of my own, who let refugees die until it suited him to intervene. If things had gone wrong, I would have slit his throat with no hesitation, thou shalt not kill be damned.

  I don’t know whether Joseph and Conrad could see that, or if they just weren’t prepared to take the chance. They immediately stood away from Abdi, holding their hands up in plain view.

  “Abdi, can you find something to tie them with?”

  “Uh,” he said. His eyes were wandering slightly.

  “Abdi!” I snap
ped. “I need you.”

  He pulled it together. “Tie them up. Right.”

  “This is foolish,” the Father hissed.

  “Try the cabinet,” I said, ignoring him. Well, half ignoring him. I might have pushed the knife in just a little deeper. The Father sucked in a breath and shut up. “Bethari’s computer is in there.”

  Abdi shoved the computer in his pocket and rummaged around until he came up with some sort of flexible metallic strips. Conrad and Joseph both looked resigned as he made them kneel and wrapped the strips around their wrists and ankles.

  “Please,” Conrad said. “Please don’t hurt him.”

  “That’s going to depend on you, isn’t it?” I said. “I don’t owe you any favors. You were going to lock me underground!”

  He flushed and looked away. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy. He might have felt bad about it, but he’d have done it.

  Abdi tied the Father’s wrists, too, and then looked at me. “The boats?”

  “Yes. I think he’ll be able to turn off the burglar alarm, don’t you?”

  “I do,” he said, and glanced at the Father. If anything, he looked even less forgiving than I felt. “I should take the knife. I’m taller.”

  That made sense. I let him take control of it, sliding out from under his hand. I grabbed the Father’s computer, with its footage of the starship, took a deep breath, and looked around the office. There was nothing else we needed, and speed might be our best ally. “All right. Let’s go.”

  I stuck my arm under the Father’s and heaved, counting in time with Abdi. It was awkward, but we got him out of the chair and into the doorway.

  “If you come after us,” Abdi said, looking directly at Conrad and Joseph, “if we run into any trouble, we’ll cut his throat and push him over the side.”

  “No, no,” Joseph whispered. “No trouble.”

  We’d have to trust their fear. I closed the door behind us, and we set off. Once outside, Abdi moved the knife to the Father’s back. I was absolutely certain he couldn’t reach the heart with that small blade, but it didn’t matter. The Father could hardly run, encumbered as he was, and this way we wouldn’t murder him by accident.