by Hart, Stella
“What’s wrong with her?” Lauren asked.
I frowned and shook my head. “I have no idea.”
* * *
“Jolie. Psst. Wake up.”
With a tired yawn, I opened my eyes. Lauren was leaning over my bed in the darkness. “What’s wrong?” I asked groggily. “Is it already morning?”
I felt like I’d only been asleep for a couple of hours, but I could be wrong. It was hard to guess the approximate time in the shelter because of the complete lack of natural light. Still, I usually felt rested enough when I woke up in the mornings.
“It’s around twelve-thirty,” she whispered.
“Why are you waking me up, then?”
“Elena tried to a few minutes ago, but you wouldn’t stir. She told me to keep trying while she went around and woke all the others.”
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “Why? Is something happening?”
“She wants us all to meet her in the church at one o’clock. We have to be quiet. The boys and men aren’t supposed to know about this.”
I frowned. The enormous underground chapel with its stone walls and matching carved stone pews was right near the entrance to the men’s section of the shelter. If a hundred young women marched in there in the middle of the night, it would wake the men almost immediately.
Before I could open my mouth to say it, Lauren held up a palm. “Not the shelter church. The old one above.”
My eyes widened. “She wants us to go up there?” I shook my head. “We can’t. It is forbidden for us to leave the shelter unless there is a wedding, a festival, or an execution.”
“Elena said the church is technically part of the shelter,” Lauren said. “So He will surely forgive us.”
I chewed on my bottom lip. She had a good point. The decrepit old building was part of the shelter in a sense, as it contained the entrance.
I couldn’t imagine why Elena wanted us to meet her there, but at the same time, it had to be for something worthy. Everyone knew Elena was a genius. Compared to the other women, that is. Obviously, her intellect could never compare to that of a man.
“Let me get my shoes on,” I murmured, smothering a yawn. I was still half asleep.
I slid my shoes on and wrapped a shawl around my shoulders before creeping out of my room and up the hall which led to the main shelter door. I always assumed it was locked at night, but I’d never actually checked. It simply hadn’t occurred to me or any of the other girls before now.
Elena had apparently checked, though, and it was unlocked. She was standing at the foot of the stairs which led up to the door, holding a candle. “Come on,” she said, beckoning with her free hand. “It’s okay.”
I followed her up the stairs. She pushed on the metal door above our heads, slowly and carefully so that it didn’t make any loud clanging sounds when it opened and fell against the church floor. When it was wide open, she stepped up into the church.
I peered hesitantly into the darkness, and she whispered for me to hurry up. I did as she said. Behind me, I could hear the quiet footfall of the other girls and women as they crept up the stairs as well.
I shivered. Empty and shadowed, the church looked terrifyingly large, like it might swallow me right up if I stayed too long. I still couldn’t believe I was in here without permission from the men.
There was a faint glow coming from the back of the old chapel now. Elena was lighting candles. They lent a little warmth to the room along with the light, and soon the old chapel didn’t seem so frightening.
“Is everyone here?” Elena finally said, her voice loud and clear.
I looked around at the gathered women. There were a lot of faces. It certainly seemed as if we were all present.
“Yes. Why did you call us here?” Martha asked sharply.
“I wanted to talk about important things, and I wanted to do it without the men. This was the only way I could think of doing it without them finding out.”
Martha folded her arms. “What important things?”
“Things that only concern us women,” Elena replied. “Hence the lack of men invited here tonight.”
“Well, speak.” Martha narrowed her eyes.
“Okay. I want to begin by talking about the outsiders,” Elena said. “We know they are out there. Lots of them. Our men trade with them all the time. So we know for sure that New Eden isn’t the only place in the world that our God spared.”
“But it’s the only place that was spared for women,” a petite brunette piped up. “There are only male outsiders. We’ve never heard about any girls or women surviving the Great Reckoning, other than us.”
“I know. But what if we aren’t the only girls who survived? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
A titter went through the crowd. “What is she talking about?” a girl muttered from somewhere behind me.
“I mean: just because we haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. What if Prophet Jacob doesn’t know everything about the world?” Elena went on, ignoring the whispers and murmurs. “What if there are other places that women can live? Nicer places, where men are kind. Above ground. Less rules. Less punishment.”
“Rules and punishment are important,” another woman insisted loudly. “Women cause all forms of sin, and we must be kept in line so we do not fall to temptation. You know that, Elena. We all learned that a long time ago.”
Elena sighed. “We learned that from lessons designed by Prophet Jacob, and also from reading His Word, which was written by Prophet Jacob. So what I am asking here is: where is the proof for any of this, aside from the Prophet’s word?”
“Proof?” another woman said indignantly. “Our God speaks directly to the Prophet. He knew the Great Reckoning was coming, didn’t he? What more do you need?”
Elena kept going. “Don’t you think it’s strange that we’re the only women who survived?”
“We are the chosen ones.”
“Why us, though? Really, what’s so special about us? The men constantly drum it into us that we are weak and dirty and sinful like every other woman who ever existed, so if that’s the case, why didn’t we die in the Reckoning too?”
A tall blonde woman to my left shook her head to indicate her disapproval at Elena’s questions. “Our God chose us. We don’t know why.”
“Well, maybe He chose others as well, and we just haven’t seen them.”
I chewed on my lip as I thought about what she was saying. What if there were other places out there where it was safe for women to live? What if there weren’t such strict rules in those places?
How nice it would be if I could follow Mason out of New Eden to a safe place like that. One where we could speak to each other without fear of having our lips sewn shut. One where I could admire his handsome features and tall, muscular body without worrying about being severely punished or executed for lust.
“This is dangerously close to blasphemy,” Martha said in a warning tone. “You are implying that our divine Prophet is either wrong or lying to us. I am not sure we should stay and listen to you any longer.”
The muttering grew louder. Elena was losing her audience.
“Wait!” I called out. “Just… wait. I think we should hear her out. We all know Elena is smart. She wouldn’t bring us up here if she didn’t have something worthwhile to say.”
Everyone went quiet, and Elena shot me a grateful look.
There wasn’t anything in particular that made me stand out amongst the other women. I wasn’t the smartest like Elena, I wasn’t the shortest like Amy Moreau, I wasn’t the tallest like Eve Cottrell, and I wasn’t the most striking from a distance like Martha with her fiery red hair. But I was the only daughter of the Prophet. That got me some respect from most of the other women.
Sometimes I wondered if the matter of my parentage actually made some of the women resent me, as the men were slightly nicer to me than they were to them. I knew I also had some small privileges that they didn’t get. For example, even though I was a
woman, I didn’t have to participate in the Joining rituals to the same extent as everyone else. I only had to take the men in my mouth, while the others had to take them in other more painful places.
Still, whether they resented me or not, they all listened when I told them to.
“For a while now, I’ve been questioning the things we’ve been taught,” Elena said. She slipped something out of a pocket on the front of her dress. It was one of the twice-daily vitamin pills we were supposed to take. “I stopped taking these a few weeks ago, and my mind feels better somehow. Sharper.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I think these pills might not only contain vitamins. Maybe girls are just as smart as boys, and women are just as smart as men, but when we take these pills, it dulls our brains so that we think less. Question less. I’ve noticed that when we are given large doses of these, I don’t remember anything at all.”
I frowned as I considered her words. I thought I found it easier to think before I came to New Eden, but maybe I was just misremembering things. I was only a child back then, after all. Besides, my father had explained to me many times that memories could not always be trusted. Like my memories of the fields here, for instance.
During the spring wedding ceremonies, I would often admire the pink and red azaleas and camellias which grew in the fields nearby. I would also wonder why they were allowed to grow here when my father had always taught us that bright pinks and reds were sinful colors. Women used to apply those colors to their lips in the old days to entice men into committing acts of lust.
When I asked my father about it, he told me the flowers here used to be pure white, but when the world was struck by the blasts, they were all poisoned, and now they grew in bright, sinful colors. I argued that I remembered those flowers being pink in the old days, but he patiently explained to me that my memory was playing tricks on me. Sometimes we thought we knew something, but we were wrong. We simply layered new memories on top of old ones to convince ourselves we were right; a trick of the brain.
So perhaps this was a similar thing. I thought my mind was sharper in the old days, but I could just be remembering incorrectly.
Or maybe something else was happening, like Elena was implying…
One thing that had always bothered me about the flower story was that my father said the New Eden flowers were poisoned. We were all taught that the land here had been protected from the apocalyptic blasts by angels, so how could our flowers be poisoned?
Was my father lying, or was I simply too stupid to understand him properly?
“Why would we even need to think as much as the men?” Lauren asked, her eyes wide. “It makes sense that we are naturally less intelligent.”
“Maybe to you,” Elena said. “But not to me. Now, you’re really not going to want to hear this next part, but I’m going to say it anyway, and I hope you’ll try to listen.”
She paused for a few breaths, then went on. “We are only allowed above ground a few times a year. Once for the weddings, four times for the bonfire festivals, and also whenever there is an execution. The weddings are during the day, but the rest of the events happen at night.”
“So? We know that, obviously.” The woman closest to Elena folded her arms, brows knitted with confusion.
“Sometimes I don’t like to look at the executions, so I turn my head away and look at the night sky. I saw something up there once,” Elena said crisply.
We all waited with bated breath for her to continue.
“It was a light far off in the distance. It was moving and flashing, and it was red, so it wasn’t a star. I think it was an airplane,” she declared. “The younger girls here might not remember those, but the rest of you should.”
“A plane?” I shook my head, my brows shooting upward. “That’s impossible.”
“Not if the Great Reckoning didn’t really happen,” Elena said, eyes flashing.
There was a collective gasp at this, and then an angry mutter.
“Just listen!” Elena said, lifting her hands in the air. “Don’t rush to judgment too quickly. Spend a few days thinking about it. There’s so much that doesn’t make sense about New Eden and the supposed apocalypse, if you really consider it.”
“Like what?” a girl asked tentatively.
“Like the fact that all our mothers and older siblings just happened to die in a terrorist attack right before the Reckoning. We were told those terrorists wanted to ensure the church could no longer multiply because they hated us for being the chosen ones, but if that was the case, why didn’t they kill all the girls? After all, they surely had to know we would grow up eventually and become capable of carrying and birthing children.”
“The terrorists must have known the Reckoning was coming, and they assumed the girls wouldn’t live long enough to have babies,” Lauren said slowly.
Elena sighed with exasperation. “If they knew it was coming, then why bother attacking the church at all? Why kill any of us, including our mothers, if they assumed we would all die in the Reckoning anyway?”
Silence reigned in the chapel for a long moment. She had a good point.
“Seems to me like there is more to the story,” Elena finally said. “And I just think we should all consider the fact that maybe things aren’t always as they seem. Maybe the things we’ve been taught are all wrong.”
Martha opened her mouth again. “But—”
Elena held up a hand, cutting her off. “Look, I am not saying our Prophet is lying… only that he might’ve misinterpreted the visions sent to him by our God.”
I expected the other women to be angry, but they all remained silent, their faces etched with confusion and worry.
“We shouldn’t tell anyone about this meeting,” I said, stepping up to Elena. I turned to face the crowd. “Elena might be wrong, but she might not be. If that is the case, we need to wait and think about it, like she said. Find some proof. Can we all agree on that?”
Surprisingly, every single woman in the room nodded. Even Martha. I saw Elena’s shoulders slump with relief at this. She must have been terrified that someone would disagree and run straight to the men to tell them what was going on here, but she’d dragged us all out and forced us to listen anyway.
I wished I could be brave and strong like her.
We trudged back down to the shelter and quietly returned to our rooms. My mind was buzzing from everything I’d just heard, but I finally drifted back to sleep after an hour or so.
My dreams were filled with bright colors and flying machines, and in one of them, I was married to Mason, the man who had proved his devotion by coming back for me despite the odds.
We lived on an island surrounded by clear, uncontaminated waters, and the air was alive with the sound of birds and other beautiful animals. We ate cake and lay on the beach all day, and no one else was there to tell us we could not talk or kiss or stare at each other. We did every single one of those things, and it was bliss.
When I woke in the morning, Lauren was leaning over my bed again, shaking my shoulders. Her face was stained with tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my voice husky with sleep.
“It’s Elena,” she choked out. “She’s dead.”
6
Jolie
I leapt out of bed, immediately alert. “What?”
“I think… I think she…” Lauren faltered and wiped her face. “Just come and see.”
I ran down the hall toward Elena’s room, heart thudding with fear. Two men were carrying her out. Her face was blue and a dark bruise was on her throat, stretching all around her neck as if thin invisible hands were choking her.
“What happened?” I screamed, trying to get closer. Another man held me back.
“Jolie, my little lamb,” my father said from somewhere behind me. His hand touched my shoulder. “Come with me to the church, please. We are gathering all the girls there to discuss this terrible tragedy.”
Tears streamed down my fa
ce as I watched the men take Elena away. She was one of my best friends in the whole world… and now she was gone forever. I would never meet someone like her again.
My knees weakened, and I sank to the cold concrete floor. Lauren joined me, wrapping her thin arms around me. “I don’t understand how this happened,” she said, her voice a ragged whisper. “I just…”
My father interrupted. “Girls, come on,” he said, reaching for me again.
With shaky legs, I got up and followed him to the church in the middle of the shelter. The rest of the women filed in soon after, their faces white and anxious. I took Lauren’s hand and squeezed hard. She was trembling like me, and her face was wet with tears.
My father took his usual spot up at the pulpit, and the Elders stood by him. He waited for the women to sit down on the uncomfortable stone pews, and then he pressed his hands together in front of him, like he was praying.
“It is with great sadness that we must inform you of Elena Landry’s passing,” he began. “We were unaware of this—and that is entirely our fault—but Elena was extremely ill.”
I frowned. Elena wasn’t sick. She seemed perfectly healthy to me.
“Her sickness was not in the body,” my father went on. “It was in her mind. So even though she looked healthy, she was very mentally ill, and recently, she started to have delusions and suffered what used to be known as a ‘psychotic break’. I only wish someone had noticed sooner and said something, so that our Healer could’ve tried to help her. If that had happened, she might not have taken her own life.”
My eyes widened. That was why her neck had all that bruising around it. She hanged herself. Oh, Elena, I thought, hoping she could hear my private reflections now that she was in the afterworld, whether it be heaven or hell. How could you?
“Elena left a note for all of you to read, and I will pass it around once I have read it out to you,” Elder Landry said from beside my father, holding up a slip of paper. “Her last words to you were this: Hello, dear sisters. I am so sorry about the things I have done, and the things I have said. I lied to you all last night, and as I write this, I am riddled with guilt. The Devil has been in my mind for a long time now. He asked me to spread his wicked lies, so that he may enter your minds too. I did as he said, and now I feel nothing but shame and deep regret. I cannot believe I have done this to my own sisters. You all deserve so much better. I must leave this world so that I cannot spread any more corruption to you. Please, try not to think of me once I am gone. You must disregard anything I told you, lest you fall to wickedness too. Again, I am so deeply sorry for what I have done. Love, Elena.”
