12
When I arrived at the station, I dutifully followed Jude’s instructions: taking the train into D.C., then weaving through the subway, changing line after line in case Zack was still following me.
Once I finally emerged onto the platform in a distant suburb, muscles aching, I saw Jude sitting on the curb outside, a hoodie over his eyes. He pushed it back as I approached, and that first glimpse of his face made my heart quiver. As those romantic feelings rekindled, so, too, did a tiny bit of guilt; some small piece of me felt like I’d betrayed him by kissing Zack. But, I reminded myself, that was silly. Jude had already moved on. And if all went according to plan, I was never going to see Zack again anyway.
“Where’s your tail?” was the first thing he asked, as though reading my mind.
“Zack?” I asked, as casually as I could. “I told him to stay away for a day or so.”
“You what?” Jude was panicked. I quickly explained everything that had happened (minus the kiss), and he calmed down, mostly. “He really wants to help?”
“That’s what he says.”
Jude was still wary. “You didn’t tell him anything about us, did you?”
“Of course not!” I said, a little offended that he thought I would give up Dawn’s organization so easily to someone who worked for the prophet.
“Good,” he said, relieved. “I’ll let Dawn know, maybe she can reach out.” Jude and I walked in step, and I caught him glancing at me—he seemed to note my lingering anxiety. “Is everything else okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I lied, looking away. I might not have betrayed Dawn’s trust to Zack, but I had definitely betrayed it to my father. I couldn’t bear to tell Jude how badly I’d failed to connect with him. I knew he’d judge me for not keeping my promises of secrecy, and I knew he would be afraid for our safety.
Truthfully, I was a little worried, too. I felt confident my father would keep my secret at least as long as my cover was intact, but could his life be in danger now?
I grabbed a pill from my pocket and quickly downed it, hoping to squelch the remorse I felt. Jude noticed, of course. “Doesn’t seem like everything’s okay . . .”
“I’m sorry that I can’t just up and leave everyone behind without feeling a little guilty.” I now felt additionally guilty for manipulating Jude.
“I get it,” he said softly, and I knew he did—leaving his old life behind had been the hardest thing he’d ever done.
I realized that maybe I’d been a little harsh. “I know how hard it was for you to leave your family, too.” I touched his shoulder sympathetically, but he instinctively tensed—thinking of his girlfriend, perhaps. “Sorry,” I said, hurriedly pulling my hand away. I wished I knew what he was thinking behind those brooding eyes.
“We’re running late, let’s get a move on,” was all he said.
We got into a car and drove for hours through rural town after rural town. Jude instinctively kept one eye on the rearview mirror, checking to see if anyone was following us. Anxiety and confusion churned together into a soup in my stomach. I’d spent all this time wondering what Jude was thinking, feeling, dying to know if he was angry at me. Finally here he was in front of me . . . and I still didn’t know. Obviously he didn’t hate me—he’d come to save my life, after all—but . . . had I damaged our relationship for good?
“About what happened six months ago—” I began.
He interrupted quickly, “We don’t need to talk about that.” I could tell how badly he wanted to change the subject.
“We do,” I insisted. “I need to say I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I know. I’m not angry.” But I wasn’t sure I believed him. He didn’t sound angry, exactly, just . . . hurt.
Nervous, I asked, “Dawn found you, right? She told you what was happening?”
“Yeah,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “Eventually.” He tried to keep up his impervious facade, but I could see the pain that memory caused him. I imagined him sitting all alone, for what . . . hours? All night? Until Dawn finally found him and told him I wasn’t coming. I hoped she’d at least made me sound noble. Had he tried to contact me? I was afraid to ask any more questions, afraid of what the answers might be. And I was afraid that I was too late. This whole line of inquiry might not be appropriate anyway . . . he had a new girlfriend, after all.
“I’m really glad to see you again,” was what I finally went with.
“Me, too. Thanks for getting in the cab. I thought we might need to stage a kidnapping to get you out of there.” He smiled, a little joke, and I knew that our friendship, at least, was safe.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I joked back.
We finally parked somewhere in central Pennsylvania that felt like the edge of the earth—closed-up shops and a gravel parking lot. Jude strode confidently down a dirt path into the woods that seemed to lead nowhere.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I followed, but my question was answered the moment after I finished the sentence—we emerged into an open field with a dirt runway, where a small plane was waiting for us.
Jude handed me a passport with my picture in it. Apparently now I was Sevda Yazici, a citizen of Turkey. “You’re going home,” he said.
Book Four
1
“Why Turkey?” I asked, as the plane took off.
“It’s the home base of the rebellion,” Jude explained. I’d never given much thought to the resistance outside of the East Coast of the U.S.—of course Dawn wasn’t the head of the entire worldwide operation; someone like that wouldn’t talk so frequently to low-level people like Jude and me.
“What am I going to do there?”
“Hopefully, you’ll keep your head down and avoid getting caught,” he said pointedly.
“Yes, sir,” I grumbled, and Jude noted my annoyance.
“Sorry,” he said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know,” I relented.
He added gently, “It just seems like every time I turn my head, you’re changing the plan, you know?” I did. Bailing on our trip to Nova Scotia. Forcing myself onto his rescue mission at the West Virginia prison camp. Putting myself in danger looking for my mother. He had plenty of reasons to worry about me bucking orders. “And I trust you, I do,” he continued, voice shaking. “I just don’t want to lose you. You know, again.”
For a brief moment, I saw a hint of the Jude I remembered—the sensitive, supportive young man I’d fallen in love with. And a hint of what he’d once felt for me. His concern sobered me, and I changed my tone, promising, “Whatever you guys tell me, I’ll do it.”
He nodded, appeased. “Thanks.”
“Where are we going in Turkey exactly?” I asked.
He seemed relieved to return to discussing logistics. “The headquarters of the resistance. I should warn you, people there are a little different from the rebels you’re used to dealing with at home.” His careful tone made me nervous.
“How so?”
“The group’s made up of people from all over the world, all different cultures, including lots of new subcultures that have sprung up since the Revelations,” he said delicately, trying to find the words. “And . . . they don’t always get along.”
I knew Jude and Dawn and I were members of a diverse crew of atheists and religious people, practicing as they had before the Revelations. But in my sheltered worldview, I’d never stopped to imagine what that might look like, on a larger scale. I guessed I was about to find out.
“You’re coming at a rough time,” he continued. “We’re about to have an election, and tensions are high.”
“What are people so tense about? Aren’t we all fighting for the same cause?” I asked, curious. While I’d had plenty of my own issues with Dawn’s decisions, I’d never stopped to think that there might be larger rifts within our group.
“Our cause is the one thing holding everyone together. But everyone has a different way they want to do things
, different priorities. And honestly, underneath it . . . there are still all these old grudges. People tend to trust their own.”
“So it’s what . . . tribal or something?” I asked, dumbfounded, trying to translate his careful language.
Jude nodded, still treading delicately. “If you can call religion a tribe, yeah. People our age, we don’t remember what it used to be like, but the adults . . . they haven’t shaken that old way of thinking. They’re all afraid of each other.”
I knew that people used to fight over petty things like race and religion all the time, but in my naïve way, I’d assumed the Revelations had cured all that. At least—I knew they’d cured it for anyone who still believed in the word of Great Spirit. Apparently without that common deity, everything had fallen apart again.
The Universal Theology had taught me to trust people who looked like me, the non-Outcasts, the “normal” people. I knew we were all on the same side, the “good” side. Honestly, once I learned the truth, that had been the hardest thing to get used to—not knowing whom to trust, once I knew that beauty and goodness didn’t have anything to do with each other.
For everyone in the resistance, then, things were more complicated. Perhaps without the Universal Theology’s visual cues to tell us who was good and bad, we were reverting to our worst, most archaic selves . . . the kind that used a different kind of visual cue to guess who was good or bad. If you look like me—if you’re dressed like me, if your skin color is the same as mine—you must be good. It was the kind of primitive thinking I remembered my mother warning me about before the Revelations . . . and it made me sick to think that racism and xenophobia might be making a comeback among the very people I’d allied myself with.
“If they’re all afraid of one another, how does anything get done? How do decisions get made?”
Jude was clearly trying his best to stay neutral, apolitical—to avoid scaring me by passing on his own concerns, I assumed. “The resistance’s leadership has always been secular. We thought it had to be, you know? To get elected, you need to get votes from people who don’t agree with you. That’s easier to do if you’re more moderate, if you accept everybody.”
“So why the tension?” I asked, trying to figure out what he wasn’t telling me.
On Jude’s face, I could see I’d hit a nerve. “Lately, a couple politicians have been riling up old divisions. Appealing to the hardliners.”
“The superreligious people?”
“Yeah, they call themselves the Originalists. They’re the ones who’re angriest about the Revelations, and they’re obsessed with going back to the way things used to be . . . though they can’t agree on what that means, necessarily. They’re making a lot of noise, but I don’t think they’ll be able to make much headway in the election. They’re too fringe, there aren’t enough of them to really matter, especially since they can’t agree on anything, even among themselves.”
“But you’re still worried.” His forehead had scrunched up with worry lines going in a thousand different directions.
“Well, getting extremists angry is never good . . . I’m sure you remember religious extremists?”
I remembered the stories about them. The violence people used to perpetrate in the name of the old religions . . . terrorism, wars, genocide. My father often referred to those events in his sermons: how hypocritical the people who committed those crimes had been, how wrong we knew them to be now.
I’d thought of his sermons often since I’d begun working with the resistance. Had I become one of those hypocritical people, doing questionable things in the name of my god? I’d convinced myself I wasn’t, that my actions were different, justified, in service of the greater good. But I doubted that Great Spirit would have wanted me to ally with people who killed simply to promote their own beliefs. “There are extremists working with the resistance?” I asked, not trying to hide my horror.
Jude nodded, clearly desensitized to this kind of conflict. “Depends on your definition, I guess. The Revelations made a lot of people very angry. And when you channel that anger through religion . . .”
“You get a bunch of extremists,” I finished for him.
He saw how worried I was and tried to reassure me. “But maybe it’s not all a bad thing. These guys, their goals might be different from ours in the long run, but right now, all we want to do is take out the prophets. Which means we need people who are willing to do violent things . . . sabotage government installations, assassinations, maybe worse. And honestly, they’re gonna be better at that than you or me.” I could hear the skepticism clinging to his words, even as he tried to give them a positive spin for my sake.
“Yeah, I guess they would be.” As outraged as I wanted to be that the resistance had made such questionable allies, I remembered I’d set off a bomb and killed an innocent man just days ago. Every time I thought of that guard, a new wave of regret came over me, a sickening, dizzying pulse echoing in my chest that felt like it would never stop. A guilt I knew I deserved to feel forever.
I wondered, would that bombing have been more easily accomplished by someone who was eager to kill in the name of their god? Someone who wasn’t constantly plagued by remorse, like I was? The logic of it made sense, but the idea still sickened me—and from Jude’s expression I could tell how much it bothered him, too.
“Who are you voting for?” I asked him, happy to change the subject. My real question of course was, Who should I vote for?
Jude shook his head and replied darkly. “Whoever has the best chance of defeating the extremists.”
“And who’s that?” I pressed.
He thought a moment. “There’s a secular woman I like, Ariana something, but she’s a little fringe. So I’ll probably vote for the guy who’s our leader now, Mohammed Bashar. He’s the moderate with the best chance of winning.”
“Why?”
“He’s Muslim, and that’s a big voting bloc, but he appeals to the moderates from other religions. The more liberal Hindus and Christians . . . their candidates are more conservative, so Mohammed’s their best option, if they want someone religious at all. The religious folks tend to be skeptical of totally secular candidates. They think secularism is to blame for the Revelations in the first place. Mohammed’s the one person most people can agree on.” He hesitated, then added carefully, “He also happens to be my girlfriend’s dad, so . . .”
I nodded, trying to let the statement pass, even though it had tied my stomach into knots. Jude’s matter-of-fact way of describing this world suddenly made sense to me—he had to play the politics and support his girlfriend’s family. I said airily, “So she’s voting for him, too, I guess.”
“Yeah.” He paused, gauging my reaction. “Her name’s Layla. You’ll meet her soon. I hope you like her, since we’re all going to be sharing the same space.”
I hadn’t thought there was anyone I would want to room with less than a bunch of religious extremists, but in that moment I’d gladly have taken them as bunkmates over Jude’s new girlfriend. I managed a smile, repeating the ex-girlfriend mantra, “I’m just glad you’re happy.”
“Thanks.” For a moment, the way he smiled back, it was like old times . . . but I forced that idea from my mind. I might be sitting here with Jude again, but I was still on my own.
2
All through the flight I was nervous. Would our plane be diverted, shot down? Would we be accosted when we landed? But we made it to an airport in Ottawa without incident, where we changed planes to board a commercial flight to Istanbul. My new passport worked just fine, and Jude said that even if Prophet Joshua was looking for me in the U.S., Dawn’s intel indicated that he hadn’t alerted the Canadian or Turkish government just yet.
On our long transatlantic flight, I wanted to interrogate Jude, wanted to find out what he’d been doing since we’d last spoken, but as usual he was not forthcoming with details about his past. In fact, the moment the plane took off, he fell sound asleep—exhausted from his journey out to get
me, no doubt.
I wondered what Zack was doing back at home. Had Dawn contacted him? I couldn’t help hoping he was thinking about me, missing me, having his own fantasies of seeing me again. That the kiss had meant something to him, something real. Then I immediately felt stupid for thinking that way. You can’t trust Zack, my brain reminded me. And I didn’t. But I hated that I wanted to. I hated how I couldn’t get him out of my mind. What had seemed like a harmless flirtation had, in his absence, blossomed into a full-on, incapacitating crush. I kept thinking of things I wanted to say to him, imagined what he’d say back. Found myself imagining a whole relationship: days, weeks, months that we’d never actually get to spend together.
Maybe it was just sitting next to my first love that made me wish for a second, for someone who could replace Jude, someone who could assuage that nagging loneliness inside me. Even inches away from my best friend, I felt so far from him. But, I reminded myself, there were more important things right now than whether or not some boy liked me.
Things like that guard, the one I’d killed. Left alone, my thoughts ran wild, kept returning to him, to the last time I’d seen him alive, frantically searching through those boxes. Was there something else I could have said to save his life? I imagined his family hearing the news, grappling with their loss. Did he have a girlfriend? Wife? Kids even? Who had I stolen him from?
I tried to push all my anxieties aside, get some sleep, but I couldn’t—I was well aware that these moments on the plane might be my last. Had Prophet Joshua mobilized an army to meet me in Turkey? What horrors awaited us when this plane landed?
The answer turned out to be . . . once again, pretty much nothing. Once we passed through customs in Istanbul, we picked up Jude’s car that he’d left at the airport. Jude had his own car on another continent—it felt so surreal. We drove deep into central Turkey, speeding through the wild, rocky countryside. Before today, I’d never been outside the United States, and barely outside of Virginia. Heck, even New York City had seemed exotic just a few weeks earlier.
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