I tore my gaze away from his and stared at the door, my cheeks burning. We had an objective. If we achieved it, I could kiss lots of boys, for the rest of my life. If not, I wouldn’t have long to worry about it.
Zack was poised by the entrance, gun at the ready, as we heard the door begin to creak open. Lightning fast, he grabbed the burqa-clad woman who entered, pulling her inside. She screamed, but the door slammed shut, muffling the sound for anyone outside.
“Hey, Esther,” Zack said, taking a bit of pleasure in turning the tables on his interrogator.
“Let me go!” she shrieked. Though I knew what part she played in this conspiracy, I still felt bad for her, this helpless woman fearing for her life. I wondered if that feeling came from the impostor in my brain.
“Not yet,” Zack said, pushing her away from him and training the guard’s gun on her. “Keep your hands up.”
Esther walked into the light, hands raised, and a shiver of recognition went through me. All I could see beneath her veil was her eyes, and the dark skin around them. But the way those eyes looked at me . . .
Arms still raised in surrender, Esther lifted her veil, revealing a wild mane of curls. I stared and stared, until I finally believed it. And as I saw the apology on her face, I knew for sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Esther was Valerie Luther. My mother.
My voice came out weak, childlike. “Mom?”
9
Esther stared at me, her expression a jumble of emotions. “Grace.”
“Wait, what?” Zack said, taking a step closer to her, gun at the ready.
“Don’t shoot her!” I cried instinctively. I wanted to run and hug her, but . . . I’d heard her with Samuel. She’d trained Zack. She was the enemy.
My mother moved closer to me. Her brown skin was coarser than I remembered, and her expression a jumble of emotions—but it was her, there was no question. “I’m sorry, Grace. I never wanted you to be involved in any of this.”
“What do you mean? You were dead, you’re supposed to be dead, where have you been? Why does he think your name is Esther, why are you here, working with Prophet Joshua . . .”
I had a thousand more questions, but I stopped talking as Zack hissed in my ear. “Grace, we don’t have time. Do you still want to go forward with the plan?”
I looked at my mom. Did this change anything?
Don’t do it! The voice in my head was resurging. Don’t do it!
“Do it,” I said.
Zack handed me the gun—it felt slick in my hands, and I had the same sickened feeling holding it that I’d had during the coup. I’d finally found my mother, and now here I was pointing a gun at her. “Watch her,” he said, grabbing Esther’s security badge from around her neck. As he headed to the door, she tried to follow.
“Don’t move,” I said, as forcefully as I could, voice shaking. I’d waited all this time to meet my mother—would I really shoot her a moment later? I couldn’t, I knew I couldn’t, but she didn’t know that. And I had to make sure she didn’t figure that out before Zack came back. As the door slammed shut behind Zack, she stayed put, watching me closely.
“I can explain everything.”
All this time looking for her, I wanted that explanation. But . . . “You can’t explain why you abandoned me for ten years.”
“We make sacrifices, we give up the people we love, if we think it’ll make the world a better place.” Her excuse made my heart sink: it was the same reason I’d given for abandoning my Nova Scotia plans with Jude. She continued, “The world is at peace, for the first time in all of human history, and I helped create that. Don’t you think that’s worth whatever it costs?”
“Create that? You created it?” My voice stuck in my throat.
“Not just me. Dozens of us.”
I shook my head, unwilling to believe it. “You worked in a battered women’s shelter. I remember it, I visited you there.”
“Every CIA agent has a cover. But that cover was informative. Every week I’d meet some husband, full of guilt for abusing his wife and children. And the women who loved them, returning time after time. Because their husbands were handsome or charming, because they believed they’d changed. I wanted so badly to show them the ugliness inside the men they loved . . . and then I finally had that chance.”
I couldn’t hide my horror. “People died because of you, millions and millions of innocent people. Guilt shouldn’t be a death sentence.”
“But love should? Loving the wrong people, loving your country enough to fight for it? You may think things are unfair, but I can tell you, this is more fair than the system we had before. You don’t remember, you were too young.”
“Don’t you feel guilty?” I asked her. “For leaving me, for any of it?”
Her eyes looked pained. “Every day.”
“Do you think you deserve to die for that guilt?”
She took a moment, before saying, “Probably. I imagine you’d agree?”
I noticed then that my eyes were filled with tears. I pressed my arms straight, keeping the gun trained on her, determined to stand my ground. “What about Dad? Didn’t you love him?”
“Of course I did. I wanted to take care of him. I wanted to take care of both of you. How do you think your father became one of Joshua’s most trusted local clerics?”
So my father wasn’t magical with his words. The position that was so important to him, the sermon he was giving mere feet away from us, it was nothing more than nepotism, and he would never know. “He mourned you for so long,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry, Grace.”
“No, you’re not!” My voice was hoarse.
“I am. Truly.” Her eyes were wet now, too. She moved toward me, and I couldn’t help taking a step toward her. I was sobbing, but I never broke eye contact, never lost my grip on the gun.
And then I remembered. “You were seeing Joshua, weren’t you? That didn’t have anything to do with why you left us?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Who told you that?”
“Joshua himself,” I said defiantly.
She laughed miserably. “I wasn’t seeing him. I was recruiting him. We were planning the American Revelation together.”
Recruiting him. “I don’t believe you.”
“Does it really matter what the truth is?” my mother asked ruefully. “An affair is just a drop in the bucket, isn’t it, of all the reasons you have to hate me?”
All those reasons piled on top of one another, and it felt like they were suffocating me. “A week ago I thought you were the best person in the world. I was fighting with the resistance because I thought the Revelations were a bad thing, because they’d taken you away from me. But the truth is, I was better off without you.”
My words seemed to land, to burn her. “I’m sorry.”
Her regret made me even angrier. “Stop saying that.”
She reached out a hesitant hand to touch my shoulder, but I pulled back. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she whispered.
“You’re a mass murderer,” I hissed.
“Over the past ten years, I’ve saved as many lives as I’ve taken. More, so many more. The number of people who would have died through violence, through money spent on armies instead of on prevention of accidents, or disease? You have this black-and-white idea of right and wrong, and I understand that—I created the culture that gave that to you. But things are so much more complicated than that.” She took a step forward again. “Do you know why I wear this burqa? Because even though I knew I had to leave you behind, to help with this cause I’d spearheaded . . . I knew I couldn’t really leave you. I still wanted to go to your recitals, your class plays. You won’t remember, but I was there. In some small way, I wanted to be in your life as much as I could, even if you’d never know.”
I tried to remember if I’d ever seen a woman in a burqa at my school events. I wanted to say yes, but I wondered if I was only imagining her there, because Esther had just planted the idea in my mind. And I’d had enou
gh ideas planted in my mind.
“You didn’t have to leave,” I insisted. “If you had to be awful and evil, you still could have done it in Tutelo, with us.”
My mother shook her head ruefully. “And put you in danger? I’ve made a lot of enemies. I didn’t want to make them your enemies, too.” Those enemies were the real reason she wore the burqa, I suspected.
She took another step closer to me. As much as I tried to remember to hate her, I couldn’t . . . no matter what she’d done, she was still my mother. She was still the woman who’d held my hair back when I threw up after eating too much Christmas candy, the one who’d cleaned the gravel out of my knee when I fell on the playground, the one who could make me feel safe with one loving look.
And here was that look now. “You’re so grown up. The last time I held you, you were just this little thing.” She was so close, the gun in my hand was pushing against her heart. “And now look at you. A young woman, doing everything she can to help as many people as she can. I know you and I have different ideas about how to make that happen, but it doesn’t mean I’m not so, so proud of you. I love you, Grace. I never stopped loving you, I never stopped thinking about you. Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
And then like a flash, she disarmed me, took a step back, and turned the gun on me. “And this is the second hardest.”
10
I stared in disbelief down the barrel of the gun my mother pointed at me. “Mom . . . ?”
Her voice stayed level, sympathetic. “I understand why you could be seduced by these rebel ideas. Freedom is such a tantalizing concept at your age. It’s only when you get to be an adult that you realize freedom is merely the opportunity to make the wrong choices, to hurt people, to hurt yourself. I wish we could be free and happy, but we can’t. Happiness requires limitations, it requires someone helping us make the right choices. There will always be injustice of one kind or another in this world. We have to choose which injustices we want to live with. Someday, you’ll understand that.”
I stared at her, trying to process what had just happened. “You’re wrong,” I said. “If people knew the truth, they never would have picked this world.”
“People rarely make decisions that are in their best interest,” she dismissed. I wondered about the sins she’d committed. Did she think she deserved to die for them? Was she Punishing the world because she wanted to Punish herself?
She lowered the gun, left it hanging at her side. “You know I won’t hurt you, right?”
I couldn’t help but snarl back, “More than you already have, you mean?”
Her eyes grew soft. “I’ll always protect you. You and your father, both.”
“The hospital, in New York,” I said as I realized. She nodded, and I felt a weight lift off me. I hadn’t hallucinated her after all. “And you’re the one who told them to let me go in Israel-Palestine.”
“I’m going to get a lot of flak for that one,” she said drily. My mother, risking herself to protect me from Joshua. It should have made me happy, but . . .
“Jude almost died because of you, because of the world you created. So did Macy. You can try to protect me, but you can’t protect everyone I care about.”
My mother shook her head. “You still don’t understand. This is me protecting the people you care about. They’re safer now, trust me.”
She was so self-satisfied, it made me wonder. “What happened to the women at the shelter? Are they happier now?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “Yes. Most of them.”
Her choice of words made me skeptical. “What about the others? Didn’t any of them feel guilty, for subjecting their children to abuse?”
My mother’s eyes grew dark for a moment. Just a moment. “On the whole, their lives are better.”
Even her own failures wouldn’t convince her. She was just as entrenched as my father in her own twisted belief system. There was nothing I could do to sway her from the notion that she was the great hero who had saved our world.
She reached out, took my hand. Her touch felt familiar, like a memory come to life. “It’s been a long, strange journey, but now that we’ve found each other again, I can keep you safe. Maybe we can all be a family again.”
I tried to imagine what that would look like, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Samantha was looking like a great maternal figure right now. “Or maybe I just leave.”
“And go where?” she asked.
I thought of the country Dawn had talked about—a safe haven for people who knew the truth. “I have an idea.”
My mother laughed. “You mean Dawn’s little rebel country plan? Do you really think we’d give the opposition a base to operate from?”
My heart skipped a beat. “How do you know about that?”
“You’ve been tapped into our network, we know. But we’ve been tapped into yours, too. We’ve been watching you, listening in on your communications. We’ve overheard enough. You’re planning to remove the nanotech from every person in this stadium. Or at least, you would have been able to, if the device in the ventilation room were operable. We disabled it as soon as we learned about your plans.”
“Disabled it . . . ?”
“You can enter that code all you want, but it can’t create any new material.”
So it had all been a waste. Everyone who worked for Dawn and Mohammed was about to be arrested—maybe tortured, maybe killed. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. Jude, Layla, Irene, and Zack—who’d really joined us at just the wrong moment. “My friends . . . You say you love me—if you really do, save my friends.”
“I’m sorry, Grace.” And she really did look sorry.
“Stop saying you’re sorry and not doing anything!” I shouted.
Before she could respond, the phone rang on the wall. My mother moved toward it, but I was closer, and I grabbed it, staring down the barrel of the gun, daring my mother to pull the trigger. “Hello?”
My mother steadied the gun, voice urgent. “Grace, put it down.” But I didn’t.
On the phone, Zack was panicked. “Grace, the machine isn’t working . . . it’s hooked up to the vents, but when I turn it on, nothing happens.”
“I know,” I interrupted him. “My mom disabled it.” And then, I had an idea. “Do you see anything yellow in that room? Like a powder maybe?”
The expression on my mother’s face confirmed I was onto something. She moved toward me, yelling now. “I said put the phone down!”
Zack was talking at the same time. “Yeah, there’s like a big vat of yellow dust, it’s hooked up to the vents already. It looks set to go, I think you just push a button and it all goes whoosh.” That yellow dust could be anything. But I had a guess it was the same substance that was in Zack’s pills, the same yellow substance that had been left behind when Prophet Joshua gave me his “healing touch.”
“Get it into the vents, now,” I said. And I dropped the phone and ran for the door.
“Grace!” my mother cried, but I knew she wouldn’t shoot me. All my little remnants of memories of her added up to that, at least.
I sprinted out the door, and my mother followed, yelling to nearby guards to restrain me. But I kept running, through souvenir stands and food stalls. I could hear footsteps pounding at my back, but I ignored them.
More guards approached from the opposite direction, blocking my escape. So I veered down an aisle, into the stadium’s crowded stands. I raced down set after set of stairs, pushing past gawking conferencegoers until I ran out of steps.
Cornered, I jumped over the fence and onto the field, and I kept running. I could see guards coming after me in all directions—I was running out of places to go.
Desperate, I clambered up onto the stage as the startled band paused in the midst of their uplifting musical number, turning one at a time to see what was happening. Out of breath, I looked around.
I was standing next to Prophet Joshua, who smiled at me—a devilish smi
le of conquest. “Hello there, Grace.”
11
I stared at Joshua, and then I looked out at the ninety thousand assembled faces, all staring back at me. Macy was in that crowd somewhere. I could see my father mere feet away, now finished with his sermon, staring at me with his mouth open, not knowing what to do. And all this was being broadcast across the world, since I doubted Dawn had managed to cut off communication while being held prisoner by Joshua.
“I think we’ve got you in a corner, don’t we?” Joshua whispered to me.
What could I possibly do? My instinct was to pray—that’s what I always did in times of desperation. But this time, my head was pounding with the voice of the nanotech. Great Spirit couldn’t speak to me now even if He wanted to—there was an impostor living in my brain.
Just give up, the voice was hissing. There’s nothing you can do now.
“Grace, I’d like you to meet the most pious folks in South Africa!” Prophet Joshua said into his microphone. I waved half-heartedly. Joshua was twisting the knife, but I knew the longer I played along, the longer I had before the guards would escort me off the stage.
This was my last chance. I could attack Prophet Joshua right now if I wanted to, maybe inflict some kind of physical damage. Or . . . I could tell all these people the truth. If Zack had managed to get that yellow dust into the air shafts, if it was healing these people right now, I could reveal the truth without killing them all. I could accomplish Dawn’s plan in a different way. A more dangerous way—since, when the uppers wore off, these people might be plagued by the same lingering doubts that had almost killed me six months ago. And even the ones who survived, would be what—condemned to life on an island that was just a larger version of that underground city, with its violent infighting?
But then I had a different thought. A thought that made the intruder in my brain howl and moan. A thought which that intruder begged me not to act on. And that was enough to convince me it was exactly what I should do.
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