Hallow

by Renato Carreira

  *

  What if it's true, she was thinking as she entered the abandoned warehouse once more. What if it's all true? She couldn't pinpoint exactly the moment she had stopped believing. It was somewhere between joining the Timenaut Corps and the death of her father at the hands of heretics when he was only ninety-seven years old, ten years away from retirement age and the cabin he always dreamed of buying in the forest. Before the new heresy had spread enough to become a threat, causing the Archbishop to panic and order an attack on one of their settlements. It was a massacre and served only to gather more converts for their cause and to increase the frequency and violence of their attacks.

  She walked to the unremarkable pile of rubble, dug out her slate and removed the stylus from her pouch. The message from the previous drop was promptly erased and she wrote:

  Agent debrief. Albert Ford. Target coord. acquired. On to confirm ID. Drop 3.

  She buried the slate again and realized she couldn't care less about the truth.