by Elle Hill
Eryl returned to their air-conditioned haven no more than an hour later, seven more Tithes tottering, striding, or limping behind him. By then, the pain in Josh’s legs had subsided to a moan rather than a scream, so she watched the seven emerge from the elevator. Had her eyes darted like that, her lips pressed together so tightly? Probably. Four men and a woman entered the room behind Eryl. Another town’s equivalent of Jan-Yin carried in a young boy who appeared asleep, while behind her, a young man pushed a woman riding in another wheeled chair.
“I told you I don’t need you to push me,” the woman, maybe thirty and with dark skin and short, curly black hair, groused. “It’s my legs that don’t work, not my arms.” The man continued pushing her into the room. He stopped a few feet from the enormous man on Josh’s left.
The woman carrying the child placed him on the long couch next to the red-haired woman. Without a word, the two attendants walked back to the elevator, entered it, and stood, silently and with hands clasped over their stomachs. With their expressionless faces and uniform postures, Josh wondered if Eryl had wound them up and let them go.
“May I have everyone’s attention?” Eryl asked politely, his cannon-boom voice reverberating off the hard surfaces of the room. Even the man who’d muttered nonstop to himself ever since Josh’s group had arrived, quieted. “I am honored to once again welcome the seventy Tithes, seven each from the ten towns in San Bernardino County.” Once again? “This is the third time I’ve served the county in this capacity,” he confirmed, smiling at them all. He was a good speaker, making eye contact with each person.
“Before I share with you all the meager amount of information I have, I wanted to thank you all for your faith and bravery. Your devotion to your townspeople humbles me. I know I’m unworthy to stand in the same space as you.”
Yeah, yeah, they were all so holy and enviable. Heaven, who wouldn’t want to be a Tithe?
“I know some of you are concerned about what the Tithe brings. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much, not because I’m withholding information but because I simply don’t know. Every seven years, the county places our Tithes in this underground location. It may seem an odd place to bring you all, but it is a holy place, a sacred place, a place where Elovah and the Tithes meet and talk. Why here, I can’t pretend to know, but I do know Elovah takes the Tithes from this place and escorts them directly to heaven. We check this bunker once a year, every anniversary of the Tithe festivals, and no trace of the Tithes remains.
“I cannot prepare you for your holy journey. I can only tell you that until Elovah comes for you, whenever it will be, you will live in comfort here. The pantry, refrigerators, and freezers are well-stocked with enough food for several months, and water flows from the faucets and in the bathrooms. I don’t know when Elovah comes or what will happen when She does, but I urge you to spend your time until then praying and readying yourself.” He smiled broadly, wistfully, shaking his head as if in wonderment at Elovah’s grand scheme.
“So you’re locking us in here for the rest of our lives?” someone out of Josh’s line of eyesight asked.
However long or short that may be.
Eryl pressed his lips together in a patient smile. “This is the middle ground between your former life and your new one with Elovah. It’s your temporary home until She comes to claim you and you fulfill your holy duties.”
“What happens if the heating and cooling systems break or one of the pipes leaks?” the tired woman with the crutches snapped.
Eryl continued smiling. “Somehow, that has never happened,” he said. “More of Elovah’s great mystery.”
Oh, dear heaven. Living for twenty years in a rab’ri, she could attest that faith had yet to fix a broken lamp.
“So what happens if we decide to get on the elevator and ride back up to the surface?” Josh asked with some sweetness, although she was pretty certain she knew the answer.
Eryl’s grin grew lopsided, and he shook a finger at her. “There’s always one that asks,” he boomed. “We’ll disable the elevator and lock the hatch above the stairway. Please understand this is an honor, a sacred covenant between you and Elovah. To attempt to escape is to show doubt, and as the Bitoran says in the Book of Salvation . . .”
“‘Doubt is the seed from which all sins bloom,’” Josh concluded.
Eryl’s dark eyes twinkled, although she suspected that was just the gleam of the overhead lights on the darkness of his irises. “I leave you all with my thanks, with all our thanks. May you remain shielded from Elovah’s wrath.”
“But we won’t. That’s kind of the point, right?” Josh asked.
Eryl backed into the elevator with the other two persons. The doors groaned closed.
Chapter 2
They stared at one another while, somewhere up above, the sun crept another millimeter across the sky.
A young man, seeming oddly spry for a Tithe, leapt to his feet and rushed to the elevator. He pushed the button to summon it. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. And again. And again and again and again. He kept pressing it until a tall, thin, dark-haired woman led him away.
Silence spread across the room, thick and sour.
“So where’s the bathroom in this place?” Josh asked, looking around the dull metal room. “I know we’re supposed to pray and all, but I really have to pee.”
No one responded.
With a sigh, Josh pushed herself to her feet. Her ankles wobbled, and she spent a scary three seconds wondering if she’d collapse back into her chair. Eyes narrowed and mouth clamped, she dragged heavy legs toward the knobless door near the elevator. It had the look of public facilities. She shoved open the door and glanced inside.
“Found it!” she announced, and disappeared within.
When she exited the bathroom a few minutes later, small groups had broken off and some of the Tithes had begun chatting with one another. In spite of the pain, she sighed away some of the heaviness in her chest. Their silence had felt hopeless, unnatural.
On her way back to her chair, she shuffled, legs burning, feet flapping inside her boots, before the people sitting on the winding couch. Don’t fall, don’t fall, she begged her legs.
So of course she fell.
A few seconds after pitching face-first to the cold cement, Josh lay there, unsure whether to scream, cry, or ask for a pillow. Two heartbeats later, the red-haired girl—actually a woman in her twenties, Josh now saw—scurried to her and hunkered down. They stared at one another for a moment, Josh from the rather disadvantageous position of stomach-down on the cement.
“You okay?” the red-haired woman asked.
“Never better,” Josh said.
The woman stared at her for a minute before, finally, the curves of her round face settled into a broad smile.
“Here, smart-aleck,” she laughed, and offered her hand.
Josh took it.
A very painful moment later, Josh dropped back into her original chair. The woman dragged an unoccupied chair fifteen or twenty feet and sat it on Josh’s right. Company. Lovely.
“I’m Lynna,” the woman offered.
Josh raised her eyebrows. So, what, they were now best friends? Trapped in an underground building, waiting to die, a friendship hatched: it made for a grand tale.
Still, it wasn’t as if anyone else had offered to help.
“Joshua.”
“Huh. Like the tree?”
Oddly, no one had ever asked her that before. She nodded.
“Please to meet y—”
A loud voice, young and female, interrupted Lynna’s incongruous display of etiquette. “So what’s next? We just wait for Elovah to walk in through one of these doors?”
Eyes swung in their orbits toward the various doors.
“I wouldn’t mind knowing a little bit more about our situation,” the pretty blond man said. Even without shouting, his voice carried around the entire room. “I suggest we start pooling our knowledge.”
“This isn’t
a convention. It’s not school. We’re here to meet Elovah!” an older man, sitting three people down from Blondie, shouted. “We don’t need to know. We only need to be!”
A few others shouted their agreement, while Blondie talked of the intersection of faith and knowledge. The room devolved into a babble of raised voices.
Lynna turned back to Josh, her eyes uncrinkled in a face full of smile. “So, Joshua,” she continued, as if never interrupted. “I noticed earlier you were in a heck of a lot of pain. Want me to find you some aspirin or something?” She folded her hands in her lap and leaned forward, eyebrows raised, the very picture of helpfulness.
Josh usually took several aspirin a day. She hadn’t bothered today, since she figured she’d be dead soon enough. Still, she shook her head at Lynna’s offer.
“Oh, come on. I’m going to the kitchen anyway for a drink of water. Sure you don’t want some relief?”
After a minute, Josh inclined her head very slightly. Lynna leapt to her feet—really, the woman was amazingly nimble for a Tithe—and swept through the room so quickly Josh expected to see a comet tail in her wake.
A bedraggled teenage boy, sitting perpendicular to Josh, only the right half of his face visible, watched through narrowed eyes Lynna’s flight toward the kitchen. As she passed him, he asked in a conversational tone, “Going toward the kitchen already, fat girl? Leave some for the rest of us.”
Lynna’s head dropped, but she continued her trajectory into the kitchen.
The lack of arms on the chair made pushing herself to her feet an exercise in agony, but Josh nonetheless managed to stumble upright. “Hey, boy,” she said calmly through her teeth. Several voices quieted. The young man turned toward her. His skin was light brown, his hair and eyes a surprisingly lustrous shade of nutmeg, but most striking were the pink and red scars that streaked across the left half of his face and up into his scalp. The boiling in her chest subsided into a simmer. “We’re all freaks here,” she said. “Lay off or else this guy”—she gestured toward the hulking man dominating the chair on her left—“is going to tear your spine out through your eye socket.”
The man on her left stared at the boy for a moment before solemnly flexing his biceps. Josh’s mouth twitched.
The boy stared hard at her, his eyes pinched and his mouth twisted, whether by scars or anger she didn’t know. She turned back to the big man.
“Emmel,” the giant offered. His voice grumbled out of his chest.
She dropped back into the chair with a sigh. “Joshua.”
They nodded at one another.
Lynna returned a moment later without incident. She handed Josh a glass of water and three tablets. “The kitchen is really well stocked,” she confided. “I saw lots of food, but there’s also pain relievers, allergy meds, some first-aid stuff. How long you think they’re going to keep us here?”
Josh swallowed the pills and drank half the glass of water. After a deep breath, she mumbled, “Thanks.” Lynna grinned at her. “What?” Josh asked. “You don’t believe Elovah is going to swoop in here and chat with us?”
Lynna snorted. “Who really believes that jimson about Elovah’s existence?” she asked in her cheerful voice.
Josh gaped at her.
Lynna’s face fell. “Did I say . . . Oh. Sorry. I mean, you know, lots of people believe. I respect their right to believe and everything.”
Josh took another sip of the water. She’d intended to hand it back to Lynna so the other woman could share it, but her mouth needed something to occupy it. Sure, not everyone believed everything in the Bitoran. She imagined she wasn’t the only person to question the veracity of its claims. Still.
“Hey, sorry,” Lynna said. “I’m a little shaken up, you know.” She bit her bottom lip.
Josh shook her head. “I’ve just never heard anyone say anything like that out loud.”
“Really? Must be a town thing. Sorry. Which town you from?”
“Barstow.”
Lynna nodded. “I heard about you. You make electronics, right?”
Mostly. Josh nodded. “Where are you from?” she asked dutifully.
“Victor. We have a few factories, but we’re best known for making glass.”
Yeah, she remembered. “And, uh, why? You know, why?” Josh swept her eyes around the room.
Lynna stared blankly at her a minute before her eyelids drooped and her mouth tightened. “You seem pretty decent, but that’s not so nice.”
Josh let out her breath. “My legs are wonky,” she said, pointing downward. “You just get around pretty well. I didn’t know what else it could be.”
Lynna’s eyes narrowed further. “Are you serious?”
“They’ve been wonky since I was thirteen. I became a Tithe at fourteen.”
“I mean about me. Are you really asking me why the town leaders of Victor sent me here?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“I’m, you know”—Lynna swept a hand down her body—“fat.”
Josh waited for several seconds. Finally, she said, “You mean that’s it?”
Lynna looked away, toward the boy with the scarred face. “Of course it’s it.”
Josh shook her head, not in denial but in an attempt to shake loose what must be a misunderstanding. “You’re saying your town declared you a Tithe because you’re big?”
“Fat, and yeah.”
“What? Really? Fat? But fat’s not a . . .” She tapped the top of her boot for emphasis. “Being bigger is just a different body type.”
Lynna shook her head. “I’m not the only fat Tithe here, Joshua,” she said. She pointed across the room at two young boys, identical twins with dark blond hair. They sat hunched together on the long couch, holding hands. “Those two boys are from Adelanto.”
What in heaven? Josh’s favorite Ima, Christina, weighed in around three hundred pounds. “Our mayor is a very large woman,” Josh told her. “That’s like making someone a Tithe because they have blue eyes or are short. The Bitoran says nothing about body size.”
Lynna smiled at her, another facial movement that ended at her nose. “Where does it talk about wonky legs?” she asked.
“Well, you know, if you can’t work . . .” Josh began, and stopped. She’d been the best text translator in town, and her organizational system in the rab’ri’s library was, according to Ima Emm, borderline miraculous.
She sighed and shook her head. Barstow was an industrial town, filled with people who worked in factories and a few synasches and rab’ris. At twenty years old, she was considered among the town’s finest scholars. In a town in which basic literacy could never be assumed, few townsfolk were better read. She worked just as hard as anyone.
Funny. Josh had spent the last six years coming to terms with the end of her life and now, here she sat, debating theology and town politics with some resident of Victor.
“Yeah, I worked at a glass factory till yesterday,” Lynna said.
Josh really wanted her to go away. Yet, she couldn’t resist, “Do you live with your parents?”
“My mom, yeah.” Lynna half-smiled. “She’s fat, too, only in a thin body, you know? She starves herself so she won’t have to be Tithed. We tried starving me, too, but, you know.” She shrugged.
“Didn’t work?”
“Nope.” She shrugged again. “I’ve known for five years or so that I was destined to be Tithed. I think my mom got jealous when they bestowed the honor on me and I started eating like everyone else instead of gnawing on crackers all day.” Lynna turned more fully to Josh and her eyes shone more brightly. Josh liked it better when Lynna wasn’t aiming for ingratiating. “So what about your family?”
It was Josh’s turn to shrug. “I don’t have one.”
Lynna nodded and leaned forward. “I heard about Tithes being taken away from their families. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard some get locked away. Yeah, we Tithes are so blessed, right? So what happened to you?”
“I was dropped off at a rab’r
i when I was a baby,” Josh said. She tried not to cringe. Saying it out loud for probably the first time, her story sounded like the worst kind of melodrama.
“Raised by imrabi? No way!” Yet Lynna nodded as if that explained something. “Did you have to attend services all the time?”
Legs notwithstanding, Josh felt even more like a freak. “Unless I was sick.” She glanced up and found Blondie walking toward them. Whew.