by Elle Hill
My wonky legs, Lynna’s body size, this guy’s disjointed rants: What, really, did they have in common? What made an incap incapacitated? It had seemed so obvious before coming here and finding the definition spread across people with four of their five senses, individuals with terminal illnesses, and folks like Marcus who looked perfectly average until you scared the feathers out of him.
“You sighed,” Blue informed her.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Are you offering a penny for my thoughts?”
Blue’s brow furrowed.
She wondered if that was an inherent gesture in humans. Unless someone intentionally taught him . . . Stop it, Josh, she ordered. He’s a friend, not a research project.
“I don’t know what that means,” he said.
She opened her mouth, shut it. “I really don’t, either,” she admitted. “I know it means you want to know what I’m thinking, but I don’t know what a penny is.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“I want to know what you’re thinking.”
“Oh. I was thinking about what it means to be an IC. In Barstow, we called them—us—unworkables. I heard an imrabi or two call us ‘workies,’ but I don’t know if they were being cute or repeating a common word. ‘IC’ sounds better, maybe because the two letters together sounds chilly.” She shook her head and winced. Her tongue had stopped bleeding almost immediately, but her head still ached.
“What do you think, Blue? Are we unworkable? Incapacitated? What should we be called?”
“I don’t know what ‘we’ is,” Blue said.
She turned to him in surprise. Did he mean he didn’t understand the definition of the word?
“I’ve never been a ‘we.’ Were you a ‘we’ before coming here?”
So. Not the definition, then.
“Well, yeah. I was a, well, not an imrabi exactly, but their ward. And I was an unworkable, a Tithe. I didn’t know any others—not well, anyway, but that doesn’t mean, well . . . You know, that’s a weird question.” She glared at him.
Calm, blank, silent, Blue sat by her side.
As the afternoon crept past, Avery, may he remain shielded from Elovah’s wrath, brought her two books he’d found.
“They’re not the kind of reading we might wrap ourselves around on a cool winter evening,” Avery said, smiling. Josh liked his assumption of “we-ness” and almost pointed it out to Blue. “But just seeing the written word should satisfy a bit of that craving. Kind of like bread to a starving citizen.”
“Do you know why?” Josh blurted.
“I’m stuffed with ignorance the way air fills a room, so likely not.” He chuckled. “What, specifically, do you mean?”
Josh lowered her voice. “Why so many people don’t know how to read.”
Avery looked at her from around his imposing, angular nose. “You heard what others said: Don’t want to confuse the doctrine, have to keep people coming to services for guidance.”
She waited then said, “But you told me you think they keep us illiterate on purpose.”
Avery flung out his hands in an elaborate shrug.
“We’re going to die soon,” Josh said. “Might as well be honest with one another, right?”
He looked at her and smiled slightly. “Why listen to the rants of a crazy man? Don’t you know I’m delusional?”
“The facts aren’t delusional,” Josh said, “but I’m still not sure about your conclusion. People kept ignorant, not allowed access to our holy book . . .”
“Leaving only our leaders in charge of the words that guide our lives,” Avery agreed. “That’s a lot of power to wield over the ignorant masses.”
Josh opened her mouth to object. She knew the imrabi personally, knew none of them wanted to keep people illiterate, ignorant. “I ran our library,” she said slowly. “It was open only to the imrabi. And me, of course. I never thought to question that. I mean, we—well, the imrabi are the scholars.”
Avery said nothing.
“You taught literature,” she accused. “How could it be so secretive when you made a living teaching it?”
Avery smiled at her. “I taught politicians’ and factory owners’ children,” he replied. “Someone must have taught you, a daughter of the imrabi.”
Josh opened her mouth, shut it. Finally, she blurted, “We should teach the people here to read.”
“I don’t know if anyone would care to learn,” Avery said.
“We should ask. Are you up for teaching them?”
“Educating the walking dead?” Avery asked gently. “What a fascinating social experiment. I’m sure anyone monitoring us will be intensely amused.”
An hour later, Avery had collected nine people, six of them children, who wanted to learn to read. He beamed at Josh while scheduling the first lesson for the following morning.
Come four in the afternoon, Josh rose unsteadily to her feet. “I’m doing laundry,” she told Blue. “I’ll be back in an hour or whatever it takes to make my clothes crisp and un-smelly.”
A few steps later, she turned around and snapped, “I can get naked on my own, thanks.” She continued forward toward the hallway opposite hers, leaving him standing.
She entered the laundry room, or, well, the room she’d been told served as the laundry room. She saw no laundry-related machinery. It was actually a room spanning the space of three regular-sized cells and included a double-sized bed and two plush chairs. A short teenager with upturned, heavily-lidded eyes and a warm smile sat in one of the chairs.
“Does this room usually belong to our fearless leader?” she asked the teenager.
“If by ‘fearless leader’ you mean me, then no,” a voice said behind her.
Heaven. She turned to Marcus. “I need to sit.” She dropped with a sigh onto the edge of the bed. If its rumpled appearance was any indication, she wasn’t the first.
“You need to give me your clothes,” the smiling young man said.
“Um.”
“Ryland is our launderer,” Marcus told her cheerfully. “We hand over our clothing, he separates it and does loads in the two different washers this place seems to have.”
“I work at a launderer’s,” Ryland said, smiling and nodding.
Josh found herself nodding in time with him before stopping and looking down.
“I have a lot of people’s clothes. They’re waiting in their rooms, but you can wait here if you want,” Ryland told them.
Josh glanced at Marcus.
“We can cover up with these,” he said, nodding toward a pile of green blankets crumpled on a nearby chair.
Unlike the rest of the Tithes, she had chosen a cell on the opposite side of the Great Room. Sitting here, naked with a blanket, didn’t sound ideal, but shuffling back to her room while draped in said blanket held even less appeal.
“We’ll look away,” Ryland promised, grinning.
She believed him. It wasn’t as though she provided much temptation to peek. Josh hissed her way to her feet, grabbed a blanket, and tried to hold it up while she undressed. Both men looked away. Ryland even covered his eyes.
Ten minutes later, she huddled at the head of the bed, a cautious face peering from a green, mummified body. Even her feet—especially her feet—she had tucked inside the dark green folds.
Marcus stripped in front of both of them, although she followed Ryland’s example and closed her eyes.
“So,” Marcus said a few minutes later.
She slit one eye, found him covered chest-down with a blanket, and sighed in relief.
“So,” she said, and then called, “Thanks, Ryland.”
“You’re welcome!” he called as he exited the room, arms laden.
“Your friend seems quite devoted to you,” Marcus said. He sat in one of the plush chairs, bare feet poking out from the mass of blanket. She couldn’t help but wonder if his naked backside sat directly on the chair.
None of your bu
siness, and quit speculating about naked backsides.
“You seem to have epilepsy,” she countered.
He nodded.
“Your town considers the oddest things incapacitations,” she said.
Marcus smiled. “Someone has to be the Tithes.”
“May as well pick the ones who can’t work?”
His smile tilted to a diagonal. “Or function as well. This way, Elovah gets Her goods and the town runs a little smoother.”
Josh let her breath out. “Do you really believe that?” she asked.
Marcus shrugged.
She waited. Where was the grand orator, the one whose brave, no-nonsense words (and flowing blond hair) inspired them all?
“That’s not an answer,” she pointed out—quite helpfully, she thought.
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I was told all my life what an honor it is, aren’t I lucky, such a, an inspiration. I can’t function the way the rest of them do, so I’m allowed this ultimate glory, an incomparable opportunity to serve our town.”
“Yeah, me, too,” she said quietly. “But I notice no one else ever stepped forward, desperate to help serve the town. All I saw on their faces was—”
“Relief,” Marcus said, and she nodded.
“And fear, like my condition as an unworkable or a Tithe would somehow rub off on them.”
Marcus nodded.
“Lucky, lucky us.” Josh sighed, and then drew in her breath and pulled back slightly toward the headboard (something else her cot didn’t have). This kind of talk could get her punished in the rab’ri. Well, what are they going to do now? Sacrifice me?
“How did you become a Tithe?” she asked him, averting her gaze from his bright, perceptive blue eyes. A very different shade than Blue’s.
He hesitated for a moment before turning on his leadership smile. “Oh, you know, the usual: mental illness, betrayals, a childhood with the imrabi.”
She waited.
“The town should have caught my mother’s condition. People like her”—he shook his head—“shouldn’t be allowed to bring children into their lives. She functioned well enough to hold a job, but only because she worked cleaning the rab’ri.”
Josh didn’t bother telling him she’d cleaned her town’s rab’ri till her condition had made extended periods of standing and walking impossible.
“I was ten or so when the seizures started. My mother”—he shook his head again—“she didn’t handle it well. What if I had a seizure in public and the town turned me into a Tithe? So she kept me inside all the time. People asked about me, but she always had an excuse: I was taking an extra history class, I was apprenticing under someone, whatever.
“I stayed in the house for over a year while my mother grew more and more desperate to keep me away from the world. We kept the blinds down throughout the day. While she worked, I remained in the dark house.”
“You . . . wow. What about attending synasch or going to the rab’ri on Shabuah?” It was a dumb question, but the only one she could think to ask.
He nodded at her. “I went as infrequently as the laws allowed. We went once per week, stayed for the service, then went right home. When I wasn’t ‘sick’ or didn’t have some ‘emergency,’ of course. We’d listen to the minnabi talk about the Tithes as the holy, the chosen. Then, we’d go home and I’d hide in our dark house.”
Josh nodded. She’d heard of such thing, of people hiding their unworkable children or spouses, trying to spare them from the Tithe.
“I asked her sometimes why she didn’t just let me run around free and let Elovah make the decision.”
She waited for a moment before prompting, “And what did she say?”
“She said it was a lie, all of it.”
“All of what?”
“It. The Tithe, the imrabi, the angels, Elovah.”
Heresy, a crime punishable by imprisonment and service to a rab’ri or a synasch.
Marcus shrugged one shoulder and looked away from her. “As I said, she was unstable. A person like her shouldn’t have had children.”
But then you wouldn’t be here.
“So someone must have found out,” Josh said as gently as she knew how.
“They came during the night, grabbed my mother, took her to the gaol.”
Josh found she was leaning forward. She checked her wraps to ensure all was in order and then asked, “What about you?”
“I went to live with the imrabi.”
A pre-pubescent boy among all those women.
“Did you ever see your mother again?”
She expected him to say no, but he nodded. “I saw her at a Tithing festival.”
“Just a few days ago?” she asked in surprise.
“Fourteen years ago. It was hers, not mine.”
“Hers?” Josh asked.
“As I said, she was unstable.”
She reclined against the headboard. A mother, a skeptic, a disbeliever. How horrified she must have been when her actions brought her son’s fate onto herself, knowing that Marcus would follow her eventually. Heretic or not, unstable or desperate, Marcus’ mother had acted to save the life of her son. Josh could respect the pain, the burden of her choices.
“How did the authorities find out about what your mother was doing?” Likely an imrabi, she thought. No matter how devout the towns’ religious scholars, they still poured themselves with gleeful delight into their townsfolks’ lives.
Marcus’ eyes shone clear and bright blue. “I told them.”
A young woman, maybe two or three years younger than Josh, rushed into the room. She’d managed to twist and tie her sheet into a drapey garment. “Are my clothes done yet?” she snapped, looking from Josh to Marcus.
“I don’t know,” Josh replied.
“Where’s that laundry boy?”
“Probably tending to your clothes,” Marcus said dryly, with the tiniest of edges.
The young woman—Josh thought her name might be something like “Sara” or “Sira”—collapsed into one of the chairs. She crossed her legs, and her right foot waved from the stalk of her ankle.
“I can’t stand it here,” she stated to the room in general, throwing up her hands. “The lack of windows, you know? The clock says five, but what does that mean? Time seems pretty useless and artificial when you lose count of the movement of the sun. What does it matter if it’s dawn in the middle of summer or dusk in late winter when you can’t feel the sun moving through the sky and smell the wind?”
Into the silence that followed her statement, Josh found herself saying, “The sun doesn’t actually move around us. Our planet circles the sun. This is why—”
“I know that,” Sira snapped, although her eyes flashed to Marcus for confirmation. Her foot continued its mad dance. “I don’t know if I can handle this, you know? I need to drink the sun, I need to feel the wind on my tongue.”
That didn’t sound very tasty, but perhaps Sira was striving for poetry. Josh considered telling the woman she wouldn’t have long to suffer this underground housing but decided to remain silent.
Marcus sat forward. “After your clothes are dry, would you like to take a small group to the overhead doorway at the top of the ladder? We’ve had no success so far trying to open it.”
Sira’s eyes swam between him and Josh. Her hand flapped toward the latter. “Isn’t that blasphemy?”
Josh smiled. “Elovah gave us curiosity. She allowed the designers to place a door. What do you think She expects us to do?”
Sira leaned forward. “I’ve been thinking, and, you know, maybe the Tithing is a test,” she confided, her fingers tapping out a rhythm on her knee.
Josh shrugged, although she didn’t agree. “The Bitoran doesn’t say much about what happens to the Tithes after they go to the desert.”
Sira stood suddenly and adjusted her wearable fabric sculpture. “I can find some smart people to help me,” she told Marcus and then strode out of the room.
“I guess she’ll be ba
ck for her clothes,” Marcus said, smiling.
“You’re a good leader,” Josh said. A man with a lot of history clinging to him, but a good leader, nonetheless.
Marcus made a noncommittal noise. “Tell me about you. When did you lose your parents?”