The Tithe

by Elle Hill

  “Maybe you and Kenna can see if you can find any hidden doors,” she said, although countless adults had already tried.

  “Kenna thinks Netta is brilliant.” Garyn rolled her eyes but walked away to find her friend, anyway.

  After lunch, Josh decided to visit Lynna in her room. She didn’t know if her friend wanted Blue and her there, but if not, she figured Lynna could yell at them to go away.

  Yelling at people. Yeah, that was very Lynna.

  They knocked on her door and Lynna answered. Her face looked puffy and red, her hair looked frozen in some wild kind of dance.

  “Were you sleeping?” Josh asked.

  “No. I was just, you know, lying here.”

  They stared at one another for a minute. Finally, Lynna’s eyes grew blurred and her lips trembled. “He’s gone,” she whispered.

  Josh nodded. She knew Lynna, the heart of the Tithes, everyone’s caretaker, would feel this loss especially keenly.

  “Your, uh, your legs. They must—”

  Josh nodded. “Can I sit for just a few minutes?”

  Lynna stepped aside and ushered them inside. RJ sat in her chair at the foot of the bed. Lynna and Josh sat on the bed, talking about Avery, smiling at his paranoia, speaking wistfully of his encyclopedic knowledge of poetry and literature.

  “I plan to hold another ceremony to honor our dead,” Josh said. The word stung her tongue, but she refused to publicly cushion it with “taken” or “gone.”

  Lynna nodded.

  Before Josh and Blue departed, Lynna asked if they would send Garyn to her. “I don’t want to face Netta and the others who thought Avery was just a silly old man. I can’t stand listening to them today. But I miss Garyn.”

  Josh promised, and they quit the room.

  The other event was the death of Kadin, he of the sugar in the kitchen, the marriage to Mare, the wailing after she’d been taken. Kadin, the young man who had locked her in a hallway with an angel.

  Of all people, Bran was the person to notify Josh of Kadin’s death. Bran, whose escapades with Joona and another older woman had become the source of endless jokes and Holies-led lectures.

  In the early evening, he shuffled over on rapid feet to where Josh and Blue sat, discussing some of the technology of the Twelves that Josh had read about. Bran’s eyes had widened into Os; they were hazel, Josh noticed for the first time, or whatever the word people used to describe eyes whose colors can’t be easily classified.

  “Hello, Bran,” she said.

  “Josh, you have to come here,” he said quietly.

  “Why do you need Joshua?” Blue asked in his cold, smooth voice.

  If Bran understood the implication, he ignored it. “I found something you have to see. I think somebody is hurt, maybe dead.”

  Josh rose heavily to her feet. Why did people come to her, when Quinn would have been the better choice?

  “You go get Quinn,” she told Blue. “I’ll follow—”

  “No,” Blue said.

  Josh gritted her teeth. “Fine. Bran, you tell us where she is and then go get Quinn.”

  “Don’t think it’s a she,” Bran muttered. But he told them to check Josh’s old room. Heaven only knew why he’d been in that room in the first place.

  She and Blue walked as quickly as her legs would allow down their hallway and into the bedroom Josh had abandoned after her attack. The coincidence made her skin prickle.

  Inside the room, they found a person lying in Josh’s old bed, stomach down, face pressed against the bed’s single, thin pillow. Shaggy, but shiny dark brown hair scattered around the person’s head. The person’s skin tone was naturally swarthy, but it had paled several degrees. The green blanket lay tucked around the figure’s delicate frame.

  He—and Josh had a pretty good idea who this was—looked dead: The paler skin, the utter stillness of the blanket, the way the face pressed so far into the pillow.

  “We need to check his pulse,” she murmured, and stepped forward, lips curling in distaste.

  “No,” Blue said, grabbing her arm.

  “I’ll do it,” a female voice said.

  Josh stepped gratefully aside as Quinn entered the room. She approached the figure, pressed her fingers against the side of his throat, and backed away, sighing.

  “He hasn’t been gone more than an hour or two,” she said. “It’s Kadin, isn’t it?”

  Josh nodded. “I think so.”

  “I saw him go crazy after Mare . . . went away,” Bran helpfully reminded them. “I guess he couldn’t take it. Poor kid.”

  A minute later, Josh and Blue retreated to their room, where they sat on their bed in silence. Something about that scene . . . After a while, she described it in detail to Blue: motionless body, face mashed into the thin pillow, covers arranged neatly.

  “I don’t know much about the science of the body, but doesn’t it get all thrashy when we deprive it of oxygen?” Josh asked.

  “Yes,” Blue said.

  “How do you . . .? Never mind. If he got thrashy, shouldn’t the blanket be tangled around his legs or on the floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means . . .” She trailed off.

  They both knew what it meant.

  Minutes passed. Josh remembered the horror of her attack, the hiss of the blade against her skin. “Why did it happen in my old room?” she asked.

  “I’ve been wondering that,” Blue admitted.

  “It could be a coincidence.”

  “It could.”

  “You don’t think it is.”

  “No. I also didn’t like that you found Sira in that bathroom, when you’re almost the only one who ever uses it. Now this.”

  “But, I figured that’s why she did it there. Wait, are you saying you still don’t think she took her own life?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Well, what about Len? You don’t think someone, you know, killed him, do you?”

  “I don’t know, Joshua.”

  Silence pooled around them. After a few minutes, they left their tiny, cell-like room for the Great Room.

  Later, Josh led the Tithes in a ceremony that honored their lost. When she added Kadin to the list, one older man in the back murmured, “That makes twenty-five.”

  Over one-third of them, gone. Josh hesitated for a moment, shaken. After a moment, she continued, and her voice remained strong and confident.

  As she looked out over the crowd of forty-some Tithes, she wondered who, if any, among them could kill.

  Later, head buried beneath Blue’s cloak while the angel flapped overhead, she wondered if it was fair to also consider the angel’s actions murderous.

  It’s Elovah’s will. But it’s ending life. By definition, isn’t that killing?

  She emerged moments later with a guilty gulp to find Emmel, the giant of a man she’d met on the first day, gone.

  In her dreams that night, Josh rode the air, swimming in it, letting its coolness cleanse her body. Or perhaps she danced, twisting, rising, falling, always to the beat of her wings. She extended her hand and grasped another, large and familiar, one. As she drew him upward, her cold lips touched the warmth of his.

  “Welcome,” she whispered in a voice crafted from honey.

  “I’ve been waiting,” Blue said.

  She awakened to find him gone.

  I took him. I mean, the angel took him. The angel took Blue!

  These were her second thoughts on awakening in an empty bed. The first were, of course, “Blue’s gone.”

  Josh swung her legs over the edge of the bed and shoved her aching feet in her boots. He was probably getting her food or, or going to the bathroom. Nothing to worry about. Still, she heaved herself to her feet and tottered to the doorway.

  He had never not been in bed when she awakened. Never.

  She threw the door open and . . . He was right there, standing before the door.

  “Blue!” she cried in relief. Then, “What in heaven are you
doing out here?”

  “I heard something,” Blue said.

  “A person?” Okay, a dumb question, but she’d just woken up.

  “Yes, but I don’t know what they were doing.”

  “Probably Joona and Bran,” she joked. She led him toward the bathrooms.

  Perhaps it was the unusual start to the day, but the entire day felt awkward, like a scratchy, ill-fitting garment. As she entered the Great Room that morning, someone fell to their knees in front of her—fell to their knees as if she were some kind of . . . of holy being.

  “Please help me, Joshua, please,” the person, a thin, yellow-tinged man in his thirties, begged.

  “I can have Blue help you up,” she quipped. She just didn’t feel angelic today.

  “Before I came here,” he continued, “I used to lie a lot. My clocks were late, I blamed my apprentice. My wife wanted to buy a permit for a second child, and I didn’t want another one, so I told her we were robbed. When the healer diagnosed me with cirrhosis and I was declared a Tithe, my wife cried. She cried, after I’d deprived her of another child.

  “I’m worried Elovah won’t welcome me in heaven. You can help, though, right?”

  Josh stared at the top of his head as he bowed it before her. The entire room watched in silence. Finally, she asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Arin.”

  One of the minnabi from her childhood had been named Arin. She’d always thought it a pretty, flighty name.

  “Arin, I’m not an angel or an imrabi . . .”

  “But you know the Bitoran and you lead us all in prayers!”

  “Anyone with a knowledge of the Bitoran could do that,” she said, as kindly as she could through gritting teeth. Her legs had begun burning.

  “Will Elovah welcome me into heaven?” the man asked.

  Josh sighed. She certainly couldn’t speak for their creator, but the man seemed so miserable. “The Bitoran says heaven is filled with people who have lived lives that honor Her. No one is free from sin.”

  “I’ve sinned a lot.”

  She could barely make out his words.

  “We’ve all sinned. The Bit’ says at the end of life, Elovah asks us two questions: ‘Whom have you worshipped and feared?’ and ‘Is the world better for your existence?’ She weighs your answers.”

  “Is the world better for my existence?” Arin asked her.

  “Your wife and child think so,” Josh said.

  Arin looked up at her, his face pinched into guilt and fear. After a second, he nodded.

  “Could you possibly move? I need to sit down,” Josh said. She tried to project kindness and wisdom but probably just sounded tired.

  Not an hour later, RJ rolled into the room and announced someone had stolen the sugar. “Until you find the blasted sugar, you can all make your own breakfast!” she yelled.

  Juss stood up to offer his services but, at the sight of RJ’s expression, slammed back into his chair. Blue and Lynna made their group peanut butter and jam sandwiches.

  Come afternoon, two solemn teenagers approached Josh, hand in hand, and asked if she would marry them. For the first time, Josh refused. “I’m sorry,” she told them, as one girl’s lips trembled. “In Barstow, the minimum age for marriage is eighteen. Didn’t Lynna tell me you’re both thirteen?”

  “I’m fifteen,” the bigger of the two girls corrected. “She’s thirteen.”

  “That’s a little young to be marrying.”

  “But you married Mare and Kadin!” the younger girl cried. Brown irises shimmered behind her tears.

  “They . . . were older,” Josh muttered.

  The younger girl started crying noisily. After tossing a reproachful look at Josh, the older girl led her away.

  “And I wanted to be an imrabi?” Josh sighed to Blue.

  The day crumbled like a, well, a sugarless cookie, around them. By the time late evening arrived, many of the Tithes huddled together with equal amounts of trepidation and annoyance. Their speech grew terser, their silences longer, their eyes ever more furtive. The air felt heavy, laden, as though about to give birth. Or maybe it was only Josh who felt the weight of expectation and anticipation.

  Lynna sat to the left of Josh on the round couch, holding RJ’s hand and telling Garyn some silly story about a boy who lived in the sand dunes and ate scorpions. RJ contributed the occasional fantastic bit, like running so fast through the sunbeams, he never sunburned. Garyn finally fell asleep on the couch on the other side of Lynna.

  When the lights went out, Josh dove under the cover of Blue’s cloak. Oddly, she missed the presence of the little girl. Holding and reassuring her somehow mitigated the full terror of the angel’s arrival.

  The twenty-somethingth time, and Josh’s heart still throbbed against her breastbone, her breaths still hissed rapidly in and out. She wished she could say the sound of her breathing smothered the susurrance and snap of the angel’s wings, but it never did.

  The familiar crack shattered the air directly overhead, and Josh jumped. No, please, no, she prayed.

  Lynna’s scream tore through the Great Room.

  Josh threw herself to her left, out of the comfort and security of Blue’s cloak and into the dark room. She reached out an arm and gripped her friend’s wrist. It was higher than it should be. It continued to rise.

  “NO!” Josh screamed, just as she had when the angel had come for little Garyn.

  The pull on Lynna’s wrist eased. Her wrist—her entire arm—flopped downward as the woman’s body crashed back down to the couch.

  Had the angel released her friend?

  She looked up, then, and saw it. The angel. She still couldn’t discern much of the shape in the room, but the white eyes glowed down upon her and the wings, blacker and richer than any shadow, beat the air around them. Josh’s hair stirred briefly. The eyes peered at her for a moment, and Josh found herself leaning forward, toward the faceless entity.

  The eyes didn’t move a bit, but cold fingers suddenly wrapped around Josh’s forearm. Cold, white eyes filled her vision and expanded outward, spreading under her skin, into her bones. Vaguely, Josh felt her body rise, but her thoughts, fuzzy as they were, could only focus on the blessed lack of pain in her lower legs.

  She rose, and the room spread beneath her. Fifteen or so feet below, dozens of Tithes still cringed and wept. She shouldn’t be able to see them in the darkness, she thought hazily as her head lolled on her shoulders. Lynna, lying limply, awkwardly on the round couch. RJ, tears literally sprinkling from her face as she lunged toward her discarded lover. Netta, her head bowing almost to her lap. Blue, jumping into the air, his face contorted into a rage so fierce she gasped.

  He reached arms toward her, and she tucked her free arm tight against her body. His expression, like a sculpture of wrath from a block of granite, softened into his usual blankness. Her Blue. When he wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly against him, she did not resist him. She also no felt longer weightless. Her head rolled against his chest. Unlike the angel, he felt so warm.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw the terrible light of the angel’s eyes as they peered down at them. Blue reached up a hand, and the angel’s fingers released her arm. It dropped limply to her side.

  The wings cracked, then, and the air blew into Josh’s eyes, making her blink several times. She opened her eyes again just before the ground met the soles of her boots. The couch pressed against the back of her knees.

  “What—?” she slurred.

  “Sleep,” Blue whispered, and she collapsed on the couch.

  Josh opened her eyes, yawned, and stretched her toes. Blue lay behind her, his arm around her waist and his breath stirring her hair.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning.” Cool and quiet as usual.

  “I don’t remember coming in here.”

  “I carried you.”

  “Ah. Uh, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”