The Tithe

by Elle Hill

  “Gods are solidified beliefs,” Elovah said. “We are collections of you. We’re your—” She swept her hand down her own body. “—reflections.”

  “You aren’t god,” Josh insisted. “A god is forever. She’s eternity. You . . . your kind waxes and wanes like, like some kind of moon phase.”

  Elovah ducked her head in an affected grimace. “That’s a terrible analogy, and you know it. And if enough people believe it, we become it, so don’t be too sure that I am or am not someone or can or cannot do something.”

  Josh leaned over and pressed her forehead into the top of the chair. She was pretty certain dead people didn’t pass out, but she felt a little faint. It was a lie, all a lie.

  “A lie,” she whispered.

  “What’s the lie, Josh?” Elovah asked gently. “Your Bitoran says the Twelves were killed by their god, who spared a minority of humans and now watches over them. Just because you know the mechanics of your god, does this mean it’s less real? And what is truth but the collected memories of enough people to make it so? Your knowing the events from all those years ago doesn’t change the reality for you or anyone else.”

  “How can you be a god? You make it sound like we’re the ones in control, as though you’re helpless before our thoughts and beliefs.”

  Elovah wagged her finger. “Now, now, not so hasty. We—” She waved a hand indicating her and Josh. “—are in a mutual relationship. I never said you were our masters, just as we’re not yours. You have the strength of your faith, your belief, and we have the means to fulfill them.”

  “It’s a lie that you’re a god of wrath.”

  Elovah sat forward. “Oh, no. We can be anything. A god of wrath who smites the sinners? A god of mirth whose belly laughs the world into being? A distant, saturnine god who broods over the plight of humanity? Yes, yes, and yes.”

  “You’re amoral.”

  Elovah smiled, shrugged. “What is ‘good,’ really? Good for you in that moment? Good for your family? Good for the community? The world? For all time or right now?” She shook Josh’s head. “It’s up to you to make patterns where none existed before. We just help you apply them.”

  Josh’s legs trembled briefly. She walked carefully around the chair before dropping into it with an almost soundless groan.

  “The Twelves didn’t kill themselves with their wickedness,” she said slowly. “They killed themselves by expecting to die.” She paused, chewing it over. “Not just that. They wanted humanity to die.” She drew in a breath. “The Twelves killed themselves because of their wickedness.”

  Elovah nodded. “That’s how it usually works.”

  “But . . . who were they to decide for the entirety of humans?”

  “The believers,” Elovah said simply.

  “And you didn’t dictate our towns, our leaders, our ways of life. The Twelves did.”

  “At first,” Elovah corrected. “Now the weight of belief keeps you all spinning within your orbits.”

  Josh saw it, then. Everything she knew, from how to pray to how to reproduce, had been carefully engineered by her foremothers and fathers. They lived the careful, small, utopian lives a small group of humans had envisioned so long ago. Even the Bitoran, their holy book, the bearer of ultimate truth, had been designed as a tool of social control. Maybe not explicitly, but that had certainly been the effect.

  “And the Tithes?” she asked slowly. “Did you really make it part of your bargain that one person a year from each town be sacrificed to the desert?”

  “What do you think, Josh?” Elovah asked gently.

  “Why did they do it? Why kill their townspeople?”

  Elovah sat back in her chair and folded her hands over her stomach.

  “To instill fear in Elovah? No. The Bitoran, our prayers do that. To make us scared of deviating from the Twelves’ plan? I don’t know.”

  “For as long as humanity has existed, they have offered us sacrifices,” Elovah said. “Sometimes it’s animals, sometimes spare time, sometimes their freedom and health. Very occasionally, it is themselves, or the ones they love.”

  Josh dropped her head, but her eyes continued moving in their sockets. “If you make people give up their loved ones, they must remain committed or their sacrifice was for nothing. They have to keep believing.”

  Elovah remained silent.

  “Why the unworkables? Why would they . . . But the Bit’ says nothing about unworkables.” Josh raised her head and laughed. “We were right all along. The towns just wanted to get rid of their garbage. We’re the ones who think differently, whose bodies function differently, whose illness makes us unable to continue the Twelves’ utopia.” She continued giggling. Her fingers dug into the arms of the chair. “Oh, Avery, my friend. You courted the truth, and we rolled our eyes. Forgive me.” Her laughter smoothed into a genuine smile. “I bet Avery was one of the ones who demanded answers.” She glanced up, but Elovah offered her nothing.

  “What happens to us after we die?” Josh asked.

  Elovah shrugged. “You move on.”

  Josh waited, but the being before her made no more comment. “That wasn’t entirely helpful,” Josh pointed out.

  Elovah smiled. “You’re free from materiality. You have many options before you. We’ve found most humans don’t want options, not really. They want release. As you know, living on the material plane is so difficult. Everything is so . . . heavy. And loud. And sometimes quite smelly.”

  “Blue’s there,” Josh said in a low voice.

  Elovah nodded. “Isn’t that intriguing?” She tilted her head and her lips, obviously mystified. “It’s not the first time it happened, of course, but it’s still quite rare. The People, we don’t think like you. You think in blocks and colors and images and sounds. Everything has a beginning and end, including you. We’re not like that. We’re not discrete—” (There’s that word again!) “—beings the way you are, or at least the way you think of yourselves. The idea of separating from all and becoming boundaried and tangible just doesn’t occur to us most of the time.”

  “He said he thought I was . . . interesting.”

  Elovah nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, yes. We all find you fascinating. Maybe not with the fervor that Blue has developed.” She smiled. “But as he’s said, we don’t often encounter self-sacrifice. Blue has taken many Tithes. Living always on the edge, halfway with humans, he must have developed some humanlike tendencies. How else could he have thought himself into separation or even seen you beyond how you contribute to the whole?”

  “Can he come here?”

  “Where is ‘here’?” Elovah asked, gesturing around her and smiling.

  “I don’t know!” Josh blurted. “Deathville? Heaven? The hall of Josh’s dead brain? I have no idea.”

  “This is your doing, your place. You decide where to go from here. But I can offer you something you might enjoy. Would you like to take Blue’s place?”

  Josh gaped. “Huh?” she gasped, ever the master of eloquence.

  “Blue has become partly, maybe mostly, human. He has decided to stay there, bound to the four dimensions. You could become us. There’s so much more to the many realities. Your endless curiosity would encounter ways of existing that you can’t imagine, and I mean that literally. Your material brain cannot comprehend what we are, what else exists, and how it manifests. We live and learn and exist endlessly, Josh.”

  She sucked in her breath. Her insides quivered. To know more, always more. To think thoughts she couldn’t entertain now. Endless learning.

  And the thirty-eight others? What of them? Lynna? Garyn? Blue?

  “What about the other Tithes? Do they get this decision?”

  Elovah nodded. “Everyone does. Most don’t ask as many questions as you, and very few have their choices presented so baldly. But, yeah.”

  My sort-of god just said “yeah.”

  “How many accept it?”

  “Almost none.”

  None? She couldn’t fathom it.
An opportunity to know more, always more about the workings of the universe?

  But. “The other Tithes, they don’t deserve to die just so the other townspeople can continue believing in a system they didn’t create. It’s not right.”

  “Not right for whom? And I used ‘whom’ instead of ‘who’ to impress you with my godlike grammatical powers.” Elovah grinned. Josh didn’t think she’d ever seen her own eyes twinkle. Elovah made her far cuter.

  “If you can read my mind, why are we even talking?” Josh asked.

  Opposite her, Elovah shrugged. “Your place, your rules. I just came when called.”

  “Not right for the Tithes,” Josh continued. “Not right for all the unworkables. If this system functions, it shouldn’t be on the backs of those who are different.”

  “So what do you plan to do?”

  Josh took a deep breath and looked into her own brown eyes. “Go back,” she said.

  Elovah remained silent. Her eyes narrowed.

  Josh’s heart pounded in her chest. Or, to be more accurate, her metaphorical heart pounded in a chest she’d imagined into being.

  This situation gave her an imaginary headache.

  “Blue told me my words shape the foundation of living. Something like that. If our world rests on beliefs, then I’ll believe myself back. I have to help the Tithes. They deserve to know the truth.”

  “Do they?” Elovah asked quietly.

  “Of course.” But did she have the right to rip away their beliefs? If she decided their truths for them, she was no better than the Twelves. Which was more needful: truth or belief? Who was she to decide? Yet . . . She shook her head. “I don’t know. But they don’t deserve to die just because the towns decided to rid themselves of those they chose to represent difference.” The very thought made her jaw clench painfully.

  Elovah stared at her.

  Josh licked her lips, shifted a bit in the chair. “Can I leave?”

  Elovah shrugged.

  “Can . . . will you try to stop me? Keep me a prisoner here?”

  Elovah drew back, and her features scrunched into a portrait of disgust. “We make no one do anything. We’re not humans.”

  Josh opened her mouth, remembered Marcus, all the town leaders who had decided the fate of so many unworkables, the Twelves. She closed her mouth.

  “Okay. Um, how, exactly, do I do that?” Josh asked.

  Elovah smiled. “You’re a being of thought now. Think it.”

  Being of thought. Think it. Okay. Josh scrunched up her face and thought hard.

  Leaveleaveleaveleaveleaveleaveleave.

  She opened her eyes. Elovah-as-Josh stared at her with raised eyebrows.

  “It didn’t work,” Josh said.

  Elovah’s smile widened. “Remember, Josh, your thoughts and words shape your reality. Draw your boundaries wide, and you will flow outward.”

  “You sound like Blue,” Josh murmured.

  “Imagine that,” Elovah said. “Goodbye for now, Joshua Barstow. I look very forward to our next conversation.”

  Josh closed her eyes.

  “Oh, and thanks for calling me cute.”

  “See you around,” Josh said. She inhaled deeply.

  I want to return, but not just to wait for The People to collect their tithe. I want to free the Tithes, to give them the space to decide whether they want truth or belief. They deserve choice. And freedom.

  I am theirs. I belong to them, on their plane, whatever that means.

  But I must have the means to free them, to give them the power of choice.

  She felt the outlines of her being, then: A soft, pliable, Josh-shaped thing with a few too many hard angles to be entirely comfortable. A thing with ideas so big, so voracious, they called knowledge to it. A being with so much love she could see the outlines of thousands of humans inside herself.

  I can be bigger, do more, she thought, and gave her borders a little shove. She felt herself expand, then, into something slightly bigger, a little more herself than she’d known before.

  And the pain. She saw, now, how it threaded the fabric of her being. She could give it a tug, rid herself of the constant burning and aching. She could make herself an ordinary townsperson, no longer an unworkable. The possibilities, the future she’d allowed herself to imagine: all of this lay so easily within her grasp.

  “Your pain isn’t all of you, but it has helped you become stronger and more compassionate.”

  Blue had said that.

  And Elovah: “It’s such a part of you, you can’t imagine yourself without it.”

  She left the thread untouched.

  Twenty years old. Average height. Short, brown hair. Library caretaker. Friend and suitor. Unworkable. Incap. Leader. Tithe. Joshua Barstow, the woman with the wonky legs.

  Her.

  Joshua drew in a breath and opened her eyes.

  Chapter 14

  She sat on the floor beside the bed in Lynna’s room. To her right, the doorway gaped. Just outside, RJ sat, face gripped by shaking hands, weeping loudly. The wall perpendicular to the door, where Marcus had once stood, bore red-brown smears and streaks. Neither Marcus nor Blue remained.

  Josh wondered briefly at the time before realizing it was morning—just after seven, in fact. How easily this knowledge came to her when she understood how time wrapped itself around her body like a quilt.

  She pressed against the floor, preparing to climb painfully to her feet. RJ’s hands flew from her face, revealing wide, red-rimmed eyes. She jerked upright, gasped.

  “Josh,” RJ whispered. “Josh, you . . . There wasn’t anything there a minute ago, but then the air got heavy, like when the angels come.” RJ’s eyes remained wide and wet; her mouth began to tremble. “And now you’re here again.”

  Josh said nothing.

  “I’m so sorry,” RJ said, and tears feel like fat raindrops from her eyes. “I didn’t . . . Lynna . . . I just wanted—”

  Josh smiled, and the woman stopped speaking. “I know,” she said. “Go get Lynna, please. Take her to the Great Room. I’ll be there shortly.”

  RJ backed up. With painful slowness, Josh rose from the floor, sat briefly on the bed. After a minute, she stood and tackled the long walk to the Great Hall. The pain jabbed her feet. She imagined this was how scorpion stings might feel.

  She heard the voices roaring before she reached the end of the hallway. The air felt full and expectant. Did an angel come? But it wasn’t even nighttime! Was anyone missing? What should we do, Marcus?

  She shuffled her way into the Great Room. Voices halted in mid-sentence. Thirty pairs of eyes stared, thirty mouths emptied, thirty backs hunched inward, always toward the comfort of others. After a moment, someone gasped.

  “But the angel took you last night,” Juss warbled. It was the first time she’d ever heard him speak.

  Josh looked at all of them. Every one of them. She knew all their names, could see their pain and resignation etched into the lines around their eyes, the tilt of their brows. Her friends, her sisters and brothers in humanity.

  She considered telling them everything, relaying her experiences, rendering in as few words as possible what had occupied her all these hours. They deserved the truth of history. They deserved the truth of belief.

  Most of all, they deserved their freedom. She could decide later what to say to them.

  And besides, her legs hurt too much to dawdle.

  “No angel will ever come for you again,” she said.

  They gawked at her in silence. She wondered what she looked, or smelled, or sounded like to quiet this group.

  Her legs burned, her feet trembled under the burden of her weight. Josh smiled at them.

  She caught Bran’s eye. “Would you please get Blue from his bedroom?” she asked him.

  He leapt to his feet and shot out of the room.

  Josh scuffled to the front of the room. Toward Marcus, who sat before them. His face, sporting two black eyes, a broken nose, and swollen lips, looke
d as though he’d used it to rather forcefully greet the wall. He cradled his left arm against his chest and leaned over it as if in great pain.

  Josh reached Marcus and sat down beside him in one of the room’s armless chairs. Her feet seethed. “The background pain of being,” she marveled aloud. Looking out, she caught Netta’s eyes. The woman’s features were composed, but tears sprinkled her cheeks.