Regeneration

by Stacey Berg

  Lia’s—the Saint’s—sacrifice had been willing. Because of it, the Patri had forgiven Echo.

  She would never forgive herself.

  Gem knocked on the Patri’s door. There was conversation within, a brief delay. Then Echo was ushered in.

  A man, white haired and pale eyed, sat at the desk, surrounded as always by the stacks of prints passed down by the forebears. His thin fingers laced together as he leaned forward in the big chair. Behind him, a hunter stood guard, framed against the window. In her shock, Echo barely noticed her, though there had never been guards before.

  “Jozef!” she exclaimed, finding the name in memory. He had been a laboratory priest, one of those who worked in the underground rooms where hunters were made, and sometimes a Saint. She saw again his hands directing delicate instruments that poked and prodded the treasure beneath the magnifier, processing Ela’s eggs after Echo murdered her in the desert. His duty, as she had had hers. She was wrong to hold it against him.

  He studied her, humorless and dour as she remembered. “You will call me Patri now. Vanyi named me before he died.”

  It was the first time in her life she had heard the Patri’s given name. For that man, other than the Saint the center of the Church, and therefore of the world, any name beyond the title would have been superfluous. “Yes, Patri,” she said to the priest who sat in his chair. Her voice came out thin, squeezed by the swelling in her throat. “My service to the Church in all things.” She focused on a point beyond his shoulder, where the window provided a glimpse of the sanctuary. “I must make my report to you.”

  “Make it brief. I have urgent matters to attend to.”

  She clenched her jaw to keep her mouth from hanging open. More urgent than her return with a stranger? In the desert she had rehearsed this moment over and over, only with the Patri she knew. With this man, who sat tapping his thumbs together in an impatient rhythm, she scarcely knew where to begin. “There is another city! What the Patri always hoped for—we are not alone. There are not many cityens, but they have much natural wealth. Their technology is in some ways better preserved than ours; they grow a large variety of trees and crops . . . and they have saved seed, from before the Fall, including for their own line.” It was the superficial report of a juvenile, but he had instructed her to be brief. She said again stupidly, “There is another city! What we have dreamed of for so long—we have found it at last.”

  “That was Vanyi’s dream. I am Patri now. Believe me, I find enough trouble in this city without searching elsewhere for more.”

  Such an answer made no sense. Perhaps he was testing her. She took a deep breath. “Then I regret one more piece of news I bring: I may have been followed, by men of ill intent towards me if not the Church. I took precautions, but you must turn the homing beacon off, in case they were able to overcome them.”

  Jozef showed his teeth in the grimace that passed for his smile. “I am aware of the circumstances. The woman Khyn was forthcoming with the hunters. They have prepared.”

  Khyn’s description of the vektere would be all the warning the hunters needed. Nonetheless Echo said, “They have energy weapons, more advanced than ours. They are neither as strong nor as well trained as hunters, but in sufficient numbers, with such weapons—”

  She broke off as the hunter by the window stepped forward. Nyree, one of the 365s. Beyond reproach, that batch; strong and focused and unquestioningly confident of their own competence. Nyree stood with her arms crossed, weight balanced lightly on her toes, seeming to look down on Echo, though there could be no real difference in their heights. “Yes. And you may have led them to our doorstep.”

  Echo straightened her shoulders. “The risk was justified. Patri, I have additional information to report. It pertains to the—” She broke off. She could not say it aloud, not in front of Nyree. If the hunters found out—let alone the cityens—the shock would rattle the Church. “I beg you, Patri, might I speak with you privately?”

  Nyree frowned. “I advise against, Patri. Until we are sure of her state of mind, we should not leave her alone with you. And what would a returning hunter report that is unsuitable for others to hear?”

  Sensible precaution, from a hunter’s point of view. Echo had no time for it. “My mind is perfectly clear. As for my report—it is for the Patri to determine who should hear.”

  Jozef looked at her a moment, then nodded. Scowling, Nyree walked around the desk. “I will be just outside.”

  “Well?” Jozef prompted, pale eyes regarding her with mild curiosity.

  “The Preservers—certain of their leaders at least—they enter a kind of link to their systems. Like the Saint’s to the Church. And Patri”—she wet her lips and continued—“they can leave it as well.”

  He tapped his thumbs together. “What is that to us?”

  She blinked. The Patri—the old Patri—would have understood instantly. “They do this to ease the strain on those who control their systems. The woman I brought is familiar with the process. I thought perhaps . . . the burden on the Saint, controlling the whole Church, the whole city, alone . . . The Preservers could help us learn how to . . .” Her voice ran dry.

  “Priest Dalto is questioning the woman now. If there is evidence of anything immediately useful he will inform me.” She was wrong; he was not entirely without humor. She saw a flash of it now, sharp and bitter, in the curl of his lip. “When I was a priest, I might have indulged myself. As it is, however, I have more pressing duties. The city’s problems do not solve themselves. This stranger only complicates things.” He reached for one of the prints. “If you will excuse me.”

  “My service to the Church in all things, Patri,” she said after a moment; but he was already engrossed in the print and made no reply.

  Echo stood beside Gem in the yard. Nothing had changed—the hunters still drilled, the nuns still nursed their young—but everything seemed out of focus, as if she saw it through a broken lens. There is another city. The world might as well start turning the other direction. How could Jozef not care? She glanced back over her shoulder.

  “Why did the Patri choose him?”

  Gem shrugged. “The hunters were not consulted.”

  “Of course not, but . . .” She stopped herself there. The question itself was close to blasphemy; that Gem did not reprimand her for it was no credit to the younger hunter. It did no good to compound both their errors. The sanctuary, there across the yard, called to her. The Saint would know the answer, if Echo could ask. But that also was perilous ground.

  Following her gaze, Gem frowned, the tiny line appearing again between her eyes. And then to Echo’s surprise she said, “We have a few minutes to spare. I was not expecting your interview with the Patri to be so brief.”

  The priests monitoring the panels glanced up at Echo’s entrance, then returned to their work. Her presence or absence was nothing to them. Their boards hummed quietly; lights flashed in patterns unreadable to a hunter, the only reflection of whatever passed for thought in the Saint’s mind as her awareness spun out across the city. The Patri—the old Patri—had said that even he could not understand all the patterns said. Echo made her way past the tangle of wires and machinery to the altar. She forced herself to look. What she saw made her legs tremble, as always. She knelt, the stone cold beneath her knees.

  Lia lay as still as death, her arms crossed over a metallic blanket, the crown of wires glittering on her brow. Echo had placed it there, with her own hands. She would as soon have cut them off. But Lia, far braver, had accepted her duty, almost gladly, for her sacrifice had saved the city. The old Saint had been weak, dying, her body beneath the shroud withered, flesh sunken against the bone as the city consumed her, though she had been young and strong only a few annuals before. Echo dreaded the day she must see that happen to Lia. Yet it had not: the shining cloth lay lightly over the still-smooth curve of her breast, and her lips, parted slightly as in sleep, were full and soft. Echo put a fingertip to her own lips, remembering
. Though Lia’s eyes were closed, she looked as if she might waken any moment, rise and put off the crown with the smile that had made Echo’s heart beat fast long before she knew why.

  She had sat here too, hours on end, in the first days after Lia’s ascension, only dimly aware that around her the Church pulsed with the new Saint’s power. Erratic systems functioned smoothly for the first time in annuals; others that had failed came back online. Meanwhile the cityens, shocked back to sense by the violence that had nearly engulfed them, turned their energies to rebuilding what the rebellion had shattered, and more. Echo hadn’t cared about any of it. She only sat, rent by grief, wrapped in the emptiness that was all she had left.

  Then, in that silence, she had heard it. Not words as men spoke, but a voice nonetheless, a presence inside her mind, twinning with her heartbeat. It whispered to her in Lia’s voice, and told her she was not alone. It had been enough to let her live.

  And then it had faded.

  Echo made herself breathe through the pain, as she did each time she came here. It never went away, but one day it might wane, she hoped, like the other old wounds that could mostly be ignored, only recalled when an ill-advised movement or the weather brought on the ache again. One day she might kneel here and see only the Saint, and not Lia.

  She did not think so.

  Already she knew the wrongness of the hopes kindled in the Preserve. They had been borne of distance and weakness, and a kind of forgetting. Now that Echo knelt again in the sanctuary, the vaulted ceilings arching high above, the vast and echoing space suggesting something much greater than mere men could conceive, she remembered why Lia had chosen as she had. Why there was no gainsaying that choice.

  But what if there had been another way?

  What if there still was?

  Lia . . .

  And then the Saint moved.

  At first Echo thought it was the wateriness of her vision. She wiped her eyes, angry. She would not dishonor Lia by looking away. Then she saw it again: the faint twitch of a hand, a spasm of curled fingers, as someone dreaming of falling over a cliff might grasp for an invisible rope.

  Echo rose to warn the priests, but there was no need. A high-pitched beeping interrupted the steady hum of their machines, and the pattern of the panel lights changed, yellows and a bit of red flashing in rapid sequence. “What is the matter?” she asked, staring at the screens without comprehension.

  “Power fluctuation,” a priest said, fingers stabbing at buttons. The beeping continued. Another priest called out from his station, something about a circuit, and the rest sprang into action, hands jabbing at switches and dials. Echo felt a surge of fighting hormones as her body reacted to the danger, but there was nothing here that she could face. Her fists clenched uselessly at her sides.

  “Help her,” she demanded.

  Ignoring her, the priest studied his panel narrow-eyed. “Stepan, control the outputs. Three clicks. Better. Two more . . . Good. And look: that switched the beacon off. Finally.” The exchange of orders and reports went on another moment, then the beeping changed to a lower tone, slowing. Echo glanced back at the altar. The Saint lay still.

  “What happened?”

  The priest wiped his face on his sleeve. “Something disturbed the systems. It happens, we don’t know . . .” His voice trailed off into worried silence as he focused again on his screen. Echo dared not return to the altar. Instead, heart still pounding, she rejoined Gem in the yard.

  “Is something amiss?” Gem asked.

  When the old Saint was failing the Patri—Vanyi—had forbidden the least hint of discussion, keeping the secret from all but a few. Echo did not know what rules Jozef had imposed. But this was Gem, who had seen the old Saint die, and Lia ascend. “There was an alarm,” Echo said. “Something about outputs. And then the beacon turned off.”

  Gem glanced at the spire, saying nothing, but the line was back between her brows.

  The stewards in the Preserve knew how to balance their systems. “I want to see Khyn.”

  “We all do. She is still with the priests, however.”

  That was a good sign, Echo told herself. Jozef might be preoccupied with other matters, but the priests would pursue their questioning until they learned everything they could about the workings of the Preserve. That would mean understanding how the stewards controlled the systems. Khyn would be eager to provide the information in exchange for the help she sought for her people. But she would be frightened as well, alone among strangers in a place stranger than she could imagine. It would reassure her to see Echo’s familiar face. Echo took a step towards the priests’ domicile.

  Gem said, “You must report to the hunters first. Come.” After a moment’s hesitation, Echo followed.

  Another surprise awaited at the refectory. Priests sat together off to one side, and hunters in their usual corner, while the nuns occupied the long center tables as always. A group of very young hunters ate with them, probably being taught table customs, but it was not the juveniles who caught Echo’s eye. Instead, it was what she had never expected to see: cityens mixed among the nuns, women and a few men conspicuous in their city garb. The conversation was even louder than she remembered, punctuated by laughter and some small amount of argument. A pair of older hunters stood nearby, not eating but watching, their postures attentive but not particularly concerned.

  “We permit them entry for morning meal,” Gem said, following her glance. “A compromise after the last tithe. The Patri saw no reason to keep the new nuns from their families, if they choose to see them. Also, the cityens insisted.”

  So simple a change. Yet the tithe had been the focus of the cityens’ unrest, anger at the Church for taking their daughters triggering the broader rebellion that had briefly, and nearly catastrophically, pitted hunters against the cityens they were made to protect. Echo remembered the boy Loro’s rage over the sister he had lost annuals ago. What if he had been allowed to visit her, see the care and attention lavished on the girls who would bear the next generation of hunters and priests? “Which Patri?” she asked Gem.

  “There is only one. Come, take a plate.”

  The choices seemed narrow after the bounty of the Preservers’ glasshouse. Echo took grains, and the greens she favored. She wondered what Khyn thought of the food.

  The hunters at their table tracked her progress as she approached. Among them sat Brit Hunter 364, Indine, a 362, and Ava, a batchmate of Gem’s. She slid aside as Echo pulled up a stool, and no wonder: that batch had seen its share of losses, and many of them could be laid to Echo’s account, one way or another. “Gem has asked for my report.”

  A flicker of glances. Indine said, “Nyree will wish to hear it as well.”

  Brit’s expression was bland. “Nyree is not present. And the Patri has not forbidden us to know.” Her words relayed only the fact, and her tone suggested nothing beyond. Yet Echo imagined that she heard something else. Us, she thought. A group of hunters thinking of themselves as us.

  Gem said, “You were gone a long time, Echo; be succinct.”

  “I know how to compose a report, Gem Hunter 378. I trained you when you were young.” Saints, she sounded like Tana. Suddenly the few annuals between her and Gem felt like a hundred. “Nonetheless your advice is sound.” It was, as well, difficult to follow, with all that had happened at the Preserve and after; she omitted much that would only be of interest to the priests, and concentrated on what the hunters would need to know to defend the city should it come to that. They listened intently, only interrupting to clarify a detail now and then. The chatter from the nuns’ table rose and fell; she kept her voice beneath it, cautious habit. “If the vektere find the aircar,” she concluded, “they should assume we died in the wreck. I covered our trail from there.”

  “A hunter would not assume,” Brit said.

  “No,” Echo admitted. She thought of the men she had overcome in the dispensary, and Taavi. “But they are not hunters, by nature or training. They are closer to city
ens, if cityens were more like one another.”

  “The cityens are less alike than ever,” Gem said. “They are still angry at each other. Especially at the Ward. It has taken some effort to keep the peace.”

  “We underestimated them,” Ava said, perhaps thinking of the mob that had nearly trapped her in the city at the start of the rebellion.

  “But we defeated them in the end,” Indine said. “It was not so difficult.”

  Echo could not keep the sharpness from her tone. “Only because of the new Saint. Without her who knows what might have happened?”

  Indine shrugged. “That is a matter for the Patri.”

  “What is, Indine?” asked a voice from a few steps away. Nyree. Echo wondered who was guarding Jozef now, or if Nyree had only been there because of Echo.

  “We were discussing the Saint,” Brit said. Her tone was pleasant enough, but though Nyree stood with a plate in one hand and a beverage in the other, she did not slide over to make room at the table.

  “I’m glad to hear that you know what matters are best left to the Patri.”

  Brit said, “We all know a hunter’s place, Nyree.”

  Nyree looked at Echo. “Some of us might not.”

  Echo rose abruptly. “Take my seat. I’m finished.”

  “I have not heard your report.”

  “You heard what I told the Patri. I have given the details to the others here; if you have additional questions after consulting with them, I will be happy to answer.”

  Nyree’s expression tightened. “Be available in case I send for you.”

  Echo felt a surge of annoyance, beyond what the words deserved. “The Patri did not inform me that I am under your orders.”

  “He has delegated matters concerning the hunters to me.” Nyree stared at Echo a moment more, then took a place farther along the table.

  “We have always reported directly to the Patri,” Echo said, trying to keep the dismay from her tone.