Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  Clover had no doubt he was being watched. Likely there was at least one gun pointed his way at this very moment. He raised his arms, palms facing outward, and approached the building at a measured pace.

  “I surrender,” he shouted, over and over again, as he came to stand within a few paces of the doors. He sensed movement somewhere on the other side, scrapes and whispers, strangers determining whether he should live or die. The outcome was in God’s hands now. Clover bowed his head.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Clover turned to find his brother emerging from the woods at the edge of the road. Clive’s face was covered in blood, his hair matted, his eyes wild. He led Irene in front of him, the gun pressed up against the back of her head. Her arms were bound behind her, and a piece of cloth had been tied across her mouth.

  “I knew you hated me,” Clive said. “I had no idea you hated the whole Descendancy.”

  “How’d you get up here?”

  “Paz led me.”

  “Paz?”

  “This bitch here. And it’s a damn good thing she did, or I wouldn’t have been able to stop whatever it is you’re doing. Now walk straight over to me, no hesitating, or I swear to God I’ll shoot her.”

  Clover allowed himself one last long look at the girl he’d thought he would marry. Had anything they’d shared been real? Was it possible to manufacture affection so convincingly? He would’ve given the world to know the truth. But he had a mission, and it was more important than whatever he’d had with her, more important even than his love for his brother, which remained in spite of everything.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, to both of them at once, “but I can’t go with you.” He turned back toward the doors just as they opened—two eight-foot slabs of solid granite swinging soundlessly on invisible hinges.

  But before he could take a step, there was a loud crack, and a fiery red flower of pain exploded in his shoulder. He fell forward, stumbling through the opening, and immediately the doors shut behind him. He could feel the blood running torrentially down his back, and the pain crested like a wave and crashed down on him.

  Paz, he thought, as his consciousness slipped away. Her name is Paz.

  Epilogue

  Five Months Earlier

  THE DOOR SHUT BEHIND HER—whoosh—and for a moment, Zeno knew perfect peace. Light. Warmth. The sense of homecoming she always felt in the greenhouse, as if its inhabitants had gone silent in honor of her arrival, gifting her this respite from the din of the outside world. Zeno loved the quietude of plants—both in how it contrasted with the constant clamor produced by people, and in how it was really just an elaborate subterfuge; all it would require was a means of amplification to transform that seeming tranquility into cacophony. Roots could drill through solid granite. Sap flowed oceanic behind the bark. Vines spun blind, inexorable circles in search of prey, which was then enwrapped boa-constrictor tight. Plants were like a brilliant mind, in a way: calm on the surface, tempestuous underneath.

  Some of Sophia’s scholars were censorious of the many hours Zeno spent in the greenhouse. They believed her to be shirking her duties, or at the very least, squandering her talents. To them, the hard work of cultivation, the seeding and pruning, the weeding and the fertilizing, was mindless drudgery. They didn’t understand that Zeno’s mind was sharpest here. Her thoughts expanded in the humid, molten air, as if her neurons had become free-floating particles of oxygen and carbon, and she could watch the silky dendrites transmitting ideas from place to place, forming connections between distant and disparate nodes.

  Throughout history, there had been people believed capable of seeing the future. They were known by many names. Soothsayers. Fortune-tellers. Shamans. Witches. All hokum, of course, and yet at the heart of the matter was the little-understood phenomenon known as intuition. And what was intuition but the ability to read the subtle signs of the universe—not any sort of spiritual symbology, of course, but the material, objective manifestations? You could not see the future, but you could infer it, in much the same way as the first generation of men had been able to make predictions about the weather, even down to the very hour.

  The key was to array the facts before you and contemplate them. You couldn’t chase epiphany the way a hunter chased a buck. You had to let the revelation come to you, like an old man scattering bread crumbs for the birds.

  Zeno gazed upon the bonsai tree. Juniperus procumbens—the dwarf Japanese garden juniper. She had inherited it from Duncan Leibowitz himself; between the two of them, the plant had now been trained for over thirty-five years. Its trunk was the off-white color of driftwood, gnarled and streaked, indistinguishable from the source tree in every aspect but size. The upper branches were of a more traditional dark brown, and it was from these that the leaves grew. This particular variety of juniper had needles when it was young, but as it aged, those needles gave way to overlapping scales.

  Just like me, Zeno thought. Prickly when young and scaly when old.

  It wasn’t a bitter notion; she’d enjoyed the process of aging. The diminution of one’s physical beauty was more than offset by the excuse it gave one to be bad-tempered.

  Though Zeno’s favorite activity in the greenhouse was pruning the bonsai, it didn’t need attention of that sort today, so she allowed herself merely to gaze on it. Slowly but surely, the tumult in her mind calmed, and she found herself looking down upon the chessboard of the future.

  Things would have been so much simpler if Sophia’s town guard had succeeded in wiping out the ministry. Zeno’s informants had long since apprised her of the bellicose aims of Grand Marshal Chang, and of his increasing popularity within the Anchor. She’d hoped to avoid direct confrontation for at least another decade, but now that Chang had his excuse, soldiers would be at her doorstep in a matter of months. At the moment, if the Descendancy chose to mobilize all of its available resources, it would easily overrun Sophia. But Zeno felt confident that the Protectorate force would be relatively meager; the deaths of a minister and his family were tragic, certainly, but not quite tragic enough to turn a whole country of pacifists into warmongers overnight. The Grand Marshal would need more blood on the ground before the people of the Anchor would let go of their noble but doomed ideal. In other words, the incoming force would triumph even in defeat.

  Of course, that was only the Protectorate’s plan. The Archbishop and his toady the Epistem (or was it the other way around?) would certainly have their own pieces on the board, and those were the pieces Zeno feared. The true capability of the Library remained the most dangerous unknown clouding her vision. Leibowitz had managed to steal only a few hundred volumes when he defected, leaving behind many thousands more. If the Archbishop’s hand was forced, and the ban on anathema was lifted, who could say what powers the Descendancy might bring to bear?

  And then there was the girl, Paz, who’d apparently managed to ingratiate herself with the Honor’s children. If things had gone well for her, she would be at the Anchor now, gleaning what information she could. While it was possible she might return with something useful, Zeno wasn’t counting on it. Far more likely that the girl would be discovered, tortured for information, and killed. It was a good thing she knew next to nothing of importance about the goings-on inside the academy, though it would make her death all the slower.

  Zeno had been accused of having no conscience, but that accusation was only half-true. She cared little for any particular human, but she cared deeply about humanity. And the best thing she could do for humanity was to protect Sophia until the day it could take its rightful place as the heart of a new civilization—a day that was fast approaching.

  She stood up, leaving the bonsai tree and wandering into her vegetable garden. A single light brown mushroom was growing at the base of the tomato plants. It was known as a haymaker—Panaeolina foenisecii. She dug out its slender stalk and turned it over in her palm. Beautiful organisms, mushrooms. Their bad reputation sprang from the fact that they were parasites, but w
hat wasn’t? Every creature on the planet was a freeloader, sustained by the ever-generous sun, and most weren’t even half as lovely as this mushroom, with its baby-soft skin and delicate tan gills.

  Maybe that was the best thing about a garden—the way it grew metaphors. The mushroom reminded Zeno how many things grew in the dark crevices of the world, weeds that could choke the life out of the healthiest tree, if left unimpeded.

  The Church would cultivate its own haymaker in the shadows. But how would this parasite manifest? Cunningly, no doubt. As much as Zeno despised the Descendancy, she knew it was run by intelligent men. But only men, of course. Such a common mistake, failing to see the value in the feminine.

  The bell rang, signaling a shift to the second class of the day. Zeno had students to teach, but they would forgive her for being a few minutes late. There was one last thing she needed to do—not a practical matter, but an emotional one.

  Down one set of stairs, along the northern side of the building, through two unlocked doors and then a locked one, secured with an ingenious coded device built specially by Sister Balewa. Zeno entered the password—aliger—and felt the satisfying click as the tumblers lined up and the bolt slid loose.

  The room on the other side was known as St. Nick’s, from the old myth about the toymaker who brought gifts to children once a year. Though there were at least twenty-five projects in some state of development scattered across the enormous work floor, only one was of interest to Zeno at the moment.

  It was by far the largest object in the room, twenty feet from end to end and twice that across. Covered by a thick canvas blanket, it looked a bit like a giant who’d fallen asleep with his arms outstretched. Zeno grabbed a corner of the canvas and walked backward, pulling it away with a long, steady hiss, until the great secret was revealed.

  The future was a dark forest, full of evils crouching in the shadows. But Zeno had faith in her mission, in what they were trying to build here in Sophia. Someday soon, the Descendancy’s reign of ignorance and superstition would end, and the people would at last be free. That many of them believed themselves to be free already was simply an error of perspective. True freedom was the right to study what you wanted, when you wanted, in whatever manner you wanted. It was the right to a future that was better than the present. It was the right to fly a kite.

  There weren’t many things that made Zeno cry, but as she looked upon that magnificent machine, the precocious offspring of her imagination, she felt the tears rise to her eyes. She stepped forward and touched the cool skin of the wing. The contact thrilled her, filled her with confidence and hope. They would not lose. They could not lose.

  “Hello, my child,” she said, her voice low, as if she were in the presence of something holy. “I can’t wait to watch you soar.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TOMMY WALLACH is a Brooklyn-based novelist and musician. He is the author of Thanks for the Trouble and the New York Times bestselling We All Looked Up, which has been translated into a dozen languages. His fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Wired, Salon, and other magazines. As a musician, he has put out an EP with Decca Records as well as two independent releases, including We All Looked Up: The Album, a companion record to his first novel. He is a recent MacDowell Fellow, and a finalist for the Children’s Choice Book Award. Grok more at TommyWallach.com.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Tommy Wallach

  Jacket photography copyright © 2017 by Thinkstock.com

  Jacket photo retouching by We Monsters

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wallach, Tommy, author.

  Title: Strange fire / Tommy Wallach.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2017]. | Series: The Anchor and Sophia ; 1 | Summary: Clive and Clover Hamill, sons of a well-respected Descendant minister, discover a community intent on rediscovering the blasphemous technologies of the past, setting into motion a holy war that will endanger their relationship and humanity itself.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017002649| ISBN 9781481468381 (hardback) |

  ISBN 9781481468404 (eBook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Clergy—Fiction. | Brothers—Fiction. |

  Technology—Fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.W158855 Str 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002649