Kids who Shrived Mortal were shunned, viewed as a corrupting influence – which was usually enough to encourage Mortal kids to get their acts together and shift back towards more Liminal behavior.
“Does the result normally take this long for you?” Dare’s voice was hushed with terror.
“They’ve got a lot to think over,” I said, feeling sick.
Two more statuses hovered to the left of Mortal: Criminal, depicted by a bent-backed stick figure, and the Terminal tombstone. Terminal, it was rumored, glowed fire-alarm red if you ever managed to piss off the dead that badly… But I’d never known anyone who had.
Criminal, on the other hand, meant you’d done something the dead couldn’t forgive: a planned suicide, murder, programming. That knowledge couldn’t be used to arrest you – some old statute said you couldn’t be forced to testify against yourself – but the LifeGuard would be notified, and they’d come sniffing around to dig up evidence on whatever it was you’d done.
I wasn’t going to Shrive Criminal over a pony, was I?
Venal’s silver light flickered, like a roulette wheel spinning to a stop, then finally glowed steady. I let loose a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“Now I’m only mostly screwed.” I thumbed the button to send my Shrive results to Dr Greywoode.
“Sorry, man,” Dare said. “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t get away with my crime either.”
But you just get yelled at, I thought, uncharitably. “What happened?”
“Peaches, that’s what happened. She saw the charge on our bank account, and told Mom.”
“Like Peaches is a saint!” I protested. “I don’t know why you don’t rat her out. She goes to more Blackout Parties than you do…”
“She looks better,” he sighed. “You’ve never seen her when she’s in business mode, all work clothes and innocence. You only see her in her clubbing gear. And you know, maybe you watch her a little too hard.”
I flinched. Peaches was insanely hot. And fun to talk to. And fun to dance with.
She never danced with me alone – Peaches played the field, holding impromptu contests to see what boy won the right to buy her a drink – but we’d had a couple of late-night talks up on rooftops, where she’d hugged her knees and talked about how she was just playing along with her family until they trusted her with the money. Then she was going to create a place for living rebels like us, a safe haven where we could live and dance.
I’d told her that was a beautiful dream.
She’d kissed me.
Dare would kill me if he knew. Peaches and Dare had such a rivalry that talking to one of them was like crossing a picket line, even though they always went to the same parties and Peaches always dropped by the orphanage to check in on him, and Dare stopped by the Mortuaries to check in on her. They cared about each other – but in the Khan-Tien family tradition, they mostly showed that love by constantly whittling each other down.
None of that stopped me from thinking about how sweet Peaches’ kiss had been.
It wasn’t a crush, OK? Peaches kissed everyone. For her, a liplock was like a moister handshake. Some thought she was callous.
I knew better. Peaches had survived the Bubbler back when it was still considered a death sentence… so when Izzy had come down with it, Peaches had spent hours by Izzy’s side, lifting up her long black hair to show Izzy her own scars. Reassuring her there was life after the plague.
“Any news on Therapy?” I asked, changing the subject. “Did you find her?”
“I had Omar and Cerise scanning Central Farm’s feeds last night. Nothing. Face it, Chai: you set free a Sleipnir-class pony – that’s money on the hoof. Someone’s snagged her by now.”
I thought about Therapy in the hands of some mean-spirited farmer. I’d have let Therapy run unmodified, but her new owner would install an autobridle in Therapy’s head to induce seizures whenever she got too frisky.
“I’m not giving up hope, Dare, I’m… Why are you sniffing like that?”
“Do you smell smoke?”
That’s when the fire alarms went off. And the screaming started.
8: THE WICKLIFFE FOOD STORAGE FACILITY, COMPLETE WITH PSYCHO
* * *
“Why aren’t the fire sprinklers working?” Dare frowned at the ceiling, then squinted at the choked dribbles of water falling through the darkening smoke. The paint packets I’d put inside must have done a number on the sprinklers – and though Beldon had ordered them repaired, the living technicians hadn’t doublechecked their work.
Dare flung open the door to the hallway. Some of the sprinklers were working as advertised, but probably three out of five were still gunked up.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Living technicians were overworked and undermotivated to fix problems that affected the living. Beldon’d had every kid in the orphanage scrubbing the paint-spattered cameras clean because that affected his dead ass. But a malfunctioning fire sprinkler system? He hadn’t held a fire drill in years.
The dead didn’t have the physical resources to maintain the living’s safety, and the living all wanted to die. The combination made for sketchy repair work.
Dare’s eyes went wide. “Amichai, if the school burns down because your prank gummed up the sprinklers – that can’t be good for your Shrive–”
“I didn’t know there’d be a fire!” But I wondered: had Gumdrool set me up? It sounded too paranoid to say out loud, but–
More screaming from the pantry. A girl’s voice. She shrieked defiance, though she sounded furious and scared – yet so vital and alive she lit up the halls of the orphanage.
If the technicians who’d fixed the sprinklers had cared half as much about whatever this girl was yelling about, this school would be fireproofed.
The Junior LifeGuard members ignored the shouts as they jogged down the hallway, opening each door with skeleton passkeys. Each room revealed young kids sprawled on their beds, eyes shut and tongues lolling out, seemingly overcome by smoke – even though the dark smoke, barely worse than what you’d get from a pan of burnt sausages, was up drifting by the ceiling.
“Come on,” said the LifeGuard, not unkindly, grabbing the kids by their ears. The kids rose to their feet, embarrassed by how easily their suicide attempt had been seen through. “Now we all hope to burn to death, but the fire’s broken out all the way back in the pantry. It won’t get fatal here for another five minutes. Now get outside to safety, or get voided.”
Shamed and shepherded, my fellow orphans trudged towards the exit. The girl screamed louder.
“That poor woman,” I said. You couldn’t make out what she was bellowing, not through the murmured hustle of the evacuation, but… there was a lust for life in that cry I hadn’t heard in, well, ever. People had howled in pain during the plagues, but it had been a resigned frustration that their stupid body was still functioning.
This girl may have been burning to death, but she was fighting for what was left of her life with such passion that I needed to see her. “She sounds livid…”
Dare grabbed my shirt and hauled me backwards. I hadn’t realized I’d turned to face the girl’s voice.
“She’s burning to death,” he said. “Good for her! But right now, if the school burns down and you die in some stupid rescue attempt, you think the dead will overlook your property damage? You can’t get voided now. You gotta give yourself time to get back into favor, do good work until you Shrive Liminal – if you die right after an orphanage fire you contributed to, you’ll get voided for sure. Think, man.”
The hallways were crowding up as people filed out, checking their earputers for news updates. The smoke burned my eyes as the air grew hotter. Everyone was coughing.
“She sounds like she’s in a lot of pain.”
“She won’t remember that part!” Dare snapped. “You never remember your own death! Pain doesn’t matter!”
Except he’d never watched his own parents die, or been old enough to rememb
er when his sister got the plague. That pain had seemed significant to me. “Aren’t we supposed to help each other?”
“We’re supposed to help each other to the Upterlife.” He said it softly, with strained embarrassment, like he was telling me I couldn’t wear diapers to school anymore.
Her voice shrieked over the crowd’s murmurs: “…JESUS!”
“If she was into it, I’d let her burn. She’s not.” I slipped out of Dare’s grip, struggling upstream through the exiting crowd. I held my breath as I dashed through clouds of soot, navigating by memory–
And entered the pantry, which had no fire in it whatsoever.
Wickliffe’s pantry had been an auditorium back before the “Live Local, Die Global” initiatives. Now, come summer’s end, we were expected to spend our days harvesting food from Central Farm’s crops. We’d gather in the pantry to dry, pickle, salt, and can enough food to last us through winter.
A handful of parents had complained we spent more time canning than learning. But what did we need to learn? Reading, writing, maybe a trade or two. No math or science; the dead had that handled.
Come mid-June, the pantry was mostly empty – as usual, the students had done a halfassed job putting things away, the auditorium stairs filled with cracked jars and bags of old potatoes.
But down on stage, next to the sinks and chopping trays, was a stocky red-haired girl surrounded by Gumdrool’s thuglets.
“STOP TELLING ME THEY’VE GONE TO JESUS!” the girl yelled. “They’re not in His arms! Do you think you can change my mind?”
She was backed up against a castiron wood stove, a carving knife in her hand. She shifted stances as three uniformed boys worked out which way to come at her through the piles of heaped onions. She moved effortlessly to meet their attack, like a warrior-maiden from a fantasy show.
She was the most beautiful living girl I’d ever seen.
The remains of one of the Time-Out Chamber’s restraint jackets dangled around her waist; underneath, her traditional white woolen robe was torn down to expose her freckled shoulders in a way that made me blush. Her body was beautiful, her movements were graceful, and it was probably a bad idea to be smitten by a girl so willing to stab people.
“We didn’t say they went to Jeeza,” Gumdrool’s thugs leered. “We said your parents were wormfood! Brains rotting! Bodies slack! And now you have to live here. It’s the law!”
“In an institution designed to alter my behavior? You will put no yoke of iron upon me. You might cut open my parents’ brains, but I will not give way before the wicked!”
She weaved the knife in a careful figure-eight pattern – and that’s when I noticed the cross tattooed at the hollow of her throat.
A NeoChristian.
Great. Beautiful and crazy. Always my weak spot.
“Depart from me, workers of lawlessness.” She brought her voice under control; her hand trembled only a little. “Or else I’ll be forced to condemn you to Hell.”
The thuglets smiled. This is what they’d been hoping for. They geared up to rush her, happy to have an excuse to fall upon the knife.
Could this girl be that naïve, to not know death was what we all wanted?
“No,” I said loudly, taking a step forward. “She won’t kill you…”
Her green eyes held disbelief. “I will,” she insisted. “I do not fear death; I will live, even as I die.” Her free hand drifted up to touch her cross tattoo.
“Look at her grip,” I snorted. “No, what’s going to happen is that she’s going to stab someone in the gut inexpertly. Who wants a colostomy bag? Who wants a lifetime working with my sister down at the chip reclamation plant?”
Gumdrool’s boys backed away. They were maybe thirteen years old tops, for which I was grateful – more experienced recruits might have noticed how carefully she tracked their movements. The NeoChristians believed in God and good combat training; she could have slaughtered us all without breaking a sweat.
Still, murdering someone got you a Shriveless jail cell for life. Not that NeoChristians cared about Shrives, of course, but this girl deserved something better than life in prison.
One thug eyed me sullenly. “We’re tasked to bring her back to processing.”
I looked at the stacks of cans. “And clearly, by ‘processing,’ you thought ‘food processing.’ Were you planning on pickling her?”
“She escaped.” He sneered at me. “Aren’t you on trial, Damrosch?”
“I smuggled a pony into a hospital. This proves my skill at moving recalcitrant beauties. Clear out, kiddies, I’ll take the heat.”
“If you don’t get her to the processing center, we’ll tell Gumdrool. This is on you.” They skedaddled up the aisles, grateful not to have to deal with a lunatic skybeard-worshipper.
I sat on a counter, well out of her reach. She lowered her knife with an effort; they’d goaded her hard. I realized how much she’d wanted to stab someone.
“I take it you set the fire?” I asked.
“A trash bin outside the door.” She smirked in satisfaction as she picked up a burlap sack. “Sends up gouts of smoke, sends people running, fogs the cameras. A good distraction when surrounded by computer programs.”
I was relieved; she wasn’t a killer. Otherwise she’d have set the place ablaze.
“What’s your name?”
“Evangeline.” She stuffed dried apples into the sack. I tried not to stare at her underwear.
“Nice to meet you, Evangeline.” I didn’t offer to shake hands. “I’m Amichai. Amichai Damrosch.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That a Jewish name?”
Uh-oh, I thought. I’d heard some of the NeoChristians had problems with the Jews, though I’d never believed it. In the past, Judaism had been linked to religion and years of persecution – but religion had pretty much evaporated after the Upterlife had been invented, leaving Jewishness as just another ethnicity. At my house, all being Jewish had meant was that Mom and Dad threw holiday parties on different days.
“In name only,” I said, running my hand nervously through my Jewfro. “Well, and the hair. My family hasn’t worshipped in centuries.”
“I suppose you think that’s a point in your favor. Still, you did shoo those boys away before I had to dispatch them, so… I owe you a favor, Amichai Damrosch.”
I watched as she tossed aside a leaking jar of beets. “What are you trying to do?”
“My parents have been kidnapped across the country, just like Joseph, and it’s my duty to bring them back. It’s a lot harder, getting by in the city; more cameras to dodge. And I didn’t stock up on enough food for the final push into Manhattan, no wise virgin I, so I had to break into a store. That’s when your LifeGuard caught me. They want to refashion me into one of you.”
She spoke quickly. I could barely make sense of her words. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
A year older than me? I’d heard the NeoChristians put their kids through a constant diet of combat training, but I’d never seen up-close evidence before. She could have passed for twenty-five. A pretty twenty-five.
The dirt ground into her palms and her sunken cheeks told me she’d been on her own for a while, too. She looked like a wild raccoon – kinda cute, but able to bite your face off.
Maybe she was crazy. Like, “searching for delusions” crazy. Watching people go through meat-death did weird things to survivors.
“But… they said your parents were dead,” I stammered. “I mean dead dead. This place is made for orphans. I mean, isn’t it better to have someplace to live?”
Her knuckles went white around the knife handle. “I told you, they’re not dead. I’d rejoice if they put on the crown of righteousness. As it is, it’s the iron yoke.”
“What iron yoke?”
She sighed, as if talking to someone unbearably slow. “Your government has kidnapped my parents. They’re being reprogrammed to believe in your culture right now.”
“Brainwashed? Wh
y would anyone want to brainwash you?”
She snorted in disdain. “This isn’t mere brainwashing. I’ve spent hours on the waterboard, training to endure physical torture. You’re shoving needles into our heads to make us sin. Reprogramming us. Like computers.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped. “Organic tissue is all bunched up; our memories are mangled together. That’s why the Upterlife is a one-way trip; once they’ve extracted all your thoughts, they can’t stuff them back into your jumbled wetbrain again.”
“I didn’t say you were successful. Yet.” She examined a rack of goat jerky I’d smoked last year, threw hunks into the sack.
“Stop saying it’s me. I don’t have anything to do with it.”
“Your people, then.”
“No! My people aren’t putting an… an iron yoke on anyone! Even if they could flip neurons around like computer settings, which is unlikely because the brain is a messy stew of cells, you think the dead would let anyone get away with that? If someone had the power to rewire organic tissue, then reprogramming the dead’s memories would be trivial. That knowledge would get anyone Terminal status – the LifeGuard would be on them like gold on wheat.”
“That’s assuming the men who did this care about Shriving.”
“You told me they’re my people. We’re all obsessed with Shriving. Your story makes zero sense.”
Even though I’d shredded her story, she refused to budge. No surprises there. She already believed in an invisible superbeing who automatically Shrived the brains of each human, dog, and cockroach.
“OK.” I showed her my palms. “Your parents are kidnapped. But if you murder someone, the LifeGuard will throw you in jail. How will you save them then?”
She gave me an exhausted look, as though my kindness was a drink offered at the wrong time. “Your concern is commendable, Amichai. But my parents did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Neither shall I.”
“See, that’s why nobody likes you people!” I cried. “Not only do you spend your days quoting some crazy old text file, but nobody’s out to exterminate you. You think we want to kill you, but you’ve got it backwards. You spend your days yelling that the Upterlife is a crime against some imaginary guy and then try to blow our servers up! We don’t want you dead – you want us to die!”
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