Ruthless

by Sarah Tarkoff

  “Knowing the real reason might have killed her. And if she knew the truth, she’d know I wasn’t a real prophet, and she’d have no reason to do anything for me,” I pointed out. I hated arguing with Zack, especially right after we’d finally connected like that. I took his face in my hands and kissed him. “It’ll be okay,” I reassured him.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said skeptically, but he kissed me back.

  As we dressed and headed back downstairs to meet the others, a strange kind of silence settled in between us. We sat among our Outcast friends as Felipe, Redenção’s restauranteur, served everyone breakfast—our smallest portion of eggs yet. Supplies were running low. But Dawn would return with more when she came back with the device.

  Unless Zack was right, and our plan was about to backfire; then maybe she wouldn’t return at all.

  As the minutes ticked into hours, my hopes began to dwindle. I knew exactly how big that building was, how Paulina planned to smuggle the device through the mailroom. If she lost faith in the plan, if I hadn’t been convincing enough, then everything would fall apart. We wouldn’t get the device, and Dawn would be a sitting duck; instead of Paulina showing up at their meet point, it might be agents of the prophet, informed about our plan.

  How could I think I was as convincing as the “real” prophets, who’d been hand selected for this job as the most charismatic people in the world? Sure, I’d said a few things that resonated with people, but any idiot could do that, especially given the tools I’d had at my disposal—a whole stadium full of uppers to heal the crowd. Now that Paulina had talked to me in person, of course I should have expected her to lose faith.

  That was exactly what Zack had been trying to say, even if he’d been too polite to say it to my face. I was a novice, playing in the big leagues, and I was flailing. My frustration at him mellowed into sympathy, and regret. I wished I’d listened to him when I had the chance.

  Then, the satphone rang again. As my stomach swirled with nerves, I picked it up immediately, averting my eyes from Zack—I didn’t want to see my own insecurities reflected in his eyes. “Hello?”

  But it wasn’t Paulina or one of her friends this time, it was Dawn, voice triumphant. “We got it!”

  “The device?” I asked, hushed, knowing that every ear in this room was listening in on our call.

  “I’m on my way back now,” she said. “Good work, Prophet.”

  As I hung up, I found a smile involuntarily winding its way up to my ears. Zack clocked my expression and smiled in return. “She got it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, buzzing with a kind of pride that I’d never felt before. I’d gone toe-to-toe with the prophets once again, and somehow my words had won. I felt powerful, unstoppable. It reminded me of the first time I tried the pills, the moment I realized I wasn’t bound to all the rules I’d thought were Great Spirit–given. But this was different, intoxicating—I was truly the only one in the world with this kind of power. What could I do with it?

  Zack, for his part, was just happy we’d succeeded. “How great will it be to get this crap out of our heads, after all these years?”

  But we weren’t in the clear just yet.

  When I came into my room that night, I overheard Zack streaming a news broadcast, which he worriedly shut off as I entered. “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said suspiciously enough that I immediately grabbed for the computer.

  “Hey!” he protested, but I ignored him. “Don’t watch that, Grace, I’m serious . . .” he warned, but I clicked anyway.

  “A break-in at a facility owned by Prophet Daniel was discovered to be the work of an Outcast terrorist, who professed her allegiance to Prophet Grace. She claims Grace has been communicating with her and asked her to steal from her employer.” On-screen, I watched Paulina defiantly being led away in handcuffs, her face now marred by Punishment, lined with anger and resentment. My lies, my manipulation, had ruined her life.

  Before I could watch any more, Zack pulled the computer away from me. “Don’t do this to yourself. You did a good job, you managed to get that tech out without losing any lives. Remember that.”

  I did remember, and his kind words gave me comfort. But I couldn’t stop myself from feeling the guilt: the overwhelming sense that the earth should swallow me whole, that I deserved the same fate I’d given Paulina. “I think I need to lie down,” I said, and I could hear in my voice how the Punishment was affecting me. It was swift and all-consuming, as though all the guilt I’d felt over deceiving billions of people was hitting me in one crushing wave.

  Zack made room in the bed so I could collapse under the mosquito netting, and before I knew it, the world was black around me.

  13

  The night passed in a haze, like watching the world in fast-forward. One minute I was sure Zack was sitting right next to me, the next he was on the other side of the room, pacing. I heard Dr. Marko’s voice, whispering, “It’s bad, very bad.” My breathing slowed as my windpipe constricted; I was getting very little air.

  “Am I dying?” I tried to ask, but I couldn’t speak, and that was answer enough.

  When suddenly it was morning, I felt something touching my palm—and realized it was Zack’s. He’d fallen asleep, sitting on the floor next to me, hand squeezing mine. When I moved, he jolted awake. “Grace, can you hear me?”

  I couldn’t speak, so I nodded weakly.

  He gripped me so tightly it hurt. “Hold on. Dawn’s on her way back. Just another day, just a little longer.” I could see the fear, the desperation in his eyes, the grief thinking he might be about to lose me, and it terrified me.

  I wanted to thank him for sitting with me like this, wanted to confess everything I’d been feeling. I made a list of all the things I wanted to tell him once Dawn got here and cured me, gave me back my voice. That I loved him, how grateful I was that he’d chosen to give up everything to fight alongside me. I repeated it like a mantra in my head, memorized the words, but the more I thought them, the more they blurred together. In my sickly haze, I wasn’t sure they were even words, or just feelings that sounded like words.

  I blinked and it was night again. Maybe this was all a dream. It felt like one.

  Though it was dark outside, the room filled with a strange, bright light, cascading in pinks and purples up from the floor. I was alone, until I wasn’t. Through the strange, colorful haze, a figure moved toward the bed. Jude.

  “Hold on. Just another hour,” he whispered. He looked so young, with that awkward stilted walk he’d had in high school. An innocence about him still. “Stay with me, just focus on the sound of my voice.” I longed for him, ached to pull him close. I missed him more than ever before, even now when he was right in front of my face.

  I blinked and Jude was Zack again.

  “Just hold on,” Zack repeated, with Jude’s voice.

  I’m holding on, I wanted to tell him. And suddenly, I found my voice again. “What if I can’t do this?”

  Zack leaned over to me, and suddenly his features swirled into a jumble—one minute he had Jude’s nose, Macy’s eyes, my father’s smile. At once, he managed to be the personification of everyone who loved me. “I’ve got you.” I stared at the mishmash of features in front of me, all urging me to “Forgive yourself.”

  I wanted to, but something dark nagged inside of me. “I’m supposed to be telling people how to be better,” I whispered. “But every word out of my mouth is a lie. I’m manipulating people, I’m a monster. If I forgive myself, I’m saying that’s okay. I’m saying it’s okay that I haven’t found a way to do this more honestly, that it doesn’t matter who I’ve hurt along the way.”

  “You’re right, you did make mistakes,” the voice next to me said in its strange, ethereal way. “And you’ll make more. But you’ll learn to do things better, too. You’ll show people a better way, you’ll help make a better world. But you won’t be able to do that unless you survive. Nothing will be better until you stop defi
ning yourself by the sins of your past, and start defining yourself by the good you’re about to do. Your journey is just beginning. Forgive yourself, Grace.”

  Without even trying, I could feel it inside of me, the healing beginning. “Thank you,” I whispered. I reached out to touch my ever-changing friend, blinked again, and—

  Everything was gone, black. There was something over my face. There always had been, I realized. Everything I’d just seen, those lights, the people—they were indeed some kind of dream state.

  “Just take deep breaths.” That sounded like Dr. Marko.

  Another voice, that familiar echoey chorus, the voice my mother had planted in my brain, shouted at me. Give up, give up, give up!

  But I took a deep breath, and the air rushed in, cool and thick—I hadn’t realized how little of it had been making its way into my lungs. As I gasped, enjoying each breath, Marko removed a gas mask from my face. The room was back to its normal, non-neon coloration, as Dr. Marko and Zack huddled around my bedside.

  Zack put a hand on my back to support me sitting upright. I tried to remember all the things I’d wanted to say to him when I was delirious, but I felt them all slip away. I could see on his face that my appearance must have improved significantly. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth and found words coming out—less smooth than they had in my dream. “I think so. What was that?”

  Dr. Marko grinned, proud. “Since we didn’t have any uppers, I brewed you something new to boost your serotonin levels. A little pleasant hallucinatory experience. Think of it as an emergency anti-guilt serum.”

  “What do you mean, you brewed it?” I asked, confused.

  “The nanofabricator, it can make just about anything,” Marko explained. “Including very powerful and precise neurological manipulators.”

  “The nanofabricator . . . you mean we got it?” I asked, thrilled, and in that moment, I noticed Dawn across the room, walking over to my bedside. The sight of her filled me with deep relief. “You’re back.” I hugged her, thankful she was alive and that our mission had succeeded.

  “I used the nanofabricator that your buddy Paulina stole to create that gas that blissed you out,” Dr. Marko explained. “I’m looking forward to playing around with this device later. It can make just about any kind of small particle . . .”

  Including the nanovirus that would destroy the bugs inside our heads. The reality hit me. “We can end this.”

  “One person at a time,” Zack said, trying to temper my excitement. But the potential of this new tech was too tempting . . . my hope was now getting ahead of me.

  “And it works, to remove the tech in our heads? You’ve tried it?” I asked.

  “On myself,” Dawn said. “My brain is liberated. You want to be next?” I nodded. I was about to be free, finally, for the first time in over a decade.

  14

  The nanofabricator looked and behaved totally differently than I’d expected. The massive contraption we’d seen in South Africa had been industrial, complex. This device was palm-size and digital, heavy but smooth like a large metal pebble with only a few buttons. Dr. Marko used those buttons to enter the code we’d stolen in Israel-Palestine, and the device beeped and lit up. “You ready?” Zack asked.

  My heart fluttered with excitement. “I’ve been ready for nine years,” I told him.

  “Ten in July,” Dawn pointed out.

  Dr. Marko seemed less interested in parsing the exact number of days I’d been ready. “Press this button, wait for it to beep, and then inhale through the gas mask.”

  Don’t do it! the voice in my head screamed. It knew that I was about to destroy it, and I relished the joy of finally killing my nagging, miserable sidekick.

  I followed Marko’s directions, breathing in as deeply as I could. The gas filled my throat, and it weirded me out to think that steamy substance contained tiny little computer chips, which carried the virus that would cause the bugs in my head to self-destruct.

  “Okay, you can exhale,” Dr. Marko instructed, and I let my breath go. Instinctively I grabbed for a mirror, excited to see the results. I could hear the screaming voice in my head fading away, which meant the process must be working; the nanotech was disintegrating.

  To my surprise, what happened next didn’t look like a traditional Forgiveness. In fact, the way my face changed looked unlike anything I’d seen before. I wasn’t getting prettier or uglier . . . just different, somehow. “What’s happening?” I asked, a little freaked out.

  “The nanotech changed your appearance when it first lodged itself in your brain,” Dr. Marko explained. “To operate, it sets itself up inside your cells, and everything changes just a little bit. You’re going back to the way you would have looked before the Revelations, your real face, without any Punishment or Forgiveness.”

  I’d never considered that the beautiful thing I saw in the mirror every day might be its own kind of artifice. As my features settled, a shot of recognition went through me—the eyes staring back at me were the ones I remembered from childhood photos. I hadn’t even realized they were gone until I saw them now, all grown-up.

  There was a certain endearing familiarity to my face now, an approachability—my cheekbones were a little more prominent than I was used to, and my eyebrows had a different arch. But I was me in a way I hadn’t been in a long time.

  But was I pretty? The mechanical whisper inside my head was gone, but my own insecurities still dogged me. The face staring back—what would the world think of it? What would Zack think of it? I could no longer do good deeds to be seen as more beautiful. Was I beautiful enough? My skin was still dewy and youthful, but when you put my features together, I worried they were kind of a jumble, like a car put together with spare parts. Perfectly nice spare parts, but still. I’d defined myself for so long by my appearance, and now I was just . . . me. I was who I was, and the rest of the world would judge me accordingly.

  But maybe it didn’t matter anymore. Now that we could remove the nanotech, show people the truth, the resistance’s numbers would explode. We wouldn’t need a prophet’s fake wisdom to win people to our side—we could give them the real thing.

  For a moment, I was afraid to turn and face Zack. Would he be disappointed to see my exterior hadn’t returned to the exact same image he’d fallen in love with? As Zack caught my eye, I analyzed every flicker of movement on his face, trying desperately to see what he was thinking, but his face didn’t betray a hint of emotion.

  Dr. Marko took his turn next, and I was surprised to see his face sink a little—like his skin had previously been pulled tight in unnatural ways, and now it was loosening, giving away more of his age. As the nanotech inside his head died, I saw a kind of relief come over his features. He might not have been more attractive in the conventional sense, but he looked more real somehow. Dawn, too, I realized, had lost some of her conventional beauty but had gained a kind of lightness in her demeanor.

  “Your turn,” I said tentatively to Zack. As he covered his face with the mask, I found myself silently praying for his handsome face to get just a little less handsome. So I’d feel more confident in our relationship, that I’d be able to keep him longer. That’s messed up, I reminded myself. You love him, you should want the best for him.

  “Is it working?” Zack asked, examining himself in the mirror. Inexplicably, his face wasn’t changing at all—it looked like he was going to stay handsome as ever.

  Marko examined the device. “Looks like it.”

  “How do you feel?” Dawn asked.

  Zack grinned. “Great! Let’s go sin up this joint. Stealing, murder, what should we do first?”

  I threw him a suggestive look—I had an idea of what I wanted to do. But with a glance at Dawn and Dr. Marko, still in the room with us, I wasn’t about to voice it yet.

  And, unfortunately, I wouldn’t get the chance; while we were still celebrating our victory, Eduardo Sousa burst in, in a panic. Dr. Marko quickly hid the device, but
Sousa wasn’t concerned with what we’d been doing prior to his arrival. “One of those drones just flew overhead.”

  We knew what that meant: Prophet Daniel knew our location. Panic surged through me. Our little rainforest bubble had just popped.

  Book Two

  1

  “Where can we even go?” I asked, hurrying down to the docks with Dawn and Dr. Marko. The morning sun was just beginning to peek through the canopy, and I had to strain to see where my feet were stepping.

  “We need to move away from this location. The Amazon is big, so it’ll be hard to pick out individual boats on satellite. We can use trees for cover and find shelter eventually,” Dawn explained.

  “So nowhere, that’s a polite way of saying nowhere,” I pointed out.

  Our Outcast friends were already piling into boats as we approached the water’s edge. “Prophet Grace!” they shouted, gesturing for me to join them as they piled onto the two good boats—the one they’d arrived on and the small craft Dr. Marko had brought. But I could quickly see there wouldn’t be room for all of us . . . and more importantly, if Prophet Daniel was coming specifically for me, I didn’t want to put these innocents in any more danger.

  I shook my head, pointing to the wooden rowboat we’d arrived in. “I’ll take this.” The rag that had plugged the hole in its hull was missing, and it barely looked sturdy enough to keep one person afloat, much less all five of us.

  As Zack approached with a confused and terrified Macy in tow, he eyed the boat warily. “Is that thing leaking?”

  “Not very quickly,” Marko joked.

  “You guys go with the others,” I said as bravely as I could muster. “If they’re looking for me, I want you all as far away from me as possible.”