by Tosca Lee
I finish, scoop up a handful of snow, brush my hands together, and then shove them in my pockets.
Now that I’m awake, all the restless energy of before comes back. The anxiety of not being on the road, of not moving anywhere at all. Stuck here, wondering where Jackie is and if she was followed or only imagined it. How far east she got on what remained of her gas.
And then there’s the person—or persons—Jackie was supposed to meet. It couldn’t have been Blaine; he’s already dead.
I shudder in the freezing cold, wondering if Jackie would have been next. A simple mugging, a robbery at the center, a senseless murder—any one of those, and all traces of the samples could have disappeared and there’d have been no one to say anything about their existence.
I walk until my toes are frozen, my cheeks and ears numb. Until I’m light-headed from cold. And then I start back, following the shallow indentations of my tracks already filling with fresh snow. Wondering if I should wake Chase. Ready to plead my case about needing to get to my mom. To manufacture tears, if that’s what it takes.
A glow emanates from the open entrance of the corncrib. Rounding the corner, I see that the dome light of the Jeep is on. It takes me a minute to register the fact that it’s empty. Another to notice the form leaning against the driver’s-side door.
Chase.
“You’re awake,” I say, surprised. “Does this mean we can go?”
He comes to meet me near the entrance, hands in his coat pockets. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“Look. You seem like a really nice person. But there’s something I need to know.”
“What’s that?” I ask warily. There’s something strange about his posture. Something almost feline in that six-foot frame that sets me instantly on edge.
“What’s in the carrier, Wynter?”
“I told you,” I say warily.
“You also lied.”
“It’s also none of your business!”
“Normally I’d agree with you except this is my vehicle,” he says, walking toward me. I force myself not to take a step back. “And I’ve just spent hours—with you—listening to radio reports about cyberattacks and possible bioterrorism, watching you check every fifteen minutes to see if we’re being followed. So when I find a refrigerated carrier full of specimen samples and a USB drive with files about the Bellevue 13 and rapid early-onset dementia being carted around by a girl I know has been lying to me about why she’s so desperate to get to Colorado . . . you can see why I’m ready for an explanation.” He shrugs.
“I’m not a terrorist!” I exclaim, incredulous.
“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that, honey,” he says.
But I can’t. I won’t. Because Ashley voiced what I’d already suspected: that those samples in the wrong hands could be very bad. They’d been in the wrong hands once.
“No. Sorry,” I say.
I don’t know Chase. Not even a sliver as well as I knew my father or Magnus or Shae or any number of people I thought I knew—people for whom the chasm between who they pretended to be and who they really were was as wide as the one dividing Heaven from Hell.
I move toward the Jeep, ready to get the carrier, my things. Having no idea what I’ll do next, but knowing it won’t involve him.
He lifts the keys from his pocket, clicks the fob. The Jeep locks.
I stop, staring at the locked vehicle, my things trapped inside. I spin back.
“What are you going to do—steal from me?”
“I don’t think that carrier belongs to you any more than that Lexus did.”
“I told you, the SUV belonged to my aunt. I mean she’s like an aunt. And those samples are for a grad school project,” I say, remembering the empty fellowship form on the flash drive.
He takes a long look at me, turns on his heel, and walks to the Jeep.
I haul in a relieved breath as he unlocks it—until he gets in and slams the door shut. Relocks the door from the inside.
“No!” I run toward the Jeep as he starts the engine. Pound on the driver’s-side window. “Stop!” I yell. “Please!”
He puts the Jeep into gear and I feel myself go hot in the chill air as he starts backing toward the entrance.
I scream, banging on the door, jogging alongside it, out into the snow. Clawing at the door handle.
He shoves the Jeep into gear and, before I can run around front and throw myself in front of the tires to stop him, plows through the snow toward the road.
I run after him, nightmare slow. Sink into a drift and lunge forward again. I’m light-headed, staggering through the snow, all the heat gone from my limbs, my head.
I feel like I’m going to vomit. A bright light shines in my face, but it isn’t enough to keep the world from going dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
* * *
A blinking eye stared from the corner above the toilet.
I hadn’t minded the eye during my few days of self-imposed Penitence the last four years especially—probably because they had been fewer than before and mostly voluntary. But I probably should have thought twice before tearing down Magnus’s picture. Luckily, the camera was at the wrong angle to capture the wall.
Tonight, that eye was my friend. By Magnus’s own edict, the punishment for rape was expulsion and damnation, and the eye would know.
Not that anyone would ever see the evidence.
I counted the seconds—something I had done naturally entire portions of my life, even when I didn’t need to. One minute. Five. Ten. Thirty.
At 10 p.m., lights out, my cell went dark. All except for the red dot of the eye.
Trust me.
But as the hours wore on, I started to panic.
I couldn’t be here when they came to let me out for breakfast. To attend service. To be dressed by the women of the Factory for my wedding. Taken to the Banquet Table to celebrate over a meal, songs, congratulations. There’d be no chance to talk to Jackie—who would spend the night at the Factory to give us our privacy—before I was escorted to Magnus’s barrow.
I got to my feet and began to pace blindly, hands over my eyes in the dark. And then I was feeling my way to the door, fingers going to the hinges, tugging on the pins, scratching at them like a caged animal.
I scrabbled in the dark for the worn copy of the Testament and, finding it, ripped the cover free. Fell down beside the door to pry at the hinge pins and then the screws of the lock. Finally I crawled toward the cot, feeling in the darkness for anything on the frame I could use. A strut, maybe—anything.
A sound outside the door. I stiffened at the sound of purposeful steps moving down the hall toward the Admitter’s desk where monitors lined the wall and the log of Penitents—their check-in and check-out times with their room numbers—was kept.
No. No, no, no . . .
Rushing to the altar, I snatched up the cloth on it. Glanced at the blinking red light . . . just in time to watch it go out.
The footsteps neared and then stopped outside my door. I darted to the side of it and flattened myself against the wall, the cloth twisted between my hands.
A key slid into the lock. Turned, clicked.
The door opened the length of a blouse-clad arm as a figure eclipsed the hallway’s lone fixture and slipped into the cell.
But it wasn’t Magnus. It wasn’t even a man.
And she was pregnant.
Ara.
I moved from the wall behind Ara, startling her.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted, blinking against the light.
Her gaze fell to the cloth. “What were you going to do—strangle me?”
“I—I didn’t know it was you.”
“I couldn’t exactly announce it, could I?” she snapped.
My gaze flicked past her, already judging the distance between her swollen body and the hall. Between the hall and the stairs and the back door above. My legs tensed, ready to sprint past her, to shove her aside
—until she pulled a slip of paper from her pocket.
“What’s that?” I said, taking it.
Did I imagine it, or was it the same size as the one Jackie had given me just two nights ago? It contained only five digits: 4 0 7 1 5. Jackie’s handwriting.
“Memorize it,” she commanded.
I did, quickly. “What is it?”
“The Narrow Gate code,” she said, putting it back into her pocket.
“What time is it?”
“Just after four.”
The Guardians changed shift at four thirty. The Narrow Gate would be unattended for a few minutes.
“Get Truly. Jackie’s already out. She’s waiting at the end of the road with a car.”
My breath left me all at once. Clearly, I’d underestimated her.
I started past her and then stopped.
“Why?” I asked, turning back. “Why are you helping us?”
She lifted her chin. “Because with both of you gone, Magnus will need a wife.”
“But you’re already married,” I said.
She gave a hard little laugh. “If he can have a revelation just to marry you, he can have another.”
I caught her by the arm. “Ara. I know we haven’t been friends for years. But thank you.”
She fixed me with a level look. I used to think she was pretty, with eyes the color of sea glass. Now I realized just how brittle they’d become.
“Like I said. I’m not doing it for you. You’ve never been one of us.”
I didn’t know if she meant “us” the Enclave, or “us” the kind of person she imagined herself and Magnus to be.
It didn’t matter.
“He likes secrets,” I said as she turned to go.
She glanced over her shoulder at me, something glittering in her eyes. “I know.”
She left then, striding swiftly down the hall despite her swollen belly. Before her steps had faded from the stairwell, I pulled the cell door shut with a soft click and hurried to the panel behind the Admitter’s desk, where the panes on the screen had all gone dark, and switched the system on.
And then I was bolting down the hall and hurrying up the same stairs Ara had ascended seconds before.
I bypassed the metal side door at the top of the stairwell and turned down the corridor to emerge in the narthex of Percepta Hall. I could just make out Ara’s form through the glass door, disappearing down the path.
I strode to the opposite door, skin prickling as I passed the sanctuary where I imagined shadows hulked behind the altar.
4 0 7 1 5.
I chanted the numbers in my head as I hurried past the Banquet Table, the Factory and storehouse, clinging to the shadows. I knew the way to the children’s barrow so well, I could have found it blindfolded.
I slipped out of my shoes on the back porch. Let myself in through the door, which I left ajar as I crept through the children’s sparse galley kitchen to the girls’ dorm at the western end. Navigating past the faint glow of the bathroom night-light, I stopped midway down the row of small wooden-railed beds.
I didn’t need to see her; I would have known the sound of her breath anywhere. The smell of her sweet, honeyed hair.
Sliding my arms beneath her, I picked her up, blanket and all. She stirred as I cradled her against me, her arms winding around my neck in sleep. She knew my sounds, my skin, as well.
I carried her out to the porch, toed back into my shoes. And then I was running through the shadow of the wall cast by the setting moon.
I crouched at the corner of the guesthouse, eyes fixed on the gate. It seemed somehow appropriate to me that I would wait here, at the edge of the cottage we had first stayed in fifteen years ago. That we had come in as three. That we would leave as three tonight.
Truly stirred and I pulled the blanket around her, my arms prickling in the chill September air.
“Hi!” I whispered.
“Winnie? Why are we—”
“We’re playing a game,” I murmured into her hair. “But if you want to win, if you want the prize . . . you can’t talk. We have to be very quiet.”
She held her finger to her lips. I scrunched my nose at her and nodded.
Movement in the darkness. The soft click of the guardhouse door. They were leaving, one Guardian from the front booth, the second from his post near the gate. My heart hammered against my ribs as I closed my eyes, resisting the urge to run this instant. Counting their steps to the garden path, listening for the crunch of their boots fading toward the Banquet Table where their reliefs were clattering empty mugs onto the pass-through counter as they got ready for their shifts.
A walkie-talkie crackled with a brief exchange from the Guardians at the southern end of the Enclave near the warehouse and its treasure: the seed bank. I was used to the walkie-talkies, the sounds of boot heels crunching on gravel—they were the sounds of security and safety I’d lain awake to so many sleepless nights. Sounds so mundane they belonged, in my mind, with those of the crickets and first birds of dawn.
I imagined the path up the drive, past the Factory, toward the Banquet Table kitchen, walking it in my mind until the sound of their muted conversation faded.
And then I was sprinting, all out, skirt swishing around my knees, Truly bouncing in my arms.
I threw my shoulder against the Narrow Gate door, shifted her to my right arm. Fumbled with the keypad in the darkness, finding the 1, 3, 7, and 9 at the corners.
4 . . . 0 . . . 7 . . . 1 . . . 5.
I waited for a click.
Nothing.
I tried the door handle. It didn’t turn.
I exhaled a breath, willed my fingers to stop trembling.
“Winnie . . .” Truly whined.
4 . . . 0 . . . I carefully felt for each number. 7 . . . 1 . . . 5 . . .
I tried the handle. It wouldn’t budge.
I pictured Jackie at the end of the long drive, waiting for us, engine running. Wondering where her daughter was. What was taking so long.
“Winnie—” Truly twisted in my arms.
“Hush!” I hissed.
Twice, in the last fifteen years, a Guardian had gotten the Narrow Gate code wrong enough times that the sirens on the four corners of the Enclave had sounded and the lights had come on, stadium bright, in the middle of the day. That must not happen now.
Truly started crying, wrenching this way and that. “Why are we leaving? I don’t want to go!”
I said, more gently than before, “Mommy’s waiting outside.”
But it was the wrong thing to say. She didn’t know Jackie as “Mommy” any more than I had known our mom as “Sylvia.” There were no mommies here.
Voices in the distance.
My fingers hovered over the keypad, shaking worse than before. I counted the top row, found the 4.
Over, down, across the next row to the bottom.
0 . . .
I could hear boots against the gravel, coming down the path. Ten seconds. It was all we needed to slip through, to shut the door behind us. No one would see us running for the road on the other side.
7 . . .
A walkie-talkie crackled.
Top left corner.
1 . . .
Second row. Middle. I double-checked, counting the buttons, left to right and down.
5.
The Enclave lit up in stark relief like a picture thrown into negative as a siren blared to life above.
Truly screamed, hands over her ears. I threw myself against the door, keyed the code in again, and then again, in the light brighter than day. Praying to God, then begging, and finally screaming myself.
I snarled as they grabbed me, my arms locked around the little body inside them, Truly’s hands like barnacles as she clung to my neck. Bit the Guardian who tried to pry Truly from me, backed against the gate like a rabid animal.
And that’s when I saw her running toward me in her nightgown, a shawl tight around her shoulders.
Jackie.
What?
> How was that possible? She was supposed to be waiting outside!
“Truly!” she cried, Magnus tight on her heels. “She’s taking Truly!”
I swung my gaze around, uncomprehending. Ara had done this. She had always hated me. She had done this to us both. To us all.
Her pregnant figure stalked toward us from the shadows, finger pointed.
“She was stealing the child!” she shouted. “She was trying to leave with a child!”
It was a damning offense, trying to leave with another. Worse yet, trying to take a child. More damning, even, when that child belonged to Magnus.
They pried Truly screaming from my arms. Hauled me across the yard.
I stared at Jackie as they dragged me past her. At her wide eyes, her face so white in the darkness.
Did I imagine it, or did her lips move in a single, silent word?
Sorry.
I was given one phone call to the number on my intake form filled out by our mother, I assumed, when we’d arrived. It had since been crossed out and replaced by another I didn’t recognize with a 770 area code. I didn’t know who had written it there or who it belonged to, but when the line rang, I knew the voice immediately.
“I’m coming” was all she said.
I cried after that.
On the morning of my wedding day, I did not eat the breakfast meant to honor me. I spent the service meant to celebrate my union with the Voice of God locked in a cell.
I was spared visitors. Just the red light blinking in the corner.
Until the Guardians came for me.
To send me into Hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
Wynter, you with me?”
I try to talk around a thick tongue as my eyes pry open on a face far too close to mine.
Blue eyes. Good eyebrows.
Chase.
“Hey,” he says, sounding relieved.
“What happened . . .”
“You passed out. How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”
I scrunch my eyes shut, feeling vaguely claustrophobic because there’s a heavy band around me making it hard to move.