The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  The work they’re doing right here – trying to keep everything normal, to keep people feeling safe and going to their jobs and spending their dollars on weekend recreational activities – this is important work.

  Daniel says, ‘I try, I really try, always to have something positive to say, you know, but I just’ – he lets the pages slip from his hand, fall across the table – ‘your people haven’t given me a single thing I can use here.’

  Arnold, Daniel’s budget guy, nods silently, holding his chin in his hand, an awkward, twisted gesture.

  ‘I know it’s not your fault,’ says Daniel. ‘You’re understaffed, under-resourced – we all know you’re trying your hardest in difficult circumstances – but this just isn’t something we can use.’

  Margot has read the report from the Mayor’s office. It’s bold, yes, it suggests a strategy of radical openness about the current state of protection, of treatments, of the potential for any future reversal. (The potential is nil.) Daniel keeps on talking, listing one problem after another, never quite saying, ‘I’m not brave enough for this,’ but meaning that every time.

  Margot’s hands are flat against the underside of the table, palms upward. She feels the fizz building as he speaks. She breathes very slowly and evenly; she knows she can control this, it’s the control that gives her pleasure, at first. She thinks of exactly what she would do; as Daniel drones on, she can feel it out quite simply. She has enough power within her to take Daniel’s throat in her grip and pinch him out with one blast. She’d have plenty left to deliver Arnold a blow to the temple, knock him cold, at least. It would be easy. It wouldn’t take much effort. She could do it quickly enough that there’d be no sound. She could kill them both, right here, in conference room 5(b).

  Thinking this, she feels very far from the table, where Daniel’s mouth is still flapping open and closed like a goldfish. She is in a high and lofty realm, a place where the lungs fill with ice crystals and everything is very clear and clean. It scarcely matters what is actually happening. She could kill them. That is the profound truth of it. She lets the power tickle at her fingers, scorching the varnish on the underside of the table. She can smell its sweet chemical aroma. Nothing that either of these men says is really of any great significance, because she could kill them in three moves before they stirred in their comfortably padded chairs.

  It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

  She speaks quite suddenly, across Daniel, sharp like the knock at a door. ‘Don’t waste my time with this, Daniel,’ she says.

  He’s not her superior. They are equals. He can’t fire her. He’s talking as if he could.

  She says, ‘You and I both know that no one has an answer yet. If you’ve got a great idea, let’s hear it. Otherwise …’

  She lets it dangle. Daniel opens his mouth as if to say something and then closes it again. Under her fingertips, on the underside of the table, the varnish is softening, curling, crumbling to fall in soft flakes on to the thick-pile carpet.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ she says. ‘Let’s work together on this one, OK, buddy? No sense throwing each other to the wolves.’

  Margot is thinking about her future. You’re gonna pump my gas someday, Daniel. I’ve got big plans.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah.’

  She thinks, That is how a man speaks. And that is why.

  Rudimentary weapon, approximately one thousand years old. The wires are intended to conduct the power. Possibly used in battle or for punishment. Discovered in a gravesite in old Westchester.

  EIGHT YEARS TO GO

  * * *

  Allie

  Not very many miracles are required. Not for the Vatican, not for a group of highly strung teenage girls cooped up together for months and in fear of their lives. You don’t need so many miracles. Two is plenty. Three’s an abundance.

  There is a girl, Luanne. She’s very pale, with red hair and a dusting of freckles across her cheeks. She’s only fourteen. She arrived three months before and she’s a particular friend of Gordy’s. They share a bed in the dorm room. For warmth. ‘It gets awful cold at nights,’ says Gordy, and Luanne smiles, and the other girls laugh and nudge each other in the ribs.

  She’s not well, hasn’t been since before her power came in. And no doctor can help her. There is a thing that happens to her when she gets excited, or scared, or laughs too much; her eyes roll back in her head and she falls to the ground wherever she is and starts to shake like she’ll crack her own back. ‘You have to just hold her,’ Gordy says. ‘Just put your arms around her shoulders and hold her until she wakes. She’ll wake by herself, you just have to wait.’ She often sleeps for an hour or more. Gordy has sat with her, arm around Luanne’s shoulders, in the refectory at midnight or in the gardens at 6 a.m., waiting for her.

  Allie has a feeling about Luanne. A tingling sense of something.

  She says: Is it this one?

  The voice says: I’m thinking so.

  One night, there’s a lightning storm. It starts way out at sea. The girls watch it with the nuns, standing on the deck at the back of the convent. The clouds are blue-purple, the light is hazy, the lightning strikes one, two, three times on the face of the ocean.

  It gives you an itchy feeling in your skein to watch a lightning storm. All the girls are feeling it. Savannah can’t help herself. After a few minutes, she lets go an arc into the wood of the deck.

  ‘Stop that,’ says Sister Veronica. ‘Stop that at once.’

  ‘Veronica,’ says Sister Maria Ignacia, ‘she didn’t do any harm.’

  Savannah giggles, lets off another little jolt. It’s not that she couldn’t stop it if she really tried. It’s just that there’s something exciting about the storm, something that makes you want to join in.

  ‘No meals for you tomorrow, Savannah,’ says Sister Veronica. ‘If you cannot control yourself in the slightest, our charity does not extend to you.’

  Sister Veronica has already had one girl thrown out who would not stop fighting on the convent grounds. The other nuns have ceded this to her; she can pick and choose those in whom she detects the Devil working.

  But ‘no meals tomorrow’ is a harsh sentence. Saturday is meatloaf night.

  Luanne tugs on Sister Veronica’s sleeve. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘She didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Don’t touch me, girl.’

  Sister Veronica pulls her arm away, gives Luanne a little shove back.

  But the storm has already done something to Luanne. Her head jerks back and to the side in the way they all know. Her mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. She falls backwards, smack on to the deck. Gordy runs forward, and Sister Veronica blocks the way with her cane.

  ‘Leave her,’ says Sister Veronica.

  ‘But, Sister …’

  ‘We have done quite enough pandering to this girl. She should not have welcomed the thing into her body and, as she has done, she will have to deal with the consequences.’

  Luanne is fitting on the deck, slamming the back of her head into the wooden boards. There’s blood in the bubbles of saliva at her mouth.

  The voice says: Go on, you know what to do.

  Allie says, ‘Sister Veronica, may I try to stop her making a fuss?’

  Sister Veronica blinks down at Eve, the quiet and hardworking girl Allie has pretended to be for all these months.

  She shrugs. ‘If you think you can stop this nonsense, Eve, be my guest.’

  Allie kneels down next to Luanne’s body. The other girls look at her like she’s a traitor. They all know it’s not Luanne’s fault – why is Eve pretending she can do anything?

  Allie can feel the electricity inside Luanne’s body: in her spine and in her neck and inside her head. She can feel the signals going up and down, stuttering, trying to right themselves, confused and out of sync. She can see it, clear as with her own eyes: there’s a blockage
here and here, and this part just at the base of the skull is mistiming what it’s doing. It’d only take a tiny adjustment, an amount of power you wouldn’t even feel, the kind of quantity that no one else can fractionate down to, only a tiny thread right here to set it right.

  Allie cradles Luanne’s head in her palm, puts her little finger in the notch at the base of the skull, reaches out with a fine tendril of power and flicks at it.

  Luanne opens her eyes. Her body stops convulsing all at once.

  She blinks.

  She says, ‘What happened?’

  And they all know this is never how it goes, that Luanne should have slept for an hour or more, that she might be confused for a week.

  Abigail says, ‘Eve healed you. She touched you, and you were healed.’

  And this was the first sign, and at this time they came to say: this one is special to the Heavens.

  They bring her other girls in need of healing. Sometimes she can lay her hands on them and feel out their pain. Sometimes it is just that something is hurting that need not hurt. A headache, a twitching muscle, a giddiness. Allie, the no-account girl from Jacksonville, has practised enough that Eve, the calm and quiet young woman, can lay her hands upon a person’s body and find just the right place to send out a needle of power and set something to rights, at least for a while. The cures are real, even if they are only temporary. She cannot teach the body to do its work better, but she can correct its mistakes for a time.

  So they start to believe in her. That there is something within her. The girls believe it, anyway, if not the nuns.

  Savannah says, ‘Is it God, Eve? Is God speaking to you? Is it God inside you?’

  She says it quietly one evening in the dormitory after lights out. The other girls are all listening, pretending to be asleep in their own beds.

  Eve says, ‘What is it you think?’

  Savannah says, ‘I think you have the power to heal in you. Like we read in Scripture.’

  There’s a muttering around the dormitory, but no one disagrees.

  The next night, as they’re getting ready for bed, Eve says to around ten of the other girls, ‘Come with me down to the seashore tomorrow at dawn.’

  They say, ‘What for?’

  She says, ‘I heard a voice saying, “Go to the seashore at dawn.”’

  The voice says: Well played, girl, you say what you need to say.

  The sky is pale blue-grey as a pebble and feathered with cloud, the sound of the ocean is quiet as a mother shushing her baby, when the girls walk down to the shore in their nightgowns.

  Allie speaks in Eve’s voice, which is soft and low. She says, ‘The voice has told me that we should wade out into the water.’

  Gordy laughs and says, ‘What is this, Eve? You want to go swimming?’

  Luanne shushes her with her finger to Gordy’s lips. Luanne has not had a seizure that lasted more than a few seconds since Eve placed her thumb to the nape of her neck.

  Abigail says, ‘What shall we do then?’

  Eve says, ‘Then God will show us what She wants of us.’

  And this ‘She’ is a new teaching, and very shocking. But they understand it, each of them. They have been waiting to hear this good news.

  The girls wade out into the water, their nightgowns and pyjamas sticking to their legs, wincing as their feet find sharp rocks, giggling a little, but with a holy feeling that they can see on one another’s faces. Something is going to happen out here. The dawn is breaking.

  They stand in a circle. They are all up to their waists, hands trailing in the cold, clear brine.

  Eve says, ‘Holy Mother, show us what you want of us. Baptize us with your love and teach us how to live.’

  And each of the girls around the circle suddenly feels their knees buckle under them. As if a great hand were pressing on their backs, pushing them down, ducking their heads into the ocean to rise up, water fountaining from their hair, gasping and knowing that God has touched them and that this day they are born anew. They all fall to their knees in the water. They all feel the hand pressing them down. They all know for a moment that they will die here under the water, they cannot breathe and then when they are lifted up they are reborn.

  They stand in the circle, wet-headed and amazed. Only Eve remained standing, dry in the water.

  They felt the presence of God around them and among them, and She was glad. And the birds flew above them, calling out in glory for a new dawn.

  There were around ten girls in the ocean that morning to witness the miracle. They had not been, before that moment, leaders in the group of five dozen young women dwelling with the nuns. They were not the charismatic ones, not the most popular, or the funniest, or the prettiest, or the cleverest girls. They were, if anything drew them together, the girls who had suffered the most, their stories being particularly terrible, their knowledge of what one might fear from others and oneself particularly acute. Nonetheless, after that morning, they were changed.

  Eve swears those girls to secrecy about what they have seen; nonetheless, the girls cannot but pass it on. Savannah tells Kayla, and Kayla tells Megan, and Megan tells Danielle that Eve has been speaking with the Creator of all things, that she has secret messages.

  They come to ask for her teachings.

  They say, ‘Why do you call God “She”?’

  Eve says, ‘God is neither woman nor man but both these things. But now She has come to show us a new side to Her face, one we have ignored for too long.’

  They say, ‘But what about Jesus?’

  Eve says, ‘Jesus is the son. But the son comes from the mother. Consider this: which is greater, God or the world?’

  They say, for they have learned this already from the nuns, ‘God is greater, because God created the world.’

  Eve says, ‘So the one who creates is greater than the thing created?’

  They say, ‘It must be so.’

  Then Eve says, ‘So which must be greater, the Mother or the Son?’

  They pause, because they think her words may be blasphemy.

  Eve says, ‘It has already been hinted in Scripture. It has already been told to us that God came to the world in a human body. We have already learned to call God “Father”. Jesus taught that.’

  They admit that this is so.

  Eve says, ‘So I teach a new thing. This power has been given to us to lay straight our crooked thinking. It is the Mother not the Son who is the emissary of Heaven. We are to call God “Mother”. God the Mother came to earth in the body of Mary, who gave up her child that we could live free from sin. God always said She would return to earth. And She has come back now to instruct us in her ways.’

  They say, ‘Who are you?’

  And Eve says, ‘Who do you say that I am?’

  Allie says in her heart: How am I doing?

  The voice says: You’re doing just fine.

  Allie says: Is this your will?

  The voice says: Do you think a single thing could happen without the will of God?

  There’s going to be more than this, sweetheart, believe me.

  In those days there was a great fever in the land, and a thirst for truth and a hunger to understand what the Almighty meant by making this change in the fortunes of mankind. In those days, in the South, there were many preachers who explained it: this is a punishment for sin, this is Satan walking amongst us, this is the sign of the end of days. But all these were not the true religion. For the true religion is love, not fear. The strong mother cradling her child: that is love and that is truth. The girls pass this news from one, to the next, to the next. God has returned, and Her message is for us, only us.

  In the early morning of a day a few weeks later, there are more baptisms. It is the spring, near to Easter, the festival of eggs and fertility and the opening of the womb. Mary’s festival. When they come from the water, they do not care to hide what has happened to them, nor could they if they tried. By breakfast, all the girls know, and all of the nuns.


  Eve sits under a tree in the garden and the other girls come to talk to her.

  They say, ‘What shall we call you?’

  And Eve says, ‘I am only the messenger of the Mother.’

  They say, ‘But is the Mother in you?’

  And Eve says, ‘She is in all of us.’

  But even still the girls begin to call her Mother Eve.

  That night there is a great debate between the nuns of the Sisters of Mercy. Sister Maria Ignacia – who, the others note, is a particular friend of that girl Eve – speaks in favour of the new organization of beliefs. It is just the same as it’s always been, she says. The Mother and the Son, it’s just the same. Mary is the Mother of the Church. Mary is the Queen of Heaven. It is she who prays for us now, and at the hour of our death. Some of these girls had never been baptized. They have taken it into their heads to baptize themselves. Can this be wrong?

  Sister Katherine speaks of the Marian heresies, and the need to wait for guidance.

  Sister Veronica hauls herself to her feet and stands, straight as the true cross, in the centre of the room. ‘The Devil is in this house,’ she says. ‘We have allowed the Devil to take root in our breasts and make his nest in our hearts. If we do not cut the canker out now, we shall all be damned.’

  She says it again, more loudly, casting her glance from woman to woman in the room: ‘Damned. If we do not burn them as they burned these girls in Decatur and in Shreveport, the Devil will take us all. It shall be utterly consumed.’ She pauses. She is a powerful speaker. She says, ‘I shall pray on it this night, I shall pray for you all. We will lock the girls in their rooms until dawn. We should burn them all.’

  The girl who has been listening at the window brings this message to Mother Eve.

  And they wait to hear what she will say.

  The voice says: You’ve got them now, girl.