Godsent

by Richard Burton

  With a gasp, the man released him and dropped to his knees like the others had.

  Ethan got on the elevator. Only then, seeing his reflection in the mirrored interior, did he realize that he was glowing.

  He was frightened and exhilarated at the same time. What was happening to him? What did it all mean?

  He pressed the button for his mother’s floor. The doors closed, and he ascended.

  When the doors opened again and he stepped out into a corridor identical to the one below, there were more people waiting and watching. They, too, tried to stop him. They, too, fell to their knees.

  Ethan went to his mother’s room and opened the door. There were three people inside. They were on their knees the instant he crossed the threshold. There was a big mirror against one wall, and Ethan sensed other people behind that mirror, which was really a window. It was meant to be one-way, but Ethan could see them clearly there on the other side. Among them was an old man, a man who gazed back at him without fear or awe. Instead, anger contorted his lips, and he turned brusquely from the window. Ethan felt a link between himself and this man. But now was not the time to explore it.

  His mother was sitting up in the hospital bed. She too was trailing an assortment of tubes and wires. Tears were streaming down her face. She was trying to speak, but no words were coming out. He saw what had been done to her. How the gas had damaged her lungs, scarred her throat and larynx. Then he fixed her. He knew that he was to blame for those injuries as surely as if he’d inflicted them himself. But he wasn’t going to let anyone hurt her again. He knew now what he had to do. He climbed up into bed with her, put his arms around her, and burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Then he did something to the world. In a way, it was the same kind of thing that he had done before to people, reaching inside them and changing them. Only this time it was on a grander scale. Yet it was no more difficult for him.

  It was not as if he had never been in the hospital.

  It was far more than that.

  He simply never had been there.

  He was at home, in Olathe, in the backyard, lying down on the grass and looking up at the night sky spangled with stars and the flashing red and green lights of airplanes. His mother lay beside him, their sides touching. He could feel her trembling.

  In all the world, only the two of them remembered the hospital. Only they knew that Gordon had been killed in cold blood and had not died of a heart attack. Only they knew that there was something special about Ethan. Something wonderful. Something dangerous.

  “What have you done?” asked Lisa in a hushed voice.

  “The man that tried to kill me, he said something strange,” Ethan said, his eyes fixed on the sky, where the tiny white dot of a satellite moved against the field of fixed stars. “He said you weren’t really my mother. And that Dad wasn’t really my dad.”

  Beside him, Lisa sighed.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Your father and I adopted you, Ethan,” Lisa said.

  “And you were going to tell me this when?” His voice shook.

  “It’s complicated,” Lisa said.

  “I want to know everything. What happened to my real parents. Why that man tried to kill me. Why I can do the things I can do.”

  “Those are a lot of questions.”

  “I’ve got plenty more.”

  “This is going to take a while.”

  “I don’t have anything better to do.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you everything. We should have told you before.”

  “Yes, you should have,” he said. “Maybe Dad would still be alive then.”

  She gasped at that, and he knew that he had hurt her. He told himself he didn’t care.

  “Whatever your father and I did, we did out of love for you, Ethan,” Lisa said after a moment. “You have to believe that.”

  He just stared silently upward.

  Finally, haltingly, Lisa began to talk.

  First she told him about the origins of Conversatio and the doctrine of the second Son. She told him about the centuries-long war between Conversatio and the Congregation, which had once been, and in its secret heart still was, the Inquisition. She told him about Grand Inquisitor and the agents it dispatched to track down and eliminate high potentials— boys believed to have a strong probability of being or becoming the Antichrist . . . and, if identified early enough, their mothers. Then she told him about how Conversatio agents like herself and Gordon were assigned to be foster parents to high potentials rescued from the Congregation or snatched away to safety before the Congregation could get to them. As for his real parents, she didn’t know anything about them: not who they were, where they had come from, or even if they were still alive. This was for their own safety, for the Congregation would try to strike at Ethan through them if they could.

  “Like they tried to get at me through you and Dad?”

  “Exactly. Only we’re trained to protect you. They’re not.”

  “Yeah, great job there, Mom,” he said bitterly.

  He felt her stiffen beside him and struggle with tears before she spoke again. “I know you must feel hurt, honey, even betrayed. But if we’d told you this too soon, you might have inadvertently given yourself away to Grand Inquisitor. GI monitors phone lines, Internet connections, wireless networks, ATM machines. It sees and hears almost everything, and then it puts the pieces together in ways that you and I can’t begin to imagine.”

  “So you had to lie to me in order to protect me, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, that’s about it. And I won’t apologize for it, because we did it out of love.”

  He thought about that for a while. “Does love make everything all right?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  He shrugged. “So you think I’m, like, this second Son or something?”

  “I don’t think it,” she said, and he felt her turning on her side to look at him. “I know it. What you’ve done—they’re miracles.”

  “Right,” he said, his voice full of bitterness again. “Some miracle worker I am! I couldn’t even save Dad. I’m not really mad at you, Mom. I’m sorry. It’s my fault he’s dead. This has all been my fault.”

  “Ethan, no!”

  “Yes,” he insisted, turning to face her now, the two of them just inches away from each other as they lay on the cool grass of the backyard. And then he told her about Peter, how he had “fixed” him. And how he had done the same thing to the killer. And even how he had chased down Gordon’s receding soul . . . only to stop at the end, faced with a barrier he lacked the courage to breach.

  Lisa put her arms around him as he poured out his confession between sobs. “Honey,” she said at last. “You may be the second Son, but you’re also a nine-year-old boy.”

  “I can’t do it,” he said, pulling away from her and turning skyward again.

  “Can’t do what?”

  “I can’t be who you want me to be. There’s so much hate in the world! Not just between people, and races, but whole countries. Even Conversatio and the Congregation. Am I supposed to fix all that? Mom, I can’t even stop myself from hating. It’s true. I know the man who killed Dad hung himself, and I’m not sorry for it. What does that make me? Am I any better than him?”

  “Honey,” Lisa began.

  But Ethan interrupted her. “Am I supposed to make sure everyone in the world gets enough to eat? Cure AIDS and other diseases? Protect the environment? What am I here to do? Because nobody told me. Nobody even asked.”

  “I think you’re here to lead people back to God,” Lisa said softly.

  “That’s it? How?”

  “Just by being yourself.”

  “Right. Everybody’s going to follow the nine-year-old. That really would be a miracle. And you know what? I could do it, too.”

  “Do what?”

  “All of it. Make them follow me. Cure sickness. Feed the world. I ca
n do it all, Mom. It’s easy. I can see right to the heart of things. How every-thing . . . is put together, I guess you could say. It’s hard to explain. But I could do to the whole world what I just did to the people in the hospital and everyone else involved in Dad’s death. Mess with their minds, their memories. Make them different people. Better people. Only, it wouldn’t be right. It’s, like, cheating, sort of. That’s not why I’m here. I know that much. It’s not to use my powers in that way. But then what?” He practically shouted the question skyward, as if demanding an answer from God Himself.

  In the neighboring yard, a dog began to bark.

  “Great,” he said, then began to laugh despite himself.

  Lisa laughed along with him.

  They laughed for a long time, feeling the sadness shed from their hearts.

  Then Ethan did what he’d known he was going to do from the moment he’d seen his mother in that hospital bed. Nothing he’d heard since had caused him to change his mind. On the contrary, he knew that Grand Inquisitor was scanning for him even now, and that there was no escaping its attention. He could have eliminated it from the world, and the Congregation too, but that wasn’t his purpose. He wasn’t here as God’s hit man. He was confused and afraid, but at the same time determined. The ghost of his father had given him the idea.

  So he reached out with the part of him that was more than human, the part that was not bound in space and time, and he removed all knowledge of himself from the world. He vanished from the databanks of Grand Inquisitor, from the files of the Congregation, from the archives of Conversatio. And so did Lisa, and Gordon.

  Then he removed all knowledge of Conversatio, the Congregation, high potentials, and the second Son, and anything related to them, from Lisa’s mind. In the blink of an eye, she became exactly what she had always pretended to be.

  Finally, Ethan turned his powers inward, upon himself.

  Forget, he thought.

  And there was darkness.

  CHAPTER 14

  2014

  The line of cars at the entrance to Lake Olathe was moving at a steady pace under the blazingly hot August sun. Peter, behind the wheel of the Prius, had collected their identity cards already, and when they reached the checkpoint he passed them through the window to an armed and armored private security guard from Oz Corp, whose eyes and nose were hidden behind a dark visor that doubled as a monitor linked directly into the vast database of the Department of Homeland Security. The visor cast a shadow over the rest of the face, obscuring identity and gender alike. But when the guard ran a hand scanner over their cards, pallid flashes like heat lightning from the underside of the visor cast illumination enough to reveal a peppering of stubble on the sweat-beaded cheeks. Ethan, from the air-conditioned depths of the backseat, felt sorry for the guy. Though it was only ten o’clock, the temperature outside was already pushing a hundred. The white body armor they wore was supposedly air-conditioned and designed to reflect solar radiation, but the guard didn’t look as if either method was keeping him especially cool.

  Finally, satisfied, he handed back the cards, stepped away from the window, and stiffly motioned them on.

  “Man, those munchies seriously creep me out,” said Peter in a low voice as he drove away, using the derogatory nickname the Oz employees had acquired, derived from “munchkins.”

  “Shh,” said Maggie, who was sitting beside him in the front of the car. She cast a nervous glance over her shoulder. “They record everything, you know. Do you want to end up on a watch list?”

  “Bullshit,” said Peter. “They can’t eavesdrop on private conversations between American citizens, Mags. That’s the law.”

  “Yeah, but we’re in a public place. That makes this a public conversation.”

  “No, we’re in my car. That makes it private.”

  “It’s your parents’ car, not yours.”

  “So? That doesn’t change anything.”

  “Plus, the window’s open.”

  “Oh, please.”

  Ethan sighed as he listened to his friends argue back and forth. It seemed to him that they’d spent the whole summer so far arguing about one thing or another. It didn’t really matter what. It was starting to get old. Not only that, it was enough like flirting to make him feel jealous, which was, he told himself for the hundredth time, ridiculous. He and Maggie were a couple and had been for almost two years now. Peter understood that. Besides, he was Ethan’s best friend. He would never try to come between them. But just the same, it was annoying—probably because things were kind of tense between him and Maggie right now.

  Actually, they’d been tense for a while, since before graduation. Now the tension was ratcheting up even higher as summer accelerated toward its inevitable conclusion, when the two of them would go off to different colleges: she to the University of Chicago, he to MidAmerica Nazarene, right here in Olathe. He was afraid that she’d meet someone in Chicago, that he would lose her. But of course he couldn’t say any of that out loud. It made it sound as if he didn’t trust her. And he did.

  It was all those other guys he didn’t trust.

  But Maggie was sensitive that way. She always seemed to know what was on his mind. She’d tried to reassure him that just because they were going to different schools didn’t mean that they were going to break up. He pretended to agree but deep down wasn’t so sure. For a while now, he’d had a feeling that things weren’t going to last. That with the end of high school, other things were also coming to an end.

  “Well, of course they are,” Peter had said in exasperation when Ethan had tried to explain the feeling to him. “That’s what happens, right? One thing ends, another begins. We’re not kids anymore, Ethan.” He, too, was off to Chicago: to DePaul University, on a golf scholarship of all things.

  That was one more thing for Ethan to worry about. Maggie would likely see more of Peter than she would of him. But what could he do? Ask them to stay away from each other?

  Not for the first time, he wished that he’d been able to afford a school in Chicago too. But though his grades and scores had been good enough, the fact was that there just wasn’t enough money. Ever since his dad had died of a heart attack ten years ago, things had been tight for Ethan and his mom. MidAmerica was a fine school, but even more importantly, it was an affordable school. In the end, that had been the deciding factor.

  They pulled into the parking lot, found an open spot, and unloaded their gear: a beach umbrella to keep the worst of the sun at bay; rolled-up beach towels; a blanket; backpacks bulging with sandwiches, snacks, sun block, bathing suits, portable MP5 players, and books; and a cooler packed with ice, Cokes, and bottles of water. They had come to stay. He and Peter grabbed the cooler, Maggie took the umbrella, and the three of them lurched off through rows of parked cars that were already radiating a palpable heat.

  The beach was an obstacle course of spread blankets and towels and colorful umbrellas sticking up at odd angles like trees in a fairytale forest. Screaming and laughing kids cavorted in the sand and in the glittering water, under the watchful eyes of lifeguards ensconced on high white perches and so swathed against the sun in towels, hats, and dark glasses that it was difficult to tell without some study whether they were male or female. Roaming along the beach, equally difficult to differentiate by gender at a distance, were more white-armored munchies from Oz Corp. Ever since the last terrorist attack on the homeland, in 2010, when over a dozen recreational areas and amusement parks across the country had been simultaneously targeted by suicide bombers, local police forces had been augmented by Oz, the largest private security firm in the United States, which had been hired as a kind of home guard by the government under the emergency powers of the amended Patriot Act. Some called it a private army whose primary loyalty was to its founder and commander, “Papa Jim” Osbourne, rather than to the country, but one thing was certain: There had been no more attacks on U.S. soil since Oz had come on board, and its presence had freed up the National Guard for the war in
the Middle East. Yet despite their undoubted efficiency, Ethan agreed with Peter: The munchies gave him the creeps.

  The three friends picked their way gingerly to an as-yet-uncolonized patch of sand, where they promptly planted their flag—or, rather, umbrella. As Peter and Ethan set up the site, Maggie went off to the locker room to change into her suit.

  “You’re a lucky man, bro,” Peter told him as they watched her go.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So why the long face? You’re not still worried about the fall, are you?”

  He shrugged.

  “Dude, she loves you.”

  “She told you that?”

  “No, but I’d have to be blind not to see it.”

  “People change—ow!” Peter had punched him in the arm; Ethan rubbed the spot, surprised and angry. “Are you nuts?”

  “I’m fine. You’re the crazy one. The only way Mags is going to break up with you is if you drive her off. And the only way you’re going to drive her off is if you keep acting like such a dickhead.”

  “It’s not that simple. I—” He broke off as Peter drew back his fist.

  “Dude, don’t make me hit you again.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said hurriedly. “Jeez, I thought you golfers were supposed to be all calm and placid.”

  “This is calm and placid. You should see me when I get upset.”

  “No, thanks. Here, help me roll out this blanket.”

  Maggie came back as they were finishing up, a flustered expression on her face. “You’ll never believe what I just saw in the locker room!”

  “Is this a trick question?” Ethan asked as Peter guffawed.

  She frowned at them both, then went on. “A couple of munchies came in while I was changing.”

  “Wait, were they . . . ?”

  “Yes, of course they were women.” Maggie rolled her eyes. “Anyway, there was another girl in there, working. Mopping the floors. They went up to her and demanded to see her card.”

  Peter shrugged. “They have the right to ask for ID. We had to show ours just a minute ago.”

  “Hold on. So she shows her card, right, and the munchies do their scan thing, and then one of them says that she checks out okay, but it seems that a family member is on the watch list.”