The Night We Burned

by S. F. Kosa

  I explain how we heard about Arnold’s death and how he was an ex-member of the Oracles of Innocence.

  That’s when she perks up. “I was trying to tell Chief Ransom all about it! It’s that cult for sure. I could tell he thought I was crazy.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  She laughs. “Oh, honey. Why wouldn’t he think that? Chief and I go way back. He breaks up my solstice UFO-watching party every single year, just to be an asshole.”

  “Ah. But you have information you think is useful to the investigation?”

  “I know it’s useful,” she says. She’s drinking something; the wet smack of her lips startles me just before she speaks again. “You see, Arnie told me stuff. About that night.”

  “The night of the fire on the compound?”

  “Mm-hmm. I’d say I know more than anyone alive, but I guess that’s not right.”

  My stomach drops—please please please don’t start talking about bad math. “What do you mean?”

  “Arnie never liked to talk about this stuff, see. He loved those people. Every single one of them. And he loved that place. You had to know him—he never would have hurt a fly. He should never have been in jail!”

  “It sounds like you really loved him.”

  “He wasn’t perfect—drank too much, for one, but who doesn’t every once in a while, you know?” She pauses, and I hear the slosh of something near the phone, then a stifled belch. “He was too good for this world. And they took him.”

  Hope pokes its way to the surface of my mind, like a fragile pea tendril seeking the sun. “Who took him?”

  She sighs, long and unsteady. Takes another swig. “It’s all connected, you know? All coming back around. The visitors, the agents. You know.”

  “The visitors and the…agents?”

  “No one believes in the visitors, but they’re real. And those Oracles? I think some of them were the agents.”

  “I’m not following. Like, government agents?”

  “No. I’m saying those three weren’t the only ones there that night!” she barks. “See, Arnie knew all of them. And he didn’t like to talk about all of it, but one night, he loosened up while we were watching the stars, and he told me: there weren’t enough bodies.”

  Saliva pools on my tongue. “I’m sorry?”

  “In that barn that burned. Arnie knew everyone on that compound. Every living soul. And they only pulled thirty-three bodies out of that place. Or maybe thirty-four? Something close to that.”

  Oh god. “But it was a fire. Everything burned. Isn’t it possible—”

  “That’s what everyone says, but come on! They found everyone else, even those they couldn’t identify, charred bodies, whatever. That’s why Arnie never knew who exactly got out. But he’d narrowed it down to a few names.”

  “Which names?” I murmur, wishing I hadn’t eaten anything earlier.

  “Oh, I wrote it down somewhere a few days ago, just what I could remember. I’ll find it for you. The six who were never identified. It’s two of them who got out.”

  “That would be great,” I choke out. Miles cannot be allowed to talk to this woman. Nutty as she is, she’ll just confirm what he already suspects, which will make him more determined to figure it all out. I feel like I’m breathing in the smoke of that night, all over again. “And that’s a really interesting theory, that someone escaped the fire, especially because the door was barred.”

  “Arnie told me it wasn’t the only door!”

  “But the other door was always locked,” I blurt out.

  “How do you know that?” she demands.

  My watch chirps, warning me of an irregular heart rhythm. “I think I read it in that book about what happened?”

  “Yeah, that lady had no idea,” Gina grumbles. “I’m telling you, the visitors got a few out of that fire. And now they’re agents, working for the aliens. They’re coming for anyone who could out them to the rest of us. That’s why they got Arnie.”

  My hope springs back to life. Martin did call her a piece of work. “I see.”

  “Are you gonna print what I’m saying in your paper?”

  “We have a lot of other people to talk to,” I say quickly. “If I’m authorized to get a full quote, you’ll hear from me again. I’m just not sure which direction the story’s taking right now.”

  “This is the direction,” she yells. “This is the story! The agents are here, and they got Arnie!” She begins to sob. “They got him. And he never hurt anybody.”

  “Thank you for taking the time to speak to me. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  I end the call and lean against the wall. My heart rate is nearly 130, and it’s not because I just spent ten minutes talking to a grieving, unstable woman.

  No.

  It’s because buried in all that crazy, she does know something. And if that something gets to Miles, it’s one step closer to me.

  I desperately need to find Miles another lead.

  Chapter Seven

  The Retreat

  January 1, 2000

  Parvaneh was spat from her sleep like a mouthful of sour milk, a spray of sharp exhaustion. Eszter was shaking her shoulders, her shadowed face round but for the nub of her chin. “Come on. We have to go,” she whispered.

  Down the hall, Parvaneh could hear whispers and the creak of plywood frames as women in other rooms climbed out of their beds.

  “Octavia said we could sleep in—”

  Eszter was still shaking her. “She’s having the baby.”

  Parvaneh brushed off Eszter’s hands and sat up. “How far is the nearest hospital?”

  “Come on. Everybody has to help.”

  “Help with what? With the birth?” Parvaneh made a face.

  Eszter was tying a tan cloth over her head, keeping her thick hair away from her face. She yanked Parvaneh’s hair cloth off the hook on the wall and shoved it at her. “Maybe instead of worrying about yourself, you should focus your energy on the new soul the deep consciousness is sending into our care.” Smoothing her palm over the pudgy swell of her belly, she gave Parvaneh an apologetic look. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I was freaked out the first time too.”

  “Wait. The first time? How many have there been?”

  “Since I got here, just two. Beetah had a little girl in May, and Goli had her boy in July.”

  Parvaneh glanced up the hall and lowered her voice. “Not to be nosy, but who knocked them up?” No one on the compound seemed to be coupled up, but there were a few pregnant women and several men around, some cuter than others, she supposed. “Were they pregnant when they joined?”

  Eszter turned to her. “I never considered it my business, honestly.”

  Parvaneh narrowed her eyes. “Yeah right. You just don’t want to gossip, but come on! I saw Ladonna walking in the woods with Vahid yesterday, and a couple times at dinner, I’ve seen Mir staring at Kyra like he wants to eat her alive, and I just wondered—”

  Eszter pressed her lips together and gave Parvaneh a playful look of warning. “Later, okay? Unless you want to explain to Darius that you missed the birth because you were too busy asking about everyone’s sex lives?”

  Parvaneh snorted. “No thanks.”

  “Then let’s go.” Eszter pulled her meditation rock, rough edged and bright blue, from under her pillow and dropped it into the baggy pocket sewn into the front of her robe.

  Parvaneh stared at the uneven outline of the stone resting on the lump of Eszter’s gut, swallowing down the taste of envy. It was bitter, just as Darius had warned her it would be, when she’d asked when she could have a stone. He’d put his hand on her shoulder and asked, “Why do you want one?”

  It had felt like another test, hers to fail. “I came here to touch the deep consciousness.”

  “Words are shells, Parva
neh. Our true intentions give them meaning. And right now, your words say to me ‘gimme, gimme, gimme,’ but I hear you offering nothing.”

  She’d felt the truth of his words in the hot sting in her eyes and the cold throb in her chest. “I’m trying,” she had whispered.

  He’d squeezed her shoulder. “That, I feel. Which means you’re right where you’re supposed to be.” Then he’d warned her about the poison of envy. He’d said he could see that venom working in her soul.

  Parvaneh had bowed her head so he couldn’t see the defiance she had to muscle down. But he’d sensed it anyway. He’d tipped her chin up and pressed his thumb between her lips. The edge of his thumbnail scraped the roof of her mouth. Parvaneh gasped at the salty taste of his skin and the urge to reel backward just to have her body to herself again.

  He’d pushed her against the wall. “Shh,” he said quietly. “Understand the lesson I’m offering you. It’ll come if you stop fighting.”

  After several long seconds, she forced herself to relax her face, her jaw, even though her heart still kicked insistently.

  Darius smiled. “If you ever want to approach the deep consciousness, you have to submit yourself to it entirely. Some people, it takes a day. Others? Years, Parvaneh. As your guide, it’s my job to know you. To understand how you fit into this body and when you’re ready for the next step. Do you trust me to do that?”

  She nodded, her tongue curling docile and slick against the bend of his knuckle.

  He pulled his thumb out of her mouth. “Then don’t ask when you get a meditation stone. When that time comes, it’ll be obvious to everyone, and there will be no need to ask at all.”

  Fabia had gotten hers the very next day, after she’d fainted during the midnight session. Parvaneh’s eyes had locked with Darius’s as he’d lifted Fabia’s limp body from the floor and held her against him. Parvaneh had felt something pull tight in her abdomen, a feeling she didn’t recognize or like; it made her want to scream or cry or maybe run. And the next day, during afternoon session, when Parvaneh had showed up late with chapped, raw hands from doing the lunch dishes for the entire compound, he’d called Fabia up to the front of the meeting room and said he’d had a revelation the night before, of how Fabia was a perfect manifestation of spiritus. He’d explained that they were one body, united to reach the deep consciousness, and Fabia was their nerves or nerve endings or something like that.

  Parvaneh had stared at Fabia’s feet as she’d preened next to Darius, practically swooning against him as he presented her with the rock, painted forest green with black paint pressed into the carved markings. She simultaneously wanted to punch Fabia in her stupid face and collapse to the floor out of sheer exhaustion. Since she’d gotten her name, she’d thrown herself into the chores. It wasn’t just that she wanted to prove she was worthy of being there: Darius had promised that work prepared the mind for the meditation sessions, and pure spirits—scrubbed clean of the worries that caked on and dried hard with laziness and spare time—could slip their physical boundaries and touch that vein of unadulterated being they were all reaching for. If that were really true, Parvaneh thought, curling her fingers against her palms and wincing as the movement pulled at the fissured skin at her knuckles, then she should be the one up there getting a rock, and Fabia should be in the dorms scrubbing toilets.

  But no. Fabia had gotten the job Parvaneh had wanted—she got to spend all day playing with little kids—and still she whined at night, quietly, as they’d washed their faces and brushed their teeth in the large bathroom of the women’s dorm, about how she hated changing diapers and wiping snotty noses. But in front of Darius, she was all duty and devotion, and there she was, getting her rock.

  Tadeas had gotten his a few days later, and in typical Tadeas style, he’d fallen to the floor and kissed Darius’s feet, nearly making Darius fall over with his slobbering-puppy love. Darius had hugged him, slapped him on the back, shaken him by the shoulders. Like he knew exactly what the guy needed. Unlike Fabia, Tadeas worked his ass off, milking the three cows, tending the twenty-odd pigs, shoveling their shit and pouring slop into their troughs, mentored by Kazem, whose tattoos peeked out from under the loose, mud-flecked sleeves of his robes, who cried every meditation session, and who hadn’t said more than two words to Parvaneh since she’d been named.

  It had made sense when Tadeas got his meditation stone. Parvaneh had told herself not to be jealous. Except now she was the only one on the compound who didn’t have one. Well. The babies and toddlers didn’t have them, she supposed. They had their own special nursery where all of them slept, tended by Octavia and Ladonna and a rotating cast of Oracles—including some of the men, maybe because they had fathered at least a few of the kids—who got to play with and cuddle them. Apparently, Darius didn’t think Parvaneh was up to the job, so she got to scrub dishes and wipe tables and peel potatoes, while Basir, the bald cook who sounded like Tony Soprano, barked orders.

  Parvaneh tied the tan cloth over her hair and slid her feet into clogs. She shivered as she gathered with a few of the others near the door, forcing her face into a placid, friendly smile that would tell everyone she was fine, she was serene, she was ready to help. She wished it were genuine; she hated being this fake person, this failure. She wanted her smile to be real, like Eszter’s was. Like Octavia’s was.

  Behind her, Fabia was grumbling about the hour, how she’d been up meditating until two, how her back was hurting. Before Parvaneh could turn around and snarl at her, she heard Eszter murmuring comforting words, praising Fabia for her dedication and promising her there would be a reward for it, telling Fabia that her presence would be valuable at the birth.

  Ladonna, her hair barely tamed by a tan headband and tufting out on either side of her face, her own huge belly taking up the space of another whole person, smiled in the dim light and said, “All right, girls. Do we have everyone?”

  After everyone murmured their presence, all eight of them yawning and rubbing at their eyes, Ladonna shoved the door open and welcomed a blast of frigid air. The compound was lit by a dim, flickering, central light on its high metal pole and the glow of sunrise against the purple-black sky. Their clogs crunched through the fine crust of frost that had settled overnight. Parvaneh pulled her arms from her sleeves and shuffled along, hugging herself with her head bowed—until a scream brought it back up again. The sound had come from the place where they all spent every moment of free time.

  “She’s having a baby in the—?” Parvaneh began before being interrupted by Ladonna.

  “She’s been at it since three. Won’t be long now.”

  “It took my mom two days to have me,” said Fabia. “She loved to remind me of that, like I owed her something.”

  “It takes as long as it takes,” said Eszter. “But this isn’t Octavia’s first delivery, and she told me her first was fast too.”

  Ladonna laughed. “Xerxes is always in a hurry. That little boy has never been slow a moment in his life.”

  Fabia groaned. “He never stops talking. ‘I only have one mouth and one nose, so why do I have two eyes and two ears? Can I set dust on fire? Where do words come from? Can I have a baby when I grow up? Does the deep consciousness have a face? Is it a boy or a girl?’ And that was just yesterday.”

  “Those are actually pretty good questions.” Parvaneh winced at the faint sound of another scream and wished Ladonna would slow down—this vastly pregnant woman was marching them toward the source of the eerie wails like she was on a mission. “Especially for such a little kid.”

  “He’s the oldest,” Ladonna said. “The first baby we ever had on this compound. He’s used to talking with adults.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen him in the dining hall,” said Parvaneh. Running around, stopping only to shovel a bite into his mouth before taking off again. “He’s a cutie.”

  “He gets mad when I don’t have the answers to his questions,” s
aid Fabia. “He kicked me when I couldn’t tell him how many drops of water were in the ocean. And Octavia didn’t even punish him.”

  “You’re just as much his mother as she is,” said Eszter as they reached the big double doors of the meeting hall. She paused with her fingers wrapped around the bracketed metal handle. “But you know that we don’t punish children. They’re closer to the deep consciousness than we are, and we should be listening to them, not inflicting on them the same wounds of our past.”

  “Makes sense to me,” mumbled Parvaneh, remembering the sting of backhanded slaps that came sudden and unexpected. She inhaled a big breath, readying herself as Eszter and Ladonna pulled the doors wide.

  Unlike the rest of the buildings on the compound—which were single-story, prefab things almost like sheds, kept warm with generators and propane heaters—the meeting hall was more like a barn. Wide-planked wood floors, wooden walls, a catwalk and loft above the foyer. Windowless and candlelit, it was the only building on the compound that wasn’t wired for electricity. Darius had declared it a sacred space, to be untouched by technology that was useful but sapped spiritual energy. The only exception to that was the electronic combination lock on the door that led to his private office space at the back of the building, behind the altar.

  Despite the cold outside, the meeting hall was startlingly warm as they bundled inside and closed the doors again. The air was close and humid, like the inside of a mouth, and Parvaneh blinked up at the hazy curl of perfumed smoke rising from the incense burners at the edges of the cavernous room.

  Like they always did when she entered this space, her nose itched and her head began to ache, but she didn’t say a word about it out of fear it would be yet another black mark on her slate, yet another way she was not ready. She glanced over to see Eszter’s hand dip into the pocket over her stomach. Fabia had her meditation stone cradled in her hands already. Ladonna and Kyra, both pregnant themselves, held their stones in one hand. Their other hands rested over their round bellies. Parvaneh slid her palm down the hollow of her own abdomen, wondering what it felt like to have another person growing inside such a small space.