Dissension

by Stacey Berg

  DEDICATION

  For the Tank Girls, who set a good example

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  The girl Hunter murdered in the desert was only thirteen.

  Hunter eased the aircar closer to the cliff’s edge, hovering just above the bleached white stone stained bloody by the setting sol. Emptiness spread in every direction, silent and watchful. Hunter felt it pressing down as she studied the cautious tracks she had followed for the last few miles. The girl had tried to obscure them, as she had been taught, but Hunter knew the desert far too well to be deceived. The tracks ended in a patch of scuffed sand. A broken thornbush trailed over the edge where a desperate hand had ripped through it in a last failed grab at salvation. It was obvious now what had happened.

  She settled the aircar in the dry creek bed a hundred feet below. Already the cliff cast a long shadow across the canyon. The day’s heat still radiated from the stone, but Hunter could feel the chill in the breeze probing for gaps in her clothing, a mild warning of the harsh night to come. She had to hurry; the scavengers would gather quickly once true night fell. Even she did not want to be caught in the open then.

  Her boots squeaked a little in the fine layer of dust, though she could have moved silently had it mattered. Glancing up to the torn spot at the edge of the cliff, she estimated the fall line and began to search the bottom in a systematic grid. It was only a few minutes before she spotted the still form crumpled facedown among the rocks.

  The ground warmed her as she knelt. She could see why the girl hadn’t called out for help: her shoulders rose and fell with desperate effort, no breath to spare. Hunter rolled her gently on her back.

  The girl’s eyes were open, pupils dilated wide with shock. Her chalk-­white face was bathed in sweat despite the chill. Even so, when the girl spoke, her voice, weak as it was, came out calm, controlled. “You came for me. I knew you would.”

  “We don’t waste anyone.”

  The eyes, dark as Hunter’s own, closed briefly, dragged open again with an enormous effort. “The others?”

  “Everyone else returned as scheduled.” Eight out of nine, a good outcome for this exercise. Ten sols alone in the desert culled the weak quickly, but none of the rest had called for rescue, and the girl had not had time. The 378s were a strong batch; there had only been fourteen to begin with, thirteen annuals ago. When Hunter had been this age only eight were left. The priests always made more, but it was never quite the same as your own batch.

  “That’s good,” the girl whispered breathlessly. Her eyes wandered up the cliff.

  “Tell me how it happened,” Hunter said, though she already knew. It didn’t matter; there was still a little time, and the girl deserved a chance to make her report.

  “I was following some canids.” She had to stop and gather air. “I thought they’d lead me to water.”

  “That was a reasonable plan.”

  “It almost worked. I smelled the spring, but I let myself get too close to the edge, even though you taught us that the rocks there often crumble.” Hunter had never taught this batch. The girl’s mind was wandering, or maybe it was only the failing light. Snatching what breath she could, the girl continued, “I was so thirsty, and I thought . . . And then I fell. I broke my leg,” she added, glancing at the pink and white splinters thrusting out of the torn flesh. Her eyes came back to Hunter’s. “It doesn’t hurt. I don’t feel anything.”

  “I know.” Hunter edged around a little. “Here, let me help you sit up.” The girl was a boneless weight against her, arms dangling, a handful of sand trickling between limp fingers as Hunter knelt behind her, holding her close. “It’s all right, Ela. You did well.” The lie wouldn’t hurt anything now.

  The girl’s head lolled back against Hunter’s shoulder, eyes searching her face as if trying to focus across a great distance. Her whisper was barely audible. “Which one are you?”

  “Echo.”

  “Number five, like me.”

  “Yes, Ela.” She eased one palm around to cup the back of the girl’s head, the other gently cradling her chin. “Ready?”

  The girl’s nod was only the barest motion between her hands. Hunter let her lips rest against the girl’s dusty hair for a short moment. She felt the girl’s mouth move in a smile against her fingers.

  Then, with a swift and practiced motion, Hunter snapped her neck.

  In a trick of the sunset the spire of the Church glowed, a wire filament burning in a lamp to guide her home. The crossed antennas rose above like a man with arms outstretched to embrace the city. Beneath, the rose window was an eye gazing out at the horizon.

  The sky was dark by the time she stood before the massive doors, staring up and up as she always did when she first returned from the desert. The doors faced away from the compound, setting the line between Church and city with an edge not entirely physical; whoever had built them, long before the Fall, had meant the scale to show a greatness far beyond the mere human. Even before the newer defenses had been added, anyone seeking to enter, friend or otherwise, would have to pause here to consider the indifferent power he faced. The great planks were wider than her torso, bolted top and bottom to make the vertical run three times human height, and the worked-­metal bindings looked as strong today as the day they were forged. In the center of the doors, just along the seam at chest height, the bindings flattened into a pair of panels. A hand there, and the door knew who sought to enter. Many fates had been decided with a simple touch.

  She raised a grimy palm to the panel. Normally there was no wait. Tonight the doors seemed to hesitate, weighing her worth, before the mechanism clicked and they dragged open, permitting her to enter.

  Behind its thick walls the cathedral was cool and dim, conditions that changed little day or night. This was the oldest part of the Church, the hewn stone ancient even before the Fall. Stone walls flanked either side of the cathedral for a few hundred paces. Where they left off, the forcewall, invisible but in some ways stronger than the stone, curved to encompass the whole compound. In the other direction, the Saint’s thoughts carried the forcewall in a vast circle separating city from desert, and the canids and other dangers that flourished in the absence of men.

  Hunter crossed the nave into the sanctuary. Above her head, the vaulted ceilings arched high, a space calculated to awe the men who used to come here in search of something greater than themselves. Now the echoing silence only mirrored the emptiness of the world. Still, it was a miracle of engineering, this huge enclosure constructed from nothing more than small blocks of stone cemented expertly together. The forebears must have glimpsed long into the future to choose this place as their last refuge against the Fall. It was no allegory, the Patri always said, that the ancient cathedral stood intact so long after the metal and glass of newer buildings had fallen into ruins. The Church simply had the capacity to repair the stone.

 
The altar rose in the center of the sanctuary, surrounded by the panels and stations the priests tended. Lights played across the screens in patterns unreadable to a hunter, the priests’ fingers tapping responses with swift precision. Upon the altar lay the Saint. A glittering crown of copper connected her to the machines that preserved the remains of the city, maintaining the forcewall that blocked the wilderness out, the generators that gave the cityens a bit of light in the darkness and heat to keep them from freezing to death in the winter, and more important, powered the crypts where the priests did their work to keep the Church itself alive; for only the Church could preserve what was left of the world. That was the central truth of all life in the four hundred annuals since the Fall: without the Saint, the Church would die; without the Church, the city.

  Hunter bowed her head. She envied the priests, who could know the Saint’s thoughts, or what passed for thoughts in a mind that was so much greater now than human. The Saint spoke to them through the boards, but no one knew where her awareness began or ended, or if anything about it could be considered awareness, the way men conceived of it.

  Once the crown was on, there was no asking.

  The Saint had been a girl once, before she ascended to that altar. Hunter hoped for her sake that it was like a deep sleep, undisturbed by any dream.

  Hunter had spoken to the girl, before she became the Saint, had received her words and judged her. Wrongly, foolishly. She wished devoutly that she could speak with her now, confess, ask forgiveness. If she listened hard enough she could imagine that she still heard the girl’s voice. But that was all it was, imagining, the way a mind would always try to fill a void. To know the Saint’s thoughts was not her place, nor any hunter’s. That she even wished it made her unworthy.

  Yet she lingered, listening, until she knew for certain she would hear no voice answering her from the silence.

  The Patri waited for her at the inner gate, sure enough sign of his concern. He must have been standing there for some time; the motion-­activated lights glowed softly where he stood, but the path back to the domiciles was lost in darkness. Another man might have wished for less illumination: Hunter hadn’t had time to go back to the spring before night fell, and a quick roll in the sand had done little to scrub the blood and gore from her clothes. The Patri only nodded as she came down the steps from the mundane inner doors. “You found her in time, I see.”

  Hunter nodded, drawing the little vial from her pocket with a sticky hand. “Her ovaries were perfectly intact. I left the rest for the scavengers; there was nothing of value.”

  The Patri accepted the bottle without hesitation, secreting it in a fold of his loose-­flowing robe. “What delayed you? The aircar landed some while ago.”

  Dust clung to a wet stain across the toe of her boot. “I’m sorry, Patri. I came in through the sanctuary.”

  She heard the long breath he let out. “Very well. Go bathe. I will have a meal sent to you if you wish.”

  Hunter’s stomach twisted. “Not now, thank you, Patri.”

  His wise gaze was nearly unbearable. “Rest, then. There will be much to do in the morning.”

  Hunter let her normally silent footfalls beat a warning down the stone steps to the baths. Two young priests, interrupted in their dalliance, fled flushed and dripping as she came into the chamber. Steam rose gently from pools heated by the same source deep below that also powered systems throughout the Church, even the altar where the Saint lay. But Hunter did not want to think of the Saint, not now.

  She stripped quickly, dropping her clothes in a pile for the young nun who tiptoed in silently to collect them. The fabric was another miracle bequeathed by the forebears; by morning it would be washed clean as if never worn, blank and unstained. She caught sight of herself reflected on the calm surface of the pool, a body lean and muscled as all hunters were, marred here and there by blood and grime; the face a dusty mask with two narrow channels washed clean beneath the eyes. Ela stared back at her without accusation.

  She closed her eyes and slipped into the water, floating still as death long after the last ripple died away against the stone.

  CHAPTER 2

  She went down to the laboratory in the morning. Winter or summer, the temperature stayed the same here in the subterranean bowels of the Church, cool and dank. In the two annuals she had spent tending the listening arrays in the desert, she had grown unused to such confining spaces. She felt the rock ribs pressing close just behind the ancient plastered walls, a bone poking through here and there where repairs had been neglected. Long tubes crossed the ceiling like veins on the back of an old man’s hand, a bare few still glowing dimly, providing just enough light to let the priests pick their way along the corridor. For a hunter, it was more than enough.

  Doors were set at regular intervals along the hall. Most opened, if they opened at all, only onto the mortuary debris of the Fall. Sometimes the juvenile hunters explored inside those dead rooms, against instructions but well in line with expectations. Hunter herself had done so once. She had found the desiccated remains of two bodies intermingled in a corner, still wrapped in a few scraps of cloth that might have been white once. Far more important, beneath the dead she had spied a rectangular sheaf of prints, fixed together at one end, with a stiff cover protecting the bound edge and sides. Nothing in the Church was worth more than these, save the Saint herself, and she carried it to the priests with an appreciation bordering on awe. That had brought more priests running to search the room for further treasures. There were other items still intact and useful to be collected from the rubble, but it was the papers, burnt and crumbling but still closely covered with the mechanical writings of the forebears, that brought them up in reverent silence. They gathered them up tenderly as children and carried them off to safety, but whether the brown leaves deigned to give up any of their secrets, Hunter never heard, and though she had tried other doors after that, she never found anything else of such value.

  She didn’t care what any of those rooms might hold right now. Instead she strode towards the meticulously rebuilt laboratory at the end of the hall.

  Not a single priest looked up when she entered, though rows of them sat evenly spaced along the pristine tables, bent unmoving over their magnifiers, giving the illusion that the lenses grew out from their eye sockets. The overhead light was dim as the hallway, but each magnifier was lit from beneath, as if the priests huddled over a dozen tiny fires. Their hands worked tiny, delicate instruments, the ends too fine for even Hunter to see unaided. She knew, though, what they prodded and teased beneath the lenses, and how eagerly the next group of nuns waited for them to finish their work and give it over to be incubated through the long winter. The children would look much like Ela, like Hunter herself.

  She stood there for a long time, watching what they wrought with the bloody treasure she had brought them last night. Even when she heard the footsteps coming down the hall, she could not take her eyes off the priests and their work. The Patri stood quietly behind her, waiting patiently, breath even as a metronome. Without a hunter’s enhanced senses he could not, she knew, detect the minute irregularity of hers, the tiny increase in heart rate she could not prevent when in his presence, ever since she had something to hide.

  Since the Saint.

  The Patri let her wait some time before he finally said, “When they told me you missed teachings, I thought I would find you here. Would you like to see?”

  “Yes, please.”

  At the Patri’s nod, the priest at the nearest magnifier bowed and stepped aside. Hunter glanced at his face. He was thin and sharp-­featured, like all his kind, and his eyes were pale, the better to gather the light in this underground lair. His skin was so white she could see the vessels coursing through it, a map to show where to strike, the unprotected soft parts delivered like an offering. She clasped her hands behind her back. He would never be exposed to danger. He had probably not set foot outs
ide the Church since early childhood, instead spending all his waking moments absorbing the teachings, searching for new truths that might be the difference in the Church’s survival. One day he, or one of his brothers, would become the Patri. Hunter could not imagine it.

  He did not meet her eyes.

  The Patri took the stool first, adjusting the dials with an echo of the priests’ skilled delicacy. His hands and face were tinted darker now from the sol he walked in above, but where his loose sleeves fell back the skin showed as white as the priest’s. “It’s been a long time,” he said with a wry smile. The young priest nodded nervous encouragement. The Patri stared down for a long time. When he was satisfied at last, he stood up, holding the stool for Hunter.

  She took the seat tentatively and set her eyes to the magnifier. “If it isn’t in focus, turn the small ring to adjust. Your eyes are sharper than mine.” The lumpy pinkish blob in the viewer gained shape as she dialed the knob. “Do you see those little circles?” She nodded minimally, taking care not to lose her view. “Those are the eggs.”

  “How many will there be?” Her successors, one day, though most of them would never know her.

  “Enough for a few batches, maybe less. Many are lost in the enhancement process. We are not as skilled as our grandfathers, and they were not as skilled as theirs. In the first days after the Fall, the eggs might be taken and the hunter survive. Now we dare not try that. So much easier with priests—­pair a priest with a nun, and every child is another priest. But hunters can’t bear, so it has to be done this way. And of course we only have so many nuns to carry them.” His breath rose and fell in a sigh. She felt acutely how his burdens weighed on him.