The woman's body burst into fire. Her garment flared and the burning tatters floated away, spinning, racked by fleeting gray shadows.
The charred corpse crashed to the floor by the drain. It was little more than a mass of runny charcoal. The brightness grew dimmer and dimmer, and the fleeting letters fainter. The air smelled, oddly, not of burning meat and bone but of cleansing ions after a rain.
The Advocate rose shakily to his feet and staggered over to where the guards gathered their guns up. One said: “Sir, was she a demon?"
The Advocate shook his head. “No,” he said, clearing his throat.
“Then what was she, Sir?” Believers, they needed an answer.
The Advocate looked through them, past them. He would go to his office, put on street clothes and walk out of the city, looking for their enemies, in the hope of making peace. It was the one thing this woman had shown him how to do. If he ended up in their gas chambers, so be it.
He said to nobody in particular: “How blind of me not to have seen it, when I am the one charged with finding causes for Reprieve, and I missed this one."
“Was she a devil, Sir?"
“No,” he said softly, “she would have been our reprieve."
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Reprieve Page 2