This Sin Called Hope (New Reality Series, Book Seven) by Anna Mayle

by Anna Mayle

So many others, names he could no longer remember, but he remembered their eyes, and that night all of them were on him, loving, sad, angry, desperate, all asking the same thing. “What made you the one? What made you eternal when we were all so finite…so human?”

  Enoch couldn’t answer, and he couldn’t escape. He never would.

  A soft voice issued from the com in the Network hub across the room. Words that faded to humming which became the soft trill of a violin, Enoch didn’t know whether to yell or thank Jacobi. Instead, he curled down, let the hammock close over top of him and let his own silent tears fall where no camera could see.

  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  * * * *

  Morning came too soon. Enoch’s skin felt stiff with the salt from his tears and something was poking at his hammock insistently. He rubbed his face and pushed the hammock open. Cora stood there, legs tight and face red.

  Oh. “Chamber pot is in the corner behind that big rock.”

  She nodded and fled. He wondered how long she’d been trying to wake him.

  Once their morning ablutions had been taken care of, Enoch fed her, tried and failed to make her hair do anything but tangle more, and took her above ground to survey the wreckage that had once been a perfectly functional front lot.

  Cora stepped outside and began picking up the bits of metal and cloth that had been scattered in the fight. When she screamed and jump, Enoch figured she’d found her first body part and sent her back inside for a shovel while he gathered up all the corpses and their random detached pieces. He stripped anything salvageable from the bodies and piled them all together far and away from the shop.

  While he dug a pit, Cora continued gathering everything else into piles. When it was deep enough he built up the bottom into a large fire, stoked it hot as it would go, and pushed all of the bodies into the hole, tossed the unsalvageable clothing and some dry cactus skeletons over them to keep the flames going, and left them there. It would take care of the flesh if not the bones. They could be scattered later.

  Repairs took a bit longer. The girl followed him through them all. She didn’t know a starter relay from a crank shaft and thought an L141.31Kit looked identical to the L100.726Kit though even the grips themselves were clearly different, but at least she’d found the missing door when she’d tripped over it.

  And she wouldn’t stop talking about the hacker.

  He wanted her to stop talking about the hacker.

  “Who is Jacobi? Why doesn’t he come out of the Network? Is he in the lake too? Is he an Angel? Jacobi says you’re an Angel. Are there other good Angels like you and Jacobi? What do you do out here? Jacobi says we’re going to go north and see the Walls there! Why is north different from south? Jacobi says it’ll be dangerous, but I don’t mind. Do you practice forbidden arts? Can I learn?”

  His head was swimming with questions and the words ‘Jacobi says’. More than once he bit back the temptation to tell her ‘Jacobi says shut up’ and lock her in her settlements transport. Without the door though, it wasn’t a feasible plan.

  That evening, Enoch tried once again to tame Cora’s wild hair, finally gave it up for lost and shaved it off. She promptly donned his spare goggles and decided she was going to be an Angel when she grew up.

  If she didn’t stop talking, she wouldn’t grow up.

  Bedtime had never been such a relief. He got her into the hammock, patted her newly hairless head, careful to avoid the large cut on the back and the bruises at the temple, then readied his dose and escaped to the Network.

  He found Jacobi curled behind his desk, feet tucked up in the chair, a book open in his lap. All around him, various windows with various programs running floated; one of them played a soft song Enoch remembered hearing somewhere long ago.

  “What are you doing?” he asked the second little trespasser in his life.

  Jacobi blinked and turned from the book to smile at him. “Reading up on the United States of America. It was big, wasn’t it?”

  Enoch brought another comfortable chair into being and sat opposite the hacker. “You could say so.”

  “And strange!” he replied excitedly. “They worshiped mountains that grew in formations like faces, and had a giant green woman with a torch protecting their harbors. I wonder if it was mobile… I am sad about the poor eagles though.”

  Enoch would not laugh. He would not. It would only encourage him. “What about the eagles?”

  “Apparently those people were crazy. They shaved their heads!” he cocked his own head in thought. “Maybe it was a holy ritual.”

  Enoch bit the inside of his lip and managed to hide his snort at that. “Bald eagles weren’t really…you know what? Never mind. Yes, poor eagles. So why are you reading my books?”

  “Studying up for our journey north,” Jacobi explained and went back to the book he held.

  That again. Enoch steepled his hands in front of him and reminded the hacker, “I don’t remember saying yes to that.”

  “No, Cora did.” Jacobi informed him, flipping a page.

  “You two have fun.”

  “You’re coming too.” He was told in no uncertain terms. “Someone has to protect the kid. I’m all squishy and shit.”

  “Yes,” Enoch said with no hint of belief in his voice. “It has nothing to do with the fact that you aren’t physically present. Where are you anyway?”

  “From the map in this book, I think I might be in Virginia, in the state of Richmond, I think. So get ready.”

  Enoch didn’t bother correcting him about the location. He had something more pressing to clear up. “I’m not going.”

  “We outvoted you,” Jacobi dismissed.

  “This is not a democracy.”

  “It worked for America.”

  “Not so much in the end,” Enoch mumbled.

  “Why?”

  “Bald Eagle revolt, Page 98.” Enoch informed him, and quickly left the public area for a quite beach he’d programed once upon a time. When had he lost control of his life?

  * * * *

  Jacobi stood a few hours later. He had searched that book and others all top to bottom, and run extensive searches across the Network, but couldn’t find a single reference to the birds fighting back against their oppression.

  Annoyed he singled in on the focal markers of Enoch’s avatar, and brought himself to the infuriating Angel’s side.

  The man passed a hand over his face before he raised his head. Jacobi stared. “Were you crying?” Jacobi asked, thrown by that thought.

  Enoch looked equally baffled. “I was swimming.”

  “It’s a Network program.”

  “I programed it to be wet.” The Angel spoke slowly, as if to a small child. “Why did you come here?”

  “You lied. There was no eagle revolt,” Jacobi explained, accusation thick in his voice.

  “No,” Enoch corrected. “Why did you come to my shop? Why did you track me from the Wall?”

  “You were interesting.”

  “So you wanted to do what exactly? Study me?”

  Jacobi shook his head. “I wanted to know you. You were so obviously trying not to be known.”

  “Didn’t you even once stop to think there might be a reason for that?” Enoch asked, he sounded tired. No, worn.

  “It seemed like a cry for someone to see you. Curiosity is a part of human nature after all.”

  “What would you know about human nature?” Enoch scoffed.

  A breeze caught the blond curly hair of Jacobi’s avatar and pulled it in front of his face. He tucked it behind his ear and sat beside his Angel. “I’m human.”

  Enoch shook his head. “One instance isn’t a study, it’s an anomaly. You’re a spider. Your webs link to thousands of flies as if it lets you read their innermost selves.”

  “I would never hurt them. That analogy suggests malice.” Jacobi was hurt; it wasn’t the first time his good intentions had been maligned. “Why do you keep doing that?”

  “Apologies t
hen, perhaps a puppet master, claiming to know what a wooden heart feels.”

  “I…” Jacobi had come to be annoyed at Enoch, when had that turned around on him?

  “You hide from them,” Enoch accused.

  A tightness gripped Jacobi, pain. “I don’t want to be. I have to, I’m weak, it’s dangerous…”

  “You’re a coward riding on the shirt tails of people brave enough to face the world you won’t!” Enoch snarled and stood, kicking sand with the motion. “Risk is a part of humanity. Pain and danger and death,” his voice threatened to break on that word, it was barely there, but Jacobi heard it. Jacobi heard everything, “are all a part of humanity.”

  “You hide too,” he reasoned softly.

  Enoch sighed and looked out over the programed ocean, far away at something only he could see. “I had a long time to know them, lived amongst them, be hunted with and by them. I spent enough time to know I want nothing to do with them.”

  “But you still keep up the Network.”

  He nodded, but said nothing.

  “Did I make you cry?” Jacobi asked quietly.

  “You made me laugh. The girl makes me laugh. I haven’t done that in a while,” he sighed. “You also irritate me.”

  “Then we’re well matched,” Jacobi told him with a small smile, “because you are very irritating.”

  “What am I meant to do with the girl?”

  Jacobi had thought he’d already answered that. “We’re taking her with us.”

  “North.”

  “Yes, to see why the Walls are killing off settlements, and if the plague is really returning. I’ve also found through the memorandums between the governors that they suspect it may be an attack.”

  “From who?”

  “Does that matter?” Jacobi didn’t see why it would.

  “You want to bring a child, a young girl, to an area that is possibly plagued and potentially the target of a biological attack.”

  “Yes, after you inoculate her of course.”

  The Angel tensed. “What?”

  “I read through your files, I know you can do it.”

  “Do you ever sleep?” Enoch asked, agitated again.

  “Off and on.” Jacobi shrugged and tucked his errant hair behind his ear again. “I don’t like sleeping.”

  “Why?”

  Now it was Jacobi’s turn to be awkward and stand-offish.

  “Nightmares?” Enoch asked, his tone almost understanding.

  “No,” he admitted. “It’s just…sometimes…I feel like when I sleep I just…”

  “What?”

  “Don’t exist anymore.” He didn’t mean to sound so haunted. A change of subject was in order. “Why don’t you do it for everyone?”

  Enoch obviously saw his tactic.

  “The inoculations,” Jacobi pressed. “You could literally save the world.”

  “I don’t believe this world is worth saving.”

  He couldn’t believe that, never. There was so much worth saving! To illustrate it, Jacobi pulled up a view screen and trained the underground security camera at the pea pod of a hammock with a distinctive child shaped lump curled up inside.

  “They aren’t that cute once they’ve grown up, you know.” Enoch rolled his eyes. “It’s a defense mechanism. Most babies are cute, whatever the species.”

  “I bet you were a beautiful baby.”

  Enoch squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. He was going to have that song stuck in his head for days.

  “What?” Jacobi sounded worried.

  “It’s a song. My mother used to sing it.”

  “See! Memories! That’s worth saving!” He jumped on the idea so quickly Enoch didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth of it. How memories haunted, how they hurt. Jacobi must have kept himself locked up tightly to not understand the darkness in the world and every pestilent creature on it. “So saving the world is a good thing.”

  Enoch shook his head and changed his tactics. “It wouldn’t work. There are too many people and they’ve done too much harm. Even if I had enough of the inoculations to save everyone, they wouldn’t change. They wouldn’t stop hating each other, hurting each other, stealing and robbing and…”

  “Raping?” Jacobi supplied quietly.

  “Figuratively and literally,” Enoch agreed.

  “How much do you have?”

  The hacker was like a dog with a bone.

  “How many can you save?” Jacobi pressed.

  “None of them,” Enoch insisted. “If the plague is back, good riddance. Maybe it’s strong enough this time to take me too and this will all be over.”

  “Why would you want it to end?” The hurt and confusion was thick in the question.

  Enoch rubbed his face with both hands and stared out at the false ocean, the horizon that lead nowhere, hid no adventures or secrets, the waves that held nothing in their depths but more water.

  “Because I’m five hundred years old,” he admitted. Jacobi had gotten into all of his files. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t read, but apparently the hacker didn’t understand what it meant. Honestly, how could he? How could anyone alive today understand? They were all too young. “I’m ancient, and I’m tired.”

  “But you know so much.”

  “If knowing is half the battle, the other half is forgetting,” Enoch tried to explain. “I have never been very good at forgetting.”

  “The Once World?” Jacobi asked, scooting a little closer.

  “The once world, once people, once me, you and Cora will be gone eventually, you’ll be once people too. I will still be here.”

  “But why take that out on the rest of the world?” Jacobi’s words might have been harsh if they hadn’t sounded so lost.

  “I’ll inoculate the girl. I’ll go north with you. Just please, for a moment, stop talking.”

  Jacobi nodded, eyes wide and searching.

  Tired of being stared at, Enoch reached out and pulled the blond head down to lay against his shoulder. They sat in silence and watched a fake sun set over fake water sitting on fake sand in fake selves.

  It was almost enough.

  Chapter Seven

  Preparations weren’t difficult once his mind had been forcibly made up for him. Cora’s inoculation would take five days and five injections over which time Enoch readied the shop to be locked down, ran maintenance on the turbines, fitted his repairs cyc with a side car for the girl, and checked all of the equipment he would need.

  Cora was never far, except for the few minutes before and after each injection when she decided she didn’t like either of them anymore. She followed Enoch wherever she could, picked things up, fetched tools and then ran to fetch the right one, again and again. The child had the mechanical aptitude of a…well, he supposed of a child. Enoch wasn’t used to dealing with humans let alone their miniatures.

  He gave her the shiny bits of metal and precious stones they’d collected from the pockets of the dead Angels. He offered her a bit of chalky white rock to draw on the floor with. The only thing that kept her occupied long was the water, but inevitably she’d want to help him, more than she wanted to splash or draw or play with rocks. When he’d told her that he didn’t want her help welding because he didn’t want to find himself or his shop on fire, he’d set her off crying again.

  “What do I do with it?”

  “Play,” Jacobi suggested.

  After Enoch’s glare at that suggestion, Jacobi had taken up the role of playmate. When she wasn’t attached to Enoch, Cora could be found at the Network monitor, talking to Jacobi, her little hand splayed in the glass as if she might be able to touch him. As disruptive as they each were to his routine, Enoch was becoming accustomed to their presences in his life. That was dangerous.

  Each night when he entered the Network after putting the slip of a girl to bed, Jacobi was waiting for him. He would look up from behind Enoch’s desk where he’d inevitably surrounded himself with screen upon screen of code and content, lay aside
whatever the book of the moment was, and smile widely. “Realized that you love me yet?”

  It must have been an inside joke, something he’d read somewhere or heard somewhere that Enoch just didn’t recognize, because his candid response of, “No, hacker,” was always met by a wider smile and a slight giggle. Inevitably that was followed by a rapid barrage of questions and a debate about the value of human life that made Enoch want to toss the adorable hacker through one of his stained glass windows.

  The new routine fell around him like a sheer and weightless mantle. He didn’t notice it at first, not until each day began to look just that little bit different. He found himself becoming amused by the little girl’s fumbling attempts to be an Angel like him. He enjoyed their meals and lessons. Eventually, Enoch stitched together a hood, coveralls and leg wraps for her as protection during the journey. She’d squealed, bounced and thrown her arms around his legs and he found that he enjoyed hugs as well.

  That night when he entered the Network, he was met with a larger, more solid hug and froze, nose buried in golden curls. “What are you doing?”

  “You’re awkward at life, but I love you for it,” the hacker whispered into his ear.

  Enoch patted the other man’s slender back hesitantly.

  Jacobi snugged closer, “You can hug back you know. You’ve already killed one of my avatars. It’s not like you have to worry about breaking me.”

  I’m more worried that you and the girl are breaking me. Enoch admitted, but only to himself.

  “Realized that you love me yet?”

  He could feel the usual smile against his shoulder.

  “No, hacker,” he replied by rote and the smile widened against him. The giggle was breathy. The other man’s body, too close. When Enoch’s own began to react to their proximity he tried to pull away but the hacker wouldn’t budge. “I said no, I don’t love you,” he tried again.

  A shiver ran up the slight man’s frame and he rolled his hips forward with a soft, breathy gasp. “I’m trying to decide just how important it is that you love me before the sex part.” He groaned and raised one leg to wrap around Enoch’s back, bringing them even more tightly together. “You’re so…you. Skies, everything about you is…you make it really hard to be good.”