The Salvation State

by Marcus Damanda

  Caroline shook her head, a stark refusal to entertain the possibility.

  “Even if they did, Caroline, I don’t think they care. They’re here for Rebecca.”

  The words registered, but they made no sense. Had they known she was off campus? Had they been looking for her? Had Brian been caught and made to confess? They were the only possibilities.

  “What?” Rebecca managed anyway. The elevator hit the second floor again. Praise be to God, it kept going. What am I even hoping for at this point?

  “Straight back to your room for you,” Paula said to Caroline. “And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll fake being asleep under those covers until bells tomorrow morning. Got it?”

  Caroline nodded emphatically. “Wh-What about … Rebecca, though?”

  Rebecca watched the number two go dark and the number three light up. She felt the elevator jerk again as it stopped on the third floor. “I’m already busted. Don’t worry about it.”

  “That’s right,” Miss Paula said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “But—” Caroline started.

  “She isn’t busted just yet.”

  At those words Caroline looked as confused as Rebecca felt.

  But when the elevator door opened, she left them without another word. She ran without looking back.

  Chapter Nine

  Cotton Candy

  Rebecca wasn’t allowed in the attic. She guessed it from the moment she first saw her mother unhook the drop-door ladder. At nine years old, she had never questioned the strange rectangle in the ceiling between her parents’ room and her own. She certainly didn’t intend to spy. But, emerging from her bedroom a little earlier than usual on a Saturday, she saw her mother use that stick, the one with the metal catch at the end. She saw the ladder slide down. What was seen could not be unseen.

  There was a place up there. A new place. She asked what it was.

  Mom looked surprised but not particularly upset. “Nothing,” she said, coming back down from the three steps she had taken. “Just a bunch of old junk. Not for you. We’ll clear it out one day.”

  Rebecca stared at the open rectangle. “Let’s do it today. I’ll help.”

  Mom adopted her firm voice. “I said there’s nothing up there for you.” Then, somehow sad, she said, “Nothing for any of us.”

  “I want to see,” she said.

  “Of course you do,” Mom said, her tone longsuffering. “Listen, honey. Your dad would be very unhappy if he even knew you saw this. You’d be in trouble.”

  That was nothing new.

  “I’d be in trouble,” Mom said.

  Rebecca frowned. Mom in trouble? How did that work?

  Mom was using the stick to cover the hole in the ceiling again. “None of it would make any sense to you anyway. One day, when you’re old enough, maybe we’ll go up together. I’ll explain it, and we’ll clean it out.” Then she added, as though to herself, “We should clean it out.”

  Rebecca couldn’t help herself. “You hiding a bomb up there or something?” She put one hand on a hip, as she had sometimes seen her mother do.

  Mom came to her, knelt in front of her, took her shoulder, and leveled her gaze at her. “Maybe I am. You don’t want it to go off.”

  Rebecca knew when her mother was telling stories. Mom affected a certain voice when she did that. Rebecca also knew when her mother’s voice heralded real punishment and when she was still in the bluffing stage. But this voice, this dark urgency, she had never heard before.

  Mom said, “I won’t clear it out without you. I promise. But now is not the time. Do you understand?”

  Rebecca nodded. “Yes, Mom.”

  “Don’t you lie to me. Never lie to me. Will you let it be? For now?”

  Rebecca nodded again.

  And for a good long time, she’d done as she had been told. She’d left it alone. Much longer than “for now.” She wasn’t tall enough to get to the ladder without her mother’s help anyway. But it never left her mind. Occasionally she might put it aside for an hour, or even a day, but always the thought returned: What are my parents hiding in the attic? The question was now impossible to wholly dismiss, especially since its answer was so unaccountably forbidden. Especially since she passed under the attic every time she left her own bedroom.

  By the time she was eleven years old, she simply could not take it anymore. She was nearly five feet tall, and she’d never forgotten where her mother had put the hooked stick. Every time she passed under that rectangle in the ceiling, it called to her, promising the end of mysteries.

  Eventually there came a night when Pastor Davis was sick and called Dad in to do the evening services. With nothing prepared, he had to leave early to get ready, and so Mom and Rebecca would be home alone for a couple hours. When Mom went out for her four o’ clock run, Rebecca knew she’d be gone for forty-five minutes before coming upstairs to have her shower and get dressed for church.

  The stick was in the closet with the brooms and mops. Mom or Dad had tucked it way in the back, where it looked just as forlorn and as useless as a stick could look. Rebecca needed the little step stool, also in that closet, to successfully hook the rectangle in the ceiling. She was glad of her reflexes, honed in kickboxing class, when the ladder rushed down at her. She caught it and led it the rest of the way to the floor.

  She felt a little guilty going up. Far more than that, though, she was anxious and excited to see what lay beyond the small barrier. She told herself her parents should not keep secrets. She told herself they would never know.

  She had never been in an attic before. She had no idea what the pink fluffy stuff all around her, wrapped in some kind of thick tin foil, was. It was as though cotton candy coated the very walls. It lay in frozen pink river rapids between the floorboards. The attic was musty and smelly, as if somehow older than the rest of the house.

  Light came in through a window, and she suddenly realized she had known about this place forever. She’d seen that window from outside all her life and had never questioned what lay beyond it. It had always simply … been there.

  But there was nothing forbidding about the place—at least, not at first glance. There were cardboard boxes, most of them sealed with packing tape. Some had been sliced open, but their lids were closed and their contents hidden. There were soft green-black trash bags, tied off and containing God knew what.

  There was a headless, legless mannequin on a stand, wearing night clothes. There was also a circlet of gold strung about its neck with a heart-shaped fastener at the middle, right between the—

  No, not night clothes. A dress. A dress from “back then.” It was light purple—no, lavender. It was beautiful. Sinful.

  It was sleeveless, and the middle cut past the neckline. The fastener would have rested against bare skin.

  Girls used to actually go out wearing dresses like this. People said, once upon a time, girls could wear the same things in public that they wore when they were home alone or with their families. She thought about herself wearing such a thing at one of the youth-group socials.

  No way, she thought. Everyone would stare and I’d die.

  She ran her fingers over the fabric, knowing it was too big for her anyway. But it really was pretty. It might fit her in a few years, if she should ever dare such a thing.

  As her fingers reached a seam along the sides, her gaze settled on another box, this one wooden, at what would have been the feet of the mannequin if it had any feet. It rested on the floor between the musty rows of cotton candy, next to a snapped-shut plastic rectangle that might have been an old-world laptop.

  Except it wasn’t. Daddy still had one of those ancient laptops that he used only for typing, and this thing was definitely not one of those. It was pink and black plastic. The logo was almost unreadable until she held it up to her eyes and the dusty, filtered light.

  Be Beautiful.

  Rebecca was used to that adjective being applied to the wonders of the world, acts of kindness, th
e nature of God. The idea of opening a box that could make a person beautiful, unto herself, was simply magical. And wrong.

  They went around practically naked, her father had told her. They painted their faces to attract men or boys, who would come like sniffing dogs. A lady’s virtue was cheap and didn’t last. The world was unsafe.

  This, too, was definitely a relic of the past. Her parents had taught her all about Old America, and about the face paint called “makeup” women and girls had once used to corrupt or conceal the visage bestowed upon them by God. If Rebecca opened the box, she could become what her father called a “whore”—which she took to be a lady of the old world. The bible did talk about a whore in Babylon, and Babylon had not existed in thousands of years.

  She could hardly contain her excitement. She opened the box and was instantly disappointed.

  Whatever had been inside at one time had long since dried up or simply flaked away. Tiny bottles that looked full turned out to be empty when opened, their glass stained with the residue of long-since evaporated potions. Flesh-colored powders of varying hues had totally congealed and broke apart like pie crust when Rebecca touched them.

  She opened the smaller wooden box, hope fading. But this time she gasped in delight. Gold and silver necklaces—fake, probably, but still wonderful. Rings too—much different than wedding rings—with stones of all different colors and shapes. And bracelets! Rebecca had heard about bracelets but never seen one. Even though it was wrong, she’d always wanted to wear bracelets.

  Rolling her sleeves back, she put on every single one, until she had four on one wrist and three on the other. They slid up and down her arms as she moved, some sparkling in the half light, others glinting dully. Two were just some kind of leather with beads. They were all so—

  Beautiful. Yeah.

  There was even a little pocket mirror in there. When Rebecca swept it up to polish the glass clean with her hand, she uncovered … just what on Earth were those things?

  I ought to know. Mom and Dad taught me all about this stuff.

  Maybe they were some kind of brooch. Or clasp. Or lapel pin. But they were too small for that. Tiny bejeweled dangly things with pins on the end, each capped off to keep you from pricking yourself. She decided to poke them through her shirt.

  She must have lost complete track of time. And her hearing too. She didn’t know her mother was there until she knelt next to her, still sweaty and drippy from her run.

  Mom was smiling, eyes glistening. “Rebecca, you’re killing me.”

  Rebecca didn’t say anything. Not even “Totally busted,” which was her go-to line, typically accompanied by a winsome guilty blush that got her out of—well, nothing really, when it came to her parents. But it worked at school sometimes.

  Instead, she held aloft the prettiest of the dangly things, a pattern of amethysts woven together with silver string.

  “Your grandmother’s,” Mom said, pointing to a picture at the base of the mannequin.

  It showed one of Daddy’s “whores,” wearing the very same dress they were kneeling in front of, her face all painted. She had darker hair than Rebecca’s, more like Mom’s—wavy, not straight. But Rebecca did see herself there, if only in the cheeks and the chin. The whore was young, and she was … dancing, hand in hand with a man, one foot kicked back. Grinning and having the time of her life.

  Words at the top proclaimed: Dance Till You Drop, runner-up: Riley Garland.

  “That’s Grandma?” Rebecca asked.

  Her mother nodded. “See? She even liked the same earrings as you.”

  Earrings. Of course. How stupid.

  In the picture, Grandma was wearing the amethysts.

  Mom picked up the mirror and took the earring from Rebecca’s hand. She pushed Rebecca’s hair back on the right side, held the amethysts gently over Rebecca’s unpierced earlobe, and showed Rebecca her reflection.

  Rebecca imitated her grandma’s smile.

  But then, far too soon, Mom was taking it all from her. The earring, the bracelets—then rolling her sleeves down. Hastily, muttering to herself, she packed the box back up more or less in the same state in which Rebecca had discovered it. Rebecca knew better than to try to stop her.

  “What happened to her?” She thought her mother would not answer. She would not lie, but she often kept silent on matters Rebecca was not supposed to know about. Like her grandmother.

  “She was punished after the Scourge, in the first years of the Revival,” Mom said. “For not accepting the changes.” She clicked the jewelry box shut. “For not accepting a lot of things,” Mom added, almost to herself.

  Like Daddy? Rebecca wondered. Again, she knew better than to actually ask.

  But she knew all about what Revival “punishment” meant. Everyone did. Punishment meant put in jail forever—or even being killed. Teachers agreed it amounted to the same thing. Rebecca knew she was far from alone when it came to people who would never see their grandparents. Times had been horrible, wars within wars.

  “We have to get rid of all of this. And soon. Daddy says so, and I—well, I do agree with him, Rebecca. It’s just hard.”

  Rebecca nodded solemnly.

  “It’s not safe, keeping it. Next week, Rebecca, it all goes away. You’ll help. Okay?”

  She nodded again. And suddenly, a new question occurred to her. A safe one. She pointed. “What’s all this cotton-candy stuff?”

  Mom released a half laugh in a huff. “That’s insulation. Just something that keeps us safe.”

  Chapter Ten

  Digitally Nowhere

  The officer who had accompanied Mrs. Black to Damascus Teenage Retreat had a name, but it was seldom used. As the official law enforcement liaison to Reverend Black and Angel Island, he was a collector, typically referred to as the Dogcatcher. In conversations with friends and workmates, he was usually just DC. And that worked for him. Those were even his real initials, if anyone should ever care to read the insignia on his vest.

  At present, over the now-feeble protestations of Mrs. James, he was stalking the resident halls, having summoned the other prefects into action. Two he had stationed in the stairwell, one at the bottom, and one on the third floor. The other four were staked out at each of the ground-level exits.

  “You’d do well not to miss anything,” he’d told them. “Young Paula is about to find out what it means to aid a runaway Forgotten, a lesson that will be driven home over the next—oh, thirty or forty years, give or take the ten for behavior. Trust me, you do not want to keep her company.”

  He’d called in for another cruiser, just to be thorough. The police department at Masada HQ had been happy enough to comply. Nothing much ever happened in Masada these days. “We’ll send two,” they’d promised. “Blessings of the Lord.”

  Meanwhile, all of the other residents were right where they were supposed to be. He knew because, simply, he was equipped to know it. He had been since Open Light of Day had become the law of the land eighteen years ago. His pocket database updated automatically with each arrival and departure from DTR, Prodigal Sons, and every place like it in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. And his scanner verified their presence. Through plaster walls and behind wooden doors, the scanner zeroed in on body heat. Floors and ceilings, he checked as well. No one was hiding anywhere but in their own beds.

  Click, click, click, click…

  Once it located a subject, it drew a fluttery crimson holographic image of her, all while a second analytic within the device reported the person’s identity and matched it to the database. And so, as he strolled the residency halls of DTR, every time he passed a door, a red holograph floated out into the hall to greet him. Sometimes the image consisted of one girl; other times it contained two. They were labeled.

  Myra Visto, age 16, faking asleep, fully conscious.

  Jennifer “Jenny” Dinsmore, age 13, fully conscious. Near hyperventilation.

  Haley Haszard, age 15, faking asleep, fully conscious.
<
br />   Laura Damiano, age 13, fully conscious. Praying?

  All had the covers drawn over them, right to the shoulders. Kids knew about scanners and tended to do what they could to muddle the image. Which wasn’t much.

  Obviously they could tell something very bad was going on.

  But not for you girls, he thought, admiring one of the older ones. Someone is going to be a very happy husband, he reflected, when that one turns twenty-two. So pretty.

  Bailey Timmons, age 17, faking asleep, fully conscious. Angry. Crying.

  Click, click, click, click…

  Just behave yourselves, little girls. Keep your halos on straight, at least for tonight. This will be over in no time.

  ****

  The heat-sensitive scanner, however, could not cut through the fog created by the fluffy pink insulation of the old university’s largely untended attic. It was there they huddled as the officer continued his work. He passed right underneath them, the scanner’s loud clicking proclaiming his presence.

  Eventually Paula and Rebecca wordlessly agreed it was time to let go of each other and do something. They were going to have to move. It wasn’t like the attic would go unsearched very long.

  Paula wondered how Rebecca had thought to come up here in the first place. Had she been here before?

  As for herself, and in spite of her earlier words of reassurance to both Rebecca and to Caroline, Paula had drawn a complete blank. Rebecca had evidently realized this and seized control of their escape plan as soon as Caroline had left. Which was odd, because there was no way Rebecca could know why she was hiding to begin with.

  When the clicking of the scanner receded to nothing, Paula glanced at Rebecca, who was holding her hand over her mouth to stifle her heavy breathing. With her other hand, she pointed deeper into the recesses of the attic, away from the entrance they had utilized just ten minutes ago, when Rebecca had crawled up on Paula’s shoulders to push the ceiling panel loose and bring the ladder down.