Rise

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “Go on.”

  “The Oneness teach that the source of our unity is something called the Spirit. Some people call it God. It’s the life force animating all life in the universe, breathing through everything, if you will—”

  “The breath you felt bringing you back to life?”

  “Yes.” She nodded, and her face showed relief that he comprehended and that he was making an effort to understand.

  “They also teach that while the Spirit is holding the universe together, and in a sense directing things and uniting things, there are other forces trying to tear it apart. Demons are a manifestation of that, but so are other things . . . disease, death. The most common words they use for that force are darkness and chaos.”

  “Common enough ideas in the world of men.”

  “True,” Julie said, “but it’s one thing to think things are a certain way. It’s another thing to be filled by them. To be part of them.”

  She looked down at her hands, her face showing her struggle to put words to what she wanted to say.

  “And it’s another thing again if the Spirit, who is a part of me and is holding us all together, is not just some impersonal force, but is a person.”

  Andrew thought that over.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Julie asked. “When I became One, I knew something came into me—changed me—filled me. Something that was life and connectedness. I didn’t know someone had come in. But that’s what I know now.”

  “You’re possessed,” Andrew said bluntly.

  “We are all meant to be.”

  They stared at each other.

  “If you had to choose between me and . . . him? Is that the right word?”

  “‘Him’ is better than ‘it.’”

  “If you had to choose between me and him, you would choose . . .”

  “Him.”

  “And ‘he’ is different from Jacob because . . .”

  “Don’t do that, Andrew. Don’t draw that comparison.”

  “I don’t know why I shouldn’t.” He sat back, his head reeling. “You are telling me that I don’t just have my wife back, I have my wife and some stranger who commands her loyalty more than I do, more than I can ever hope to, if I have to guess.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Julie said. “It’s different this time.”

  He stood and tried to keep his voice level, tried not to yell. “Why? Why is it different? How is it different? You’re telling me that you’re back, and you’re willing to live with me, and our family is more important than anything, and you were wrong, and yet now you have some other Person in your life whose word is god. So promise me, Julie: promise me that this Spirit of yours will always put our family first and will never take you away again.”

  She just stared at him, dry-eyed—and he wished she would cry. He wished there were tears in her eyes to show conflict, to show that she didn’t want him to yell at her, to show that she was wavering at all. But there were no tears. Just stoic courage and determination.

  “No!” And this time he yelled. If he’d had something in his hands, he would have thrown it. “No, I can’t do that again!”

  He turned on his heel and stormed out the door, leaving Julie alone in the house with Miranda.

  With Miranda, and . . . and the other Person living in her.

  What was that even supposed to mean?

  It was freezing outside. He stuffed his hands under his sweater and charged down the sidewalk, distractedly noting that a few cars were out, headlights sweeping the dark street—it was early morning, then, and people were on their way to work while his world fell apart.

  All over again.

  Chapter 6

  The day Mother Isabel cut off Franz Bertoller was the day Teresa walked into her quarters to check on Niccolo and found the nobleman there, staring intently at her patient—who was awake, and staring intently back.

  When she walked in, instead of being startled, Franz turned and demanded, “Why is he healing? He ought to be dead. I saw the condition he was in when I brought him. What is giving him the strength to overcome?”

  Taken aback, Teresa sorted through several possible answers and only voiced one: “What are you doing in here?”

  He ignored her question. “Tell me why he is recovering.”

  “I don’t know. But you, sir, are where you do not belong and are not welcome. Answer me: why are you here?”

  Perhaps aware that she had some power in this situation that he did not, Bertoller toned himself down. “I was concerned for the boy’s welfare. It has been some time since I was allowed to look in on him.”

  “You have not been allowed it now, unless you have gained some permission I am not privy to. But I very much doubt that.”

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked, and she saw the threat and desire in his eyes. “Does it bother you to know how easily I can access your quarters when I want to?”

  “Get out,” she said. “Monster. Get out.”

  “Why would you call me that?” He took a step closer. “What do you see in me?”

  “I do not wish to talk to you.”

  “Do you want to know what I see in you?”

  “Get out.”

  She cast her glance around the room, looking for something—anything—she could use as a weapon. To defend herself, if need be, or to chase him from the room if he refused to go.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said, his voice inexplicably soft, “I will go. And I do not want to harm you.”

  Those words shook her, because he meant them. And she glimpsed something in him as he spoke the words: an enormous capacity to harm, and to desire to harm, and a vulnerability toward her that made him unwilling to tap that capacity.

  He left.

  And she trembled—with anger, with a forceful lack of understanding, with not wanting to understand. Why was he vulnerable toward her? Why?

  She went to Mother Isabel and relayed the whole encounter, and this time, Mother listened—perhaps because she could see how deeply troubled Teresa was. That this went far deeper than vanity. Teresa was responding to something in this man that was truly dangerous. Mother made no commitments, but Teresa knew she went to talk to some of the others immediately afterward, and within a few hours she found Teresa at work in the sick hall and made two announcements: that Niccolo was going to be moved out of Teresa’s quarters and that Franz Bertoller was no longer welcome at the abbey. She would send a messenger and tell him so.

  But the look on his face haunted Teresa, and the haunting grew the more she thought of it. Both sides of what she had seen: His ability, and desire, to cause harm—something she could only identify as evil. All human beings dabbled in corruption, but few seemed so wholeheartedly a part of it. And the other side, the vulnerability. The openness. To her.

  A vulnerability that was something like love.

  The haunting took the form of a question that shaped itself over days, especially after she knew the message had been dispatched and that, if he respected it, the nobleman would appear in the Way of the Sun no more: if a man so lost to evil was vulnerable to her, even in love with her, did she not have the responsibility to try to help him? To use this one open door to draw him back to the light?

  Niccolo was a welcome distraction. The turn which had so fascinated Bertoller came fast and advanced even more quickly; he went from thin and wasting—despite the food he ate—to gaining weight, colour, and energy. In a matter of days he was awake more than he slept, and Mother Isabel was entirely right to move him from Teresa’s quarters. He needed to be where others could keep a closer eye on him and where he could be given something to do. As his healing progressed, his personality began to show—a cautious solemnity, born perhaps of too much responsibility and too little care, gave way to curiosity and natural exuberance. Mother Isabel put him to work in the kitchen, but one too many spilled kettles and curious explorations into the pantry and the flour drawer ended with his exile by the exasperated older women w
ho worked there. Deciding that his scrawny legs and skinny back were stronger than they looked, and that sun and air and exercise would only help his already remarkable recovery, Mother changed his responsibility to water boy. He hauled buckets from the well for hours, with plenty of being sidetracked in the gardens and courtyard and surrounding hills, but he tended to sidetrack only when the need was not urgent—so no one minded.

  Teresa loved to see him entering the sick hall with water and scampering off again with the empty buckets. Though at first he tended to make his deliveries quickly, within a few days he was lingering at the side of the sisters who were tending the sick, and then taking up a dropper and offering water to some of the younger ones himself. Soon he was as familiar a face in the hall as any of the sisters.

  Bertoller’s absence was not marked or minded.

  Only in the middle of the night, when she rose for prayer in the moonlight, did Teresa think of him. She prayed his name and thought on his face, and speculations as to how she might help him or what might have made him so soft toward her ran roughshod over her prayers. She sensed no answers, no guidance. But when she slept, more nights than not his face marked her dreams.

  It occurred to her that she might, after the manner of women, be growing infatuated with the young nobleman. That perhaps Carmela’s family’s scheme had found its object after all, if the target had gone slightly awry. But surely that could not be. Surely her heart was only yearning to save one who was deeply lost.

  She wished she felt that she could trust herself. But who could truly know her own heart?

  Perhaps some great saint in ages past could have delved the depths of her own motivation. Teresa could not, and the inability humbled and stymied her.

  For multiple reasons, then, it was best that Bertoller was long gone. She wondered if he had left the country entirely and gone back to his own place of origin, somewhere in the north. Carmela’s family would know, but they made no effort to come to the House of Death, as all the country was calling the abbey now. Rumours began to reach them that the people expected the plague to spread to the sisters themselves, and no one would survive. The Way of the Sun would become the Way of the Forgotten.

  Clearly, the rumourmongers had not seen Niccolo running to and from the well, bounding over the low courtyard walls, chasing grasshoppers in the sun, appearing from the vineyards with a grin and a dirt-smudged face whenever he was wanted.

  But Niccolo was an aberration. Even a freak. No matter how the others were tended, as the incense burned and the haze and fever choked the hall with heat, no matter how many ladles of water were given, bowls of porridge were fed, songs were sung and hands were held, the others continued to die.

  At first, most of the patients to come to the abbey had been elderly. Now, as their bodies were moved to the graveyard, more and more of their spots were taken by children.

  Teresa could not sleep. It was a hot night, and her thoughts were full and restless. She rose and took to the corridors, following her feet wherever they led.

  They led her to the sick hall.

  The hall was in deep shadow, though groans and rustling indicated that many of its inhabitants did not truly sleep. A few of the sisters tended patients in the farthest corners, but Mother had ordered that as often as possible, the sisters sleep at night. Though it meant some would die alone, even the Oneness could not go on forever tending the sick without taking some care for themselves.

  Teresa walked the rows in the darkness, praying silently over the restless and the still. In the darkness, made murkier by the still-lingering haze of incense, she nearly walked right into another night roamer—one she had not seen in part because he was so small.

  “Niccolo,” she whispered. “What are you doing here?”

  Large eyes gleamed up at her. “I do not want them to die,” he said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “Why did I heal, and they do not?”

  “I cannot say. We all wish we knew that.”

  “The painting helped me,” he said, in a tone of voice that said his words were conclusive. “Make more of them, and bring them out here. They will help people heal.” He spoke in a whisper, as though he didn’t want to wake anyone, but so loudly that his voice carried to the far corners of the room.

  “There are already paintings out here,” Teresa said. “You know that; you’ve seen them.”

  “Not those,” Niccolo insisted. “More like the one you painted for me.”

  Teresa was going to tell him it wasn’t exactly for him, but she refrained—perhaps, in the Spirit’s wisdom, the painting had been for him.

  There was no question that Niccolo’s change for the better had happened shortly after she left it where he could see it.

  Her hands tingled uncomfortably, even painfully. “Why are you up?” she asked.

  “I want to help them.”

  A rebuke rose to her lips, but she didn’t voice it. How could she? They all wanted to help. And Niccolo’s desire was so pure, so urgent, that she could feel it like a pulse in the air.

  And then there was the dream.

  Maybe, against all appearances, there was something he could do.

  She didn’t expect that he would tell her what that something was, but he did.

  “You will teach me to paint as you do,” he said. “And you and I will both paint pictures that make the Spirit visible, and when the people see them, they will be healed.”

  “Is that what I did?” she whispered. “Did I make the Spirit visible?”

  His bad attempt to stay quiet rasped harshly. “Of course.”

  “And you think we can do it again?”

  But she knew the answer to that.

  She’d seen the dream.

  If anyone in the abbey had the latent power to bring healing amid the sights and stench surrounding her, it was Niccolo.

  But surely before he could do such a thing, he must open his heart and be Joined to the Oneness.

  She began to say so, but something in his eyes caught her off guard.

  Here, in the dark, in the haze and the sickly smells, she could see his eyes as though they glowed. They were blue—intense blue, and shifting like smoke or like fire. Yes, like fire. In the blue she could see what looked like tendrils of flame, like the Spirit itself . . .

  She shook her head to chase away the vision. She was not sure she could handle seeing what she was seeing, and she wondered if it was a mere illusion, brought on by exhaustion and hope and all the other things she was feeling.

  His eyes were just a boy’s eyes.

  But she had seen it.

  She was meant to ask him, “Are you One, Niccolo? Do you wish to become One?”

  But she could not. The question was not right—it was out of joint, somehow, with what she had just seen. The boy was filled with the Spirit. With a flash of insight she realized that in trying to make Niccolo come into the Oneness as she understood it, she was about to do what Mother Isabel had warned her not to do—to try to control the Spirit.

  He, Mother Isabel had called the Life Force that animated and filled and inspired her. As though the Spirit were a man.

  A wild and unpredictable man, no more to be controlled or leashed than the very wind.

  Her throat tightened.

  She would very much like to know such a man.

  Niccolo was peering curiously at her.

  “You should return to your bed,” Teresa said. “It is late, Niccolo. Sleep.”

  “You also.”

  She cuffed him lightly. “Don’t you know better than to command your elders?” But she smiled in the shadows, and she thought he saw it.

  * * *

  April fretted over what the Spirit had spoken to her outside the clinic all the way home, and continued to do so after they arrived and Melissa retreated to her room. Richard was too deeply engrossed in the medical news to ask April why she had run from the waiting room or why she seemed so agitated now, although under normal circumstances he would hav
e noticed. Mary was likewise preoccupied.

  The results of the latest testing had come in: things were bad, and the doctor wanted Melissa to start radiation in three days. He’d given her pills to start taking.

  The march to death was fully underway.

  One word: Julie.

  Julie held the answer, somehow. The key.

  The key . . . to something April was only beginning to grasp. An understanding, a full realization or manifestation. Of just what they were who called themselves Oneness; of just what the Spirit was, this being they breathed like air and took for granted as they did blood in their veins or clouds in the sky; of what their battle really—truly—meant.

  And the key to what was still burning inside April with a power she was growing afraid of.

  April went up to her favourite spot on the roof, not bothering to bundle up despite the wet chill in the air. The shingles were slick. She stayed up there only a few minutes before jumping off a low point and walking down the cobblestone street. Too much energy. Too many questions.

  She had no idea how to find Julie. Chris claimed the woman had been resurrected after her murder at the hands of some of Clint’s—Franz Bertoller’s—goons. He’d been told by an eyewitness, a boy Chris said was some kind of watching angel. Apparently he had run into a lot of those.

  Her feet picked up speed, and she broke into a run. It felt good to move, to fly through the cold, to throw herself into the pull of gravity and pelt downhill.

  When the supernaturality of the Oneness had entered her life, she had gladly fled the foster system and a short lifetime of abuse and neglect into its warm arms. Then, supernatural had meant safety, fulfilment, true humanness, love. Everything she’d always known she wanted.

  Not this.

  This was out of control. Frightening. Violent.

  Dangerous.

  The pounding of her feet became the pounding of fists on a wall, on a door, the threat of a beating, the breaking of glass—