1503951200

by Camille Griep

  My father ignored Perry. “No, no, no. That’s not it, Casandra. I want to know how we can use her. Len?”

  “Listen to me,” I screamed. “Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

  The Governor was losing his tenuous grasp on his temper, his face the color of boiled beets. “Enough with the hysterics. And that includes you, too, Perry.” He snapped his fingers at Cedar, who reached into a drawer for a hypodermic of tranquilizer, tilting it at me in warning.

  Len lifted his head, and I caught his eye, shaking my head as slightly as I could. He said, “Cas is right. She doesn’t belong here.” I knew he was trying for intentional ambiguity, but if he’d seen what I had, he’d have known how dangerous pretending was.

  The Governor had gotten up to pour himself a bourbon. He opened the door of the office and lifted the glass to my mother. “Beah, will you and Cedar show Ms. Harris to her room?”

  My stomach dropped. I had stopped crying, but my screams were hoarse. “No, Nelle, get out of here. Now. Run.” She looked around, wild-eyed.

  The Governor snapped his fingers again and Cedar was behind me instantly, holding my hands behind my back. I expected the needle, but the third snap—the one that would have given the body man the go-ahead to dose me—didn’t come. “Governor!” I screamed. “Please.”

  He wouldn’t look at me, just at his glass, already empty. “We’ll try this again in the morning,” he said. “Len, I expect you’ll be sober by then.”

  So he’d known all along. The Governor had become a great many distasteful things. But stupid wasn’t one of them. I turned my back to my father and mouthed for Len to go. I hoped if he could slip out during the ensuing chaos Perry was already spooling up, it was possible one of us might avoid being locked up all night.

  “Nelle can fix the power,” Perry half screamed. Though the Governor’s face was implacable, he was listening. “She can relight the town. We can have another goodwill dinner. Manage the public’s reaction after tonight. Taking away the dance and then the Deacon getting injured, it’s too much. You need to reassert control.”

  The Governor’s short attention span was already stretched. “I’ll think on it. Enough of this for tonight.”

  “Don’t send Nelle away!” Perry said. “Promise me. It’s the least you can do!”

  A hint of a grimace passed over my father’s mouth; old guilt over Perry’s exile, a taboo subject for decades, spilled out in the face of Perry’s desperation. The Governor nodded, and Perry mercifully fell silent.

  “Everybody out,” my father said. “Except you, Casandra.”

  “I’ve given you everything. What more must a father do for your cooperation?”

  I eased myself into an armchair across from him. So unnerved from the waking nightmare of the vision, I started to laugh. The night had gone from unlikely to ludicrous to surreal.

  The Governor set a glass of bourbon down in front of me. “Get a grip, young lady.”

  I took a big slug, prepared and relishing the burn. I sucked some air between my teeth. If I’d had an extra ceremony match I could’ve lit the air on fire. Either because of exhaustion or hunger, the liquor hit me hard and fast. “You think you’ve given me everything?”

  “As I said, tell me what else you need.”

  “How about my childhood back? Or my future? I’m not sure I want this, this gift, anymore. The only person this Foresight has been a gift to is you, and only so you can show off. I want to be my own person, not just a Willis.” It sounded strange coming from my mouth, when what I’d wanted for so long was for Len to stop wanting to be his own person. But I’d finally caught up. I wanted to be more than I was. More than an Acolyte. I wanted to be a leader, not a symbol, to make change, instead of forecasting the future. The kind of community we’d had at the party, I wanted it back. For good.

  “You and your brother are beacons,” he said. “For the Sanctuary. For the whole community. The people need a light in all this darkness.”

  I stood, the bourbon rushing to my stomach where dinner should have been. “I don’t want to be a goddamned beacon. I want to be normal. I want to fall in love and screw up and be loud and not worry if I’m being seen with the right people at the right time. I don’t want to be trotted out for events like a prize pig.”

  “It’s true I’ve asked this family to make some sacrifices,” he said. “But they’ve been for the greater good. New Charity is safe. You have a life people outside of this house envy and people outside our gates can only dream of. Alongside the Bishop, we’ve made New Charity more than just a town in the middle of nowhere.”

  “New Charity is still nowhere,” I said. “Or are you that deranged?”

  “Things have changed,” he said, sneering. “I know Cressyda Turner fills your head with all sorts of nonsense about her beloved City, but that place is dead now. And almost everyone in it. The rest are congregating outside our gates as we speak.”

  “And, what, does that fill you with some kind of perverse joy?” I sat down again to study his face. To try and see some part of myself in it.

  “This has always been my empire,” he said, folding his hands on his lap. “Someday it will be your brother’s.”

  “Which brother, exactly? Perry, who seems to have leapt off the deep end? Or Troy, who you treat like a dog? Or Len . . .” I didn’t want to finish the sentence. “All of us, we’ve always been your pawns. Where does it end, exactly?”

  “I’m only trying to keep Perry busy until he’s ready for real leadership. You know as well as I do he’s still trying to fit in here.”

  “Is that why you sent him to boarding school? He was inconvenient?”

  My father smiled one of his not-nice smiles, and poured us another bourbon. “I reckon you remember who led the Sanctuary before the Bishop?”

  I took another big drink while I dug for the name. “Seamus something?”

  “Good girl,” the Governor said. “He served right after my own grandmama. Do you remember he was a Seer like you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “When Perry was born, old Seamus told your mother that her first child would be New Charity’s downfall.”

  “Downfall? Perry? What, was he going to make everyone wear pocket protectors or something? Kill everyone with an overdose of ennui?”

  “Seamus wasn’t able to tell us how. And though it was a difficult decision, your mother and I decided sending him away was the best option.”

  “Wasn’t it even a little bit hard?”

  “Why do you think your mother is the way she is? She had to harden herself. Don’t you remember the holidays spent in tears, catching her alone with a picture frame? She wasn’t whole after that, I’m afraid.”

  “And I brought him back.”

  It had been in Sanctuary. The plague was all around us, but not here. We were safe and blessed. The Bishop had asked what we were missing in our lives—as a community, a collective. Len and I were on display, having finished the part of the sermon where we prophesied. Except I couldn’t stop seeing Perry. Len says I kept calling his name until the Governor had no choice to give me a sedative and send a team to look for him. When I woke up I’d tried to explain—I’d simply seen his face. I had no idea if it was supposed to be far or near.

  The posse quickly found Perry, but when he was returned, there was unrest in the town, and little celebration. People didn’t trust those from outside the gates, and he’d been gone long enough to seem alien, foreign. His aloofness hadn’t helped—he returned prickly and cold. But Nelle Harris Mangold had unlocked a side of him none of us had ever seen, and I was more disconcerted by his elation than his malicious scorn.

  A hazy unease settled over me. I had focused on Nelle in the vision, but Perry had been there too. Had Seamus been right? Had I seen the same thing he had?

  My father must have been reading my thoughts. “Seamus’s prophecy was for a child. Perry is an adult now. The danger has passed.”

  “Well then, what do you need Len and
me to do this stuff for?” My head was feeling muzzy from the bourbon.

  “I’m keeping a close eye on Perry, Casandra. Just because something is foreseen doesn’t mean it must to come to pass. That’s why we’re going to keep Nelle here a bit longer. To ensure we control the outcome. First we’ll get the power back on. And then—”

  “I don’t want to see what I saw again,” I said. “So much blood.”

  “Well, we’ll see what Len has to say about it in the morning when he’s sober.”

  “Why don’t you believe me?”

  “She’s only one woman, Casandra. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m afraid hidden under all this,” he said, gesturing to my robe, “is more than a little flair for the dramatic.”

  “Len will tell you the same thing I did.”

  He topped my glass off once more and nodded to the guard. “Go get some rest. Sweet dreams, Casandra.”

  I took one more sip and the room slipped from under me.

  I woke up in the airy Acolyte apartment over the Sanctuary, the solid whiteness of the room all at once wrong. Len and I usually stayed there before and after large celebrations and functions or to meditate or pray, but I couldn’t remember why we would have ended the previous night there. My mouth was so dry I could barely swallow, and I slid over the snowy bedsheets and groped the side table for a glass. The water was stale but I finished it and stumbled to the bath for a refill, where the mirror revealed I was still wearing the purple party dress Syd brought me the night before.

  I attempted to reassemble my memories of the party in the social hall and my father’s arrival, but afterwards there were troubling, extended gaps. It took two more glasses of water until I figured out what to do next. My body felt like I’d had a violent sort of vision—leaky and sore—but for the life of me I couldn’t call it up. Had I been arguing with my father? There had been an altercation or some such at the gate or the house or maybe both.

  Len would be able to tell me, I was sure of it. I changed my clothes and bumped my way around, trying to wake him, figuring he was still asleep in the room next to mine. Though for all my passive-aggressive noise, he didn’t stir.

  I knocked for what felt like an hour. Deciding he was too hung over to answer, I turned the knob and threw open the door. His bed was made and unrumpled, his bathroom dry and clean. Why had he stayed home if I’d come here? We almost always came as a pair.

  Things made even less sense when I went into the kitchen. Usually a Sanctuary page was waiting in the vestibule, in case we needed things. “Hello?” I called, but no one answered. I listened carefully. All the sounds below were normal for a Wednesday. A vacuum running, the chatter of the preschool and their singing of the Deacon’s songs for children.

  I put the kettle on for a cup of chicory and headed to the living room, fitting myself into the corner of the large white couch. The best part of the apartment was the view afforded by the one-way, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Main Street. It was my favorite spot to think while watching the town start to stir. But what stuck in my fuzzy eyesight, instead, was the blur of Len racing down the hill from our house on foot. I headed back toward the kitchen and took down a second mug for tea when there was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” I said automatically. I blamed my headache for my momentary confusion, wondering how Len could’ve possibly gotten from the hill to the door so quickly. I turned when I heard two sets of heavy footfalls. “Good morning, Casandra,” the Governor said briskly. The Bishop followed him in, face grim.

  “Morning,” I said, pulling a third mug down and hoping I’d boiled enough water. “Chicory or tea?”

  “Nothing for me,” he said. The Bishop held up his hand as well. I took my original mug to the stove and poured water over it, annoyed. The number of times our father had visited the Acolyte quarters was in the single digits—it was our privilege and our private space. I felt a singeing resentment toward him and yet couldn’t quite put my finger on why, save the aggravation of my headache by his cloying aftershave.

  The Bishop’s presence was even stranger.

  “To what do I owe your visit?”

  “The Bishop would like to have a reading,” the Governor said. “But first, I need to know the whereabouts of your brother.”

  “Sanctuary matters?” I asked. My arms were wrapped so tightly around my body that they had started to tingle. “What’s going on?”

  Behind them, Len had bounded in through the open door. He seemed to pause for a half second in midair before landing, taking another half second to register the scene. My father and the Bishop would have heard him land had I not shoved the glass mugs off the counter as he hit the ground. He backed up silently as my father cursed at the broken glass and my bare feet.

  “Whoops.” I hadn’t intended to create a mess quite as large as the one in front of me.

  The Governor was not amused. “Damn it, Casandra, pull yourself together.”

  “Do you really need me to read today?” I asked. I must have had a vision after the party. There had been a few times Len and I suspected the Governor had drugged us, after we’d revealed a vision that had been painful or horrific. The Governor eschewed violence, but wasn’t afraid of editing our memories pharmaceutically. The headache was growing steadily stronger, and I felt like I might throw up soon if I didn’t get some tea or toast into my system.

  My father seemed to pass judgment on the glass littering the floor, scanning the room and the now-empty doorway. “Where’s Len?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. He strode over to the door of Len’s room and threw it open. I heard him enter the bathroom and shove the shower curtain aside. “If you’d just tell me what’s going on. What do you need us for?”

  “I can’t use her like this,” the Bishop said curtly. “Priam, when you said you had things under control, I expected you to deliver both Acolytes to me in good condition this morning.”

  “Give me a minute,” said the Governor, a note of panic in his voice. “Perhaps Cedar gave her too high a dose to help her sleep last night. I’ll help her through the gaps.”

  “Without the boy, another vision is meaningless,” the Bishop said, crossing to the window. “I’ll handle gathering the rest of the information myself. Leave us.”

  The Governor gave me a cursory nod and let himself out, not even sparing a look at the broom in the corner.

  The Bishop returned from the windows and studied the glass. “Quite a mess we have here,” he said.

  “Literally or figuratively?” My head was pounding so hard that I couldn’t help but sound belligerent.

  “Both.” He picked up the broom in the corner, but he made no move to hand it over. “Faced with the upset of the past few days, I have been forced to squander my reserves looking for the connections between events. It seems I cannot trust you to come to me anymore.”

  I began to stammer, fervently wishing myself anywhere but trapped in front of him. I tried to calculate how badly I would hurt myself stepping over the glass.

  “There, there, child,” he said, folding both hands around the broom. “I know you’ve had no hand in Cressyda Turner’s shortsighted machinations. And I know you’ve been trying to figure out the reason the Spirit no longer had need for her father.”

  I had suspected it was only a matter of time before he rewound his own memories to see what had happened the day Cal died, to check what I had seen when his hand had landed on my shoulder. I was afraid and relieved all at once. “I don’t understand. I can’t stop hearing him plead with you.”

  “Do you want to see the rest?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I’d seen all I needed to. “Do you think I can have that broom now?”

  He stretched the handle out to me. As I reached over the glass, he grabbed my arm with his free hand, pulling me toward him. I was dangerously off balance. If he let me go, I’d have fallen into the glittering glass below. I was still thinking that might be a better option when I found myself back at the same cur
tains I’d seen when I’d last stumbled into the Bishop’s memories. But this time, with the Bishop’s guidance, the scene unfolded with terrible clarity.

  I was in the hallway this time, with an unobstructed view.

  The Bishop entered the room as Cal was scribbling in a small notebook sitting on the table next to a revolver. He offered the Bishop some wine, and moved the book aside, tearing out a page. “Let’s get to it,” Cal said, drinking deeply.

  “You’ve been keeping something from me all this time, haven’t you, Calvin?”

  Cal set down his glass, resigned. “It doesn’t belong to you. None of them do. Everything I’ve built belongs to Syd.”

  “I thought I’d made myself clear prior to the Blessing,” the Bishop said. “Unless you want to give me your life instead, Turner. The gifts of this community are as one, now. I cannot have rogues hiding powers and using them to assist the enemy.”

  Cal began to stutter. “I’ve done nothing I’m ashamed of—”

  “Oh yes,” the Bishop said. “I know all about your conversations with Mangold. How you delivered them horses and medical supplies. When they finally breach the gates, whose side will you fight on?”

  “I’m going to find my daughter, like I should have a long time ago.” Cal stood and raised his arms.

  A blast of wind shot from his body, buffeting the room. Of course. He’d had the gift of air the whole time. It’s why his horses were stronger and faster. He must have been giving them small pieces of his own gift in order to build his empire. An empire he’d meant for Syd. The Bishop fell back, one arm in front of his eyes, his black robes billowing. I expected one of them to reach for the revolver on the table, but instead the Bishop waited. Cal finally lowered his arms to rest, and the Bishop drew one of my father’s Tasers from his pocket and aimed at Cal’s heart. When Cal had fallen back onto the couch, the Bishop emptied a packet of something into Cal’s mouth, then poured a bit of wine down his throat.