by Nadia Afifi
“Four this time, Sarka?”
The silky voice belonged to a tall figure who Amira instantly knew as the same man who watched Rozene carry water on that hot, dusty path. He had the same narrow frame and long tan coat. His face was no longer blurred. He looked to be in his fifties, with graying hair and pale blue eyes that surveyed the scene with chilling calculation. Amira approached the hologram as she realized that the bulges on the man’s temples were not protruding veins, but wires underneath his skin. City-level technology on a compound holy man. But why?
“Caught them before they reached the highway,” the man named Sarka said, his voice high and reed-thin. He was stocky, with a full beard that failed to conceal a weak chin and a round, blunt face. His entire body trembled with nervous, aggressive energy, as though he were an incredibly dangerous wind-up toy turned to the last gear. “Look who we found here, Elder.”
The gray-haired man leaned down to face Rozene.
“Rozene Hull,” the man said softly. “I’m disappointed.”
She remained silent, staring into the distance.
“The girl’s brother got them past the gates,” Sarka said. He gestured toward a young man flanked by a pair of marshals. Rozene’s brother’s face was heavily bruised, blood leaking from the side of his swollen lower lip. He stole a terrified glance at Rozene, but she stared wordlessly ahead.
“You know I choose my brides very carefully,” the Elder said, turning indifferently away from Rozene’s brother. “Virtue and obedience are qualities I value above all. It seems I may have misjudged you.”
As though coming out of a trance, Rozene turned sharply to face him for the first time.
“You’re a disgusting old man, and I’ll never marry you,” she said with fierce conviction. Her eyes danced with that same defiant anger she had unleashed in the Elder’s office.
Another flash of a different Rozene, one without fear. Amira knew immediately that Rozene would pay for that.
“No, you won’t,” the Elder said, and his cool, velvety voice carried more danger than all his armed henchmen combined. “You’re no use to me now. But you can watch the others first.”
He nodded to the group of men standing behind the girls. Wordlessly, they grabbed them and began tying them to wooden planks that had been lying nearby. Another man dug a series of shallow holes in the sand. When one of the girls realized what was happening, she tore away from her captor’s grip and took a few steps before collapsing to the ground, falling to her hands and knees and wailing uncontrollably.
“Stop your squealing,” Sarka said before grabbing Rozene by the hair and shoving her toward the remaining plank. She knelt in apparent shock, but as Amira drew closer to her, she could see that every joint and muscle in her body was trembling.
The first of the girls had been bound to a plank and was pushed backward into the first shallow hole, so that she remained on her back with her head in the crevasse and her feet lifted several inches off the ground. She lay in silence at that precarious angle, her arms limp underneath the bindings. The other two girls were placed in the same position with only their heads below ground, the one girl continuing to sob in shuddering gasps. Sarka grabbed each girl by the hair, one by one, and tipped a substance into their mouths. To Amira’s surprise, it was not Chimyra, or any strain she had seen. Instead of the usual cloudy, blood-orange color, the liquid was clear, administered sparingly. As the men began to shovel sand over their faces, the real Rozene shuddered and twisted in her chair, a frightened gasp escaping from her throat.
“Talk me through what you’re seeing, Rozene,” Amira said, noting Rozene’s heart rate spiking to alarming peaks on the monitor. “What happens next?”
As though on cue, Sarka finished tying Rozene up and pushed her with a kick of his foot into the last hole. The other three girls choked and gasped as the men shoveled silently and the sand crept across their faces. Sarka grabbed Rozene’s face and she received her own dose of the strange substance.
“I can’t!” Rozene cried.
Amira caught Rozene underneath her arms before she slid out of her chair.
Rozene coughed and spat imaginary sand away, her shoulders jerking in time to the scene in the hologram, to her own burial. The sand began to vibrate, the grains pulsing to a silent, terrible rhythm.
“I need air!”
“Rozene, keep breathing!”
Scarabs, red and black, emerged from the sand, crawling over Rozene. The girls beside her screamed.
“I can’t breathe!”
“This will end soon. You have to let it happen.”
“I need water!”
Amira ached to tell Rozene that it was all over, that they were in Westport and far from the Trinity’s reach, but she knew that the memory had to be experienced, fully realized, to undo the damage done to Rozene’s fractured subconscious. The strangled cries of the young women were unbearable, but Amira forced herself to keep looking. The men shoveled the last of the sand over Rozene’s face.
Darkness blanketed the scene as the women’s heads were fully submerged underground. Muffled sounds broke through the silence. The thud of desperate legs thrashing against wooden planks. Male voices, cold and amused, coming from somewhere far away. Nearer, muffled cries and coughs.
Amira’s heart hammered. The entire room had turned pitch black, mirroring Rozene’s time under the sand. It became more unbearable by the second. Rozene had to come up soon, to escape. She had survived, after all.
Finally, light streaked across the room as one of the men dragged Rozene by her feet out of the earth. The other girls had also been yanked from their makeshift graves. They retched and gasped for air, spitting out sand as they were wordlessly unbound. Too weak to stand, they rolled on the ground, shuddering and struggling to restore air to their lungs and wiping sand out of their eyes.
Out of the darkness, the scene resumed on the holomentic display. The men stood around them, mutely surveying their gruesome work. The Elder turned back to Sarka, his waxen features and clear blue eyes coming alive with a smile that froze Amira to her bones.
The wires on the Elder’s temples illuminated, sending a blue, glowing current across his forehead and around his ears. He raised his arms in a slow, open arc, his thin fingers curling in time with his smile.
The four women rose from the ground to their feet in tandem, raised with a macabre flourish like vampires from a sandy coffin. Dazed, they turned to each other, when Rozene’s arm swung like a deadweight and struck the girl beside her. The second girl turned to the third, ripping the front of her dress open, while the third responded with another lumbering strike.
The men howled with laughter as the women continued their jerking, marionette assault. Sarka clapped his hands like a child excited by a new toy, glancing at the Elder, whose temples shone like blue embers as he stared with deep concentration at his captives.
The fourth girl had lunged at Rozene and kicked her to the ground. The proximity to the sand that had nearly suffocated her sent Rozene into renewed terror, sputtering and shrieking as she writhed near the wooden plank.
The hologram, now encompassing the entire room, spun and tilted. The ground was falling, or they were rising, until the hologram shifted to a bird’s eye view of the scene. Below, the compound men continued laughing as the four female bodies jerked and swung under the Elder’s apparent command.
Amira stood up and marched into the center of the room. She stretched out her hands, tingling with adrenaline, and moved them together. The hologram disobeyed her and did not move the scene closer, remaining in the hovering position in the sky. Behind Amira, Rozene twisted in her seat.
“My mouth,” Rozene muttered. “I taste metal.”
Cold shock seized Amira. The taste of rust, the high vantage point. Amira knew this sensation. Heart pounding, she spun in space, scanning wildly around the room. Another familiar sens
ation seized her, and undoubtedly Rozene as well. Eyes upon her, watching, from somewhere unseen.
At that first sense of being watched, the hologram vanished. The ward became the ward again. Machines and counters rose from the floor like a dollhouse room, surreal in its mundane familiarity. Amira returned to the holomentic machine but before she could act further, the holographic image reappeared over the platform.
The view had shifted back to the ground, where the Elder now lowered his arms. The four women all collapsed in perfect unison. One of the men clapped Sarka on the shoulder.
“It worked,” he said. “Just like they said.”
“Silence,” the Elder barked.
“Water,” Rozene whispered. In the hologram, she pulled herself up on all fours before collapsing again, eyes dull with shock.
“Let this be a lesson you never forget,” the Elder said. “You all sought to abandon your families and your faith for a life of sin. But that life is not what you imagine it to be. You may enjoy your freedom for a day, maybe even a year, but soon, you would drown in filth and descend to the Neverhaven, as you nearly did tonight.”
He paused, smiling appreciatively at his closing metaphor, and walked back to the compound.
“Water,” Rozene gasped again.
Amira brought a glass of water to Rozene’s lips and held her head back carefully. The effect of the Oniria had not worn off yet, and she had to be brought out of her waking dream state slowly. The hologram had shrunk back to the platform and they were no longer in the desert. A series of images appeared and dissolved in rapid succession on the disc – the Elder leering at Rozene while she carried her water and blinked back the sun, the same man conversing quietly with her mother in the Hulls’ kitchen, and then the Unveiling ceremony, three men’s faces now clearly visible in the crowd. The hologram faded with a final sight – a young girl with long red hair running down a desolate highway in the direction of the setting sun.
When Rozene awoke, she immediately clutched the glass in Amira’s hand, gulping water as though her throat were on fire.
While Rozene drank a second glass of water, Amira sat down, gripping her knees as she processed all that she had seen. The hidden memory, revealed at last. Torture, followed by a strange detachment that mirrored Amira’s own experience at the Gathering. The holomentic display, failing as it had done during Amira’s own Placement test. The Elder, fueled by a strange, glowing halo, commanding others as Elders could only dream of, although the impossible feats were likely an exaggeration from Rozene’s active imagination. And a strange liquid, administered to Rozene and those other, wretched women, before the terror began. A thin, clear liquid, delivered in shivering drops.
Amira shuddered and closed her eyes. Was it possible? Was it the same liquid, Tiresia, that she had stolen for Hadrian?
“Amira?”
Rozene peered into Amira’s face. Concern revealed itself behind her hooded eyes. Collecting herself, Amira drew her notepad toward them, leaving the cat-sized screen hovering between them while she conducted the post-session interview.
Rozene spoke clearly when Amira asked about her escape.
“At first, I was too afraid to try anything again,” she said as Amira helped her back into her bed. “But a few weeks after…what happened, Elder Young – that was his name – decided he still wanted to marry me. He already had seven wives. I was locked in my room after they caught me, but my parents had to let me out after a while, to help with the chores. I crossed the mountains by our house the first morning.”
“During the day?” Amira asked in surprise. Rozene nodded.
“It was risky because there was no cover, I know. But no one would notice if I was gone a few hours during the daytime, right? I had to fetch water and work in the gardens. After I made it over the mountain, I kept walking until I found the highway. They probably didn’t notice I was gone until dinner.”
“And you followed the highway north?”
“All night. It was terrible, I was so thirsty. I cried and tried to drink my own tears. I came to a bus station as the sun was coming up. I had no money, but I told the driver where I came from and he let me sleep on the bus. When I woke up, I was here in Westport.”
“How do you feel now?”
Rozene ran her hands up and down her pregnant belly, pondering the question.
“My head feels clear at last,” she said. “Like a weight inside me is gone and I can see properly again. Does that make sense? I’m so tired, though.”
Something caught the corner of Amira’s eye. Singh stood on the other side of the glass door, her arms folded. How much she had seen was unclear, but when their eyes met, she gave Amira an appraising nod and walked away.
Amira sat with Rozene for the remainder of the afternoon until Rozene finally drifted into a deep sleep. Amira replayed the Oniria session on the holographic platform, which continued to shift to the bird’s eye view before the lapse in display, and paused at the final moments when Rozene returned to the Unveiling Ceremony, the three men revealed at last.
Amira downloaded the entire session onto a disc. She was now ready to visit Hadrian again, with his mysterious Tiresia. If the strange liquid in Rozene’s memory and Tiresia were one and the same, Amira needed answers and had no desire to keep it in her possession. She also needed to unearth the remaining men’s identities. Besides Elder Young, Rozene had recognized one of the other men but didn’t know his name, only that he was ‘powerful’. The third man was a stranger to her, though he looked familiar to Amira. She wasn’t surprised to learn that Sarka wasn’t one of the three figures in the front row; though he played a key role in Rozene’s punishment, he was clearly a useful thug, not a compound power-player.
Amira stood still, hairs raising on the back of her neck. She sensed a strange shift in her surroundings, as though something had moved out of place, and turned back to the hologram in the room’s center. The three men in their seats were no longer observing the podium on which Rozene stood.
Instead, their eyes locked directly on Amira. Not in her general direction, but on her, as though she were a figure in the auditorium.
Amira shrieked, leaping up from her chair. The men continued to stare at her, suspended in time. She froze as well, rooted to the ground as her heart immobilized in her chest, until she jerked forward to sprint toward the door. When she looked back after several steps, however, the moment had passed. The men resumed their original positions, eyes turned back to the spot where Rozene sat in penitence in the Trinity’s auditorium.
Wordlessly, she removed the disc from the computer and left the room. What had happened? Had her mind, overburdened with stress after a long day, played a cruel trick on her? Holomentic readings did not interact with the reader beyond obeying commands to move, shrink or expand, but that gave Amira little comfort – either the impossible had occurred, or her hold on reality was starting to weaken, just as Rozene’s had reversed course.
Valerie Singh met her in the hallway.
“I have some tests to run on M. Hull now that she’s asleep,” Singh said. “But the monitors in my office show stronger vitals, more in line with those of a normal pregnant woman at this stage. It looks as though it has been quite a day for you both.”
“Her memories have been restored, from what I can see. Hopefully, she’s out of the woods.”
Singh smiled.
“Whether we are out of the woods or not, you’ve done a good day’s work, M. Valdez. I suggest you leave on time today, for once.” Still smiling, she passed a speechless Amira and entered into the ward.
* * *
“Do you have my payment?”
Amira held the vial of Tiresia triumphantly up to Hadrian’s face and, in a swift motion, he swiped it out of her hand. He stared at the label, shaking the glass slightly.
“Ta, my dear,” he said, handing the glass over to a solemn-looking boy
of about seventeen. Hadrian addressed him as Lee, the same boy who had asked about Rozene on Amira’s first visit to the ship. “Ok, that’s your payment met – let’s look at your little movie collection.”
“Let’s talk about the Tiresia and what it does.”
“Unimportant and not your business.”
“It is neither of those things,” Amira snapped, again channeling Singh in her sharp voice. “I risked a lot to get it, and you’re going to tell me what it is.”
“All in good time, love, but not in front of the kiddos here. First, let’s find out who your new friends are.”
Hadrian possessed a surprisingly sophisticated computer system in the cruise ship’s old gymnasium. In addition to the security apparatus monitoring the surrounding shipyard for intruders, the ship was equipped with a full three-dimensional holographic platform, although a more archaic version than the models in the Soma. A group of older teenagers set up the hologram. Hadrian shooed them all out of the room, except for Lee.
“Consider him mini-Hadrian,” he said to Amira. “What I know, Lee knows. Near enough, anyway.”
The hologram unfolded in the center of the room, car-sized, displaying the final image of the Oniria session. Rozene, head slumped at the center of a stage, the three men seated apart from their congregants. Lee grimaced and stood by Rozene, as though to protect her.
Hadrian circled the platform, scrutinizing the three men in the ceremony. The children chattered outside and Lee rapped the door in sharp warning.
Hadrian pointed to the man in the center.
“That’s Elder William Young,” Hadrian said definitively. “Most powerful man in the Trinity Compound. Got all the usual qualities of a good compound holy man – a little charm, some political know-how. Likes to keep company with scary men and little girls.”
He leaned forward, the blue monitor light reflecting his face, and pointed at the dark-haired man on Elder Young’s left, his gaunt face fixed on Rozene with hollow eyes. His frame was tall and wiry, but he gave off the impression of considerable strength, as though his every movement had purpose and calculation behind it.