Covenants: Savant (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 10)

by Terra Whiteman

  “I’m working,” he said. “What were you doing there?” Though he tried to hide it, his eyes kept rising to look above my head. He could see my halo, too. “Mehrit,” he said again when I didn’t respond, touching my shoulder. “Why were you there? Do you know that family?”

  “You’re like me,” I breathed. “Tell me what is happening. I can’t shut off my eye. My upgrade, it—,”

  He leaned in, so that our shoulders touched. “Not here,” he whispered. “I’ll meet you again after I’m done, and we can talk.”

  I looked around, hugging my chest. “How long?”

  “Not much longer. Maybe twenty minutes.” He started to walk away, then paused, turning again. “Were you at the Artifact today?”

  I didn’t respond, unsure of whether I should trust him.

  He only nodded at my silence, having already gathered the answer with his eye. “Make yourself discreet. I will be back. I promise.”

  Before I could reply, Abel sprinted away down the row and into the alley. I was left there, confused and vulnerable, trying to figure out how to be discreet as a Nascent resident in the middle of an Ogkd’ii neighborhood. Fear told me he would alert someone that I was here—why else would he have asked about the Artifact? He knew what I’d done.

  But… his halo was red. Red like the captive Eye at the Pedagogue tower. Wouldn’t that place them on the same side?

  Assumptions were useless. I knew nothing. And if Abel knew more than me, staying was a risk I’d have to take. That, and my eye was telling me not to leave the area. What was its motive? How could it even have one?

  There was no being discreet here so I merely sat at the side of the row, shaded by two dwellings, my throat raw and dry from the heat and lack of water. My stomach was sour from hunger, but each pang brought back memories of the sheen on Ema’s flakes. The headache coming on told me I’d soon have no choice but to eat the shiny food. Time was counted by the beat of my heart, and as the sky changed again I realized I’d abandoned my mother with all the chores.

  *

  Abel reappeared as the soft pink of the sky turned a murderous red; a familiar caution that the evening would bring storms on the camp. I’d spent most of my time sitting here worrying about how angry Ema would be, and what lie I would have to tell in order to evade her wrath. There were much more pressing matters at hand, but my mother’s words when angered were more terrifying than any switch in Wereda. I felt like a terrible daughter. And mother, having left Biri all alone with a woman too elderly to play with him. All the more reason to find out what was happening to me. The more I knew, the faster I could find out how to fix it.

  “Have you eaten?” asked Abel.

  “What is the point of asking that question?” I demanded, annoyed by how long he’d taken. “You already know the answer.”

  “Come,” he said, offering his hand to help me up. “There is a vendor a few blocks away.”

  “Do I look that bad?” I asked, taking his hand.

  “No, but I can feel your hunger, and it hurts.”

  “You could always get out of my head,” I said.

  “It doesn’t work like that anymore,” he said, solemn. “Don’t play stupid.”

  I looked to the ground, chastened. We said nothing else on the way to the vendor. Abel ordered two pies from the auto-drone, then looked to me when it was time to pay.

  “I… don’t have any scraps with me,” I confessed.

  He grinned the same grin as when we’d first met on the transport drone the day before. “Slick.”

  “I didn’t remember,” I said, flustered. “I didn’t set out today to buy anything.”

  Abel shook his head, still grinning, and paid for my share. When he handed me the pie wrapped in thin, clear plastic, I stared down at it, my stomach churning in both starvation and disgust.

  “What is it?” asked Abel, sensing my unease.

  “The shine,” I murmured. “Don’t you see it?”

  “Yes, but there is nothing you can do,” he said, taking a bite of his own. “It’s on all the food here. It won’t kill you, go on.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Abel.

  “Why couldn’t I see it before?”

  “I don’t know that either. The same happened to me, too.” He tilted his head. “You weren’t like this yesterday. What has changed since then?”

  I looked around us, unsure of whether such a conversation should be had out in the open. “I—,”

  “Don’t use your words,” he cautioned, tapping his head.

  I nodded and thought of the job from yesterday, and then of what had happened this morning during my upgrade. It wasn’t a full account by any means; there were bits and pieces I’d forgotten, but it was enough for Abel’s expression to darken. He regarded me with pity.

  “That is why you were here? You came to his house?”

  I gave into my hunger and took a bite of the pie. It tasted the same, at least. “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “This has been a one-sided conversation so far,” I remarked. “Why are you interrogating me?”

  “I am not interrogating you,” he said, frowning. “I am trying to understand your situation. If I understand, I can answer your questions. Which, by the way, you have not asked any.”

  “I was at his house because I wanted to see what happened to his family after Pedagogue’s Judgment.” I lowered my eyes, amiss. “Why did they take the children?”

  Abel stared at me for a long time, his dark eyes glittering with an intelligence that I found admirable. His face was plagued by lines of stress and hard-work; it was the face of a man who’d seen many things. The eye told me Abel was twenty-five. Most men died around his age. I wondered how he felt about that.

  “You are not telling the whole truth,” decided Abel. “There is another reason you came to that house.”

  I sighed, then showed him the secondhand memory of the group who’d brought the ingot to the Artifact. “They are stealing this material from Pedagogue and using it to corrupt our upgrades. I wanted to know why, and how to fix mine.”

  Abel smiled, but it was sad. “There is no fixing this, Mehrit. Your eye is not corrupted. You think it is a mistake?”

  “What else could it be?” I asked. My voice cracked in grief at the idea this could not be fixed. My stomach roiled as my heart sank into it. “I can’t live like this.”

  “You can’t face the truth, you mean? Your eye is fully functional for the first time. You are finally seeing Wereda, this world, for what it truly is. It is not the eye’s fault that you do not like what you see.”

  I took another bite of the pie, but now it tasted sour on my tongue, tainted by Abel’s forecast of my predicament. For just a moment I felt like crying again; the pressure in my chest rose in my throat, like a fizzy drink that had been dropped on the ground. “How… how do you deal with it?”

  Abel shrugged. “I just do. Mehrit, what else can you do?”

  “Why, though? Why have they done this to us? Who is behind it?”

  “That is a difficult question to answer. I do not know who started this movement, but it must have been an Eye. Who else could have known how the ingots might be used? A lot of people, more than you think, do not like Eyes and what they stand for.”

  “If that is true, then why sabotage themselves?” I asked. “If the one who discovered the use of ingots was an Eye, I mean.” He didn’t respond at first, seeming reflective of my question. I added, “And what do you think of us?”

  Abel looked around. The row was quiet; deserted. Still, he ushered me away from the vendor, as if there were people nearby. We walked slowly toward the neighborhood entrance, hearing patrol drones overhead, yet unable to actually see any. The camp was far too calm for what had happened so recently. It was unnerving. We both felt it.

  “How I think and how I act are two separate bodies,” he began, quietly. “Mehrit, I am telling you that no matter what you find along your s
earch for the truth, you cannot outwardly show your feelings. That is how you end up in Pedagogue’s district. That is how you end up with your family being sent to processing by someone like me.”

  His warning left me cold, and I shivered.

  “Promise me that what I tell you now will not lead you to do something reckless.”

  “I promise,” I said, though I had no business making promises I wasn’t sure that I could keep. If Abel sensed this, he didn’t show it.

  “I believe that Pedagogue is not of our God. I believe they are making us think that for purposes of their own.”

  “But if they are not of God, then what?” I asked. “The things we can do, our eyes, they are… miraculous.”

  “I cannot disagree with that,” admitted Abel. “But I can only say that there is too much deception in all of this for God to be at work. Why would God demand processing of small children, like you saw today? Why would he demand us to send our men to the mines, where they die of disease and exhaustion? Why would he want us to pull innocent people off the street, only because they question something?”

  “Because it disrupts progress,” I recited, realizing how very stupid I sounded then. “But then these people—that man—he had given the stolen ingots to those who wish to bring this system down.”

  “He gave them to people who only wish to bring truth to the ones who might be able to make change happen,” said Abel. “Us.”

  “That is not true,” I said, recoiling. Kwame had murdered me with his eyes. He hated me; he had not done anything out of good intention. He wanted to see me taken away. Processed.

  Abel’s eye had caught my reasoning, because he himself recoiled. “The ones who deliver the upgrades may not understand what they are doing. Everyone has their motives, but the ones behind the operation stay true to the cause.”

  “You said you did not know who was behind the cause, so how do you know that they stay true it?”

  “I know because of the people I am forced to send to processing,” he said, a hint of pain in both his voice and expression. “We all hide in plain sight. If we are caught, then so be it. They know that; they say nothing about me.”

  “But… your halo,” I said. “It’s red. How are you not found out?”

  Abel hesitated, seeming a bit confused. “How do you mean?”

  “Eyes are sent after red halos as their preliminary job. I can see yours, right now. It is red.”

  Abel crossed his arms. “And what color do you think yours is?”

  It was my turn to hesitate. I didn’t know. I’d never seen mine.

  “The colors of our halos don’t mean what you think they do,” he said. “You were lying to me when you said you were a new Eye, yesterday. But you are acting like one.”

  “That was what I was taught.”

  “Again, deception. They do not want us to know the true purpose of our jobs.”

  I massaged my head, overwhelmed. The headache was growing unbearable. “Abel, I don’t want any of this. I just want everything to go back to the way it was. I want them to fix my upgrade. Roll it back.”

  Abel’s look of pity returned. “That can’t happen. I wish it could. I’m sorry, Mehrit. But could anything go back to the way it was, now that you know? Are you really that simple?”

  Simple. “If you think living quietly—in peace with your family and health, without the constant fear of being thrown into a patrol drone, never to be seen again—is ‘simple’, then yes.”

  This answer seemed to anger Abel. “But at what cost are you living simply? Your son. You have one, don’t you? You’ve thought of him exactly fourteen times since we met. He will be of age soon and taken to the mines, where he will die early and, for what, so that people like you can live simply?”

  “Dotka ki zi,” I spat. Fuck you, it meant. “What is the point of not living simply unless you can do something about it? What exactly are you contributing by knowing, yet hiding in plain sight, bringing your comrades in for processing?”

  Abel looked away, ashamed. “At least I know,” he said, eventually. “At least they are in my mind and heart. I pray for them.”

  “But you said God is not here.”

  “I said God is not with Pedagogue, but He is here. As long as we are here, so is He.”

  I looked up at him, and he down at me. I knew that I could trust Abel, then. It felt good to have someone to trust. “That was very profound.”

  “Mehrit, promise you will not repeat what I have told you.”

  “I already promised you,” I said.

  “Do not go to our employers with this information. They will not roll back your upgrade. You understand that, don’t you? You know too much.”

  “I know absolutely nothing,” I sighed.

  “It is still too much. Please.”

  I bowed my head, conflicted. “There is still a lot I need to ask you, but I must return home. My mother is probably worried to death.”

  “Keep quiet, and you will see me again.”

  Abel began to walk away, taking a quick surveil of the vicinity.

  “How?” I called to his back.

  He turned, flashing that cocky grin. “We are connected now, right?” He tapped his head. “Good night, Mehrit. Be safe on your journey home.”

  *

  It was over an hour’s walk back to Nascent. None of the transport drones were around for a lift and the quickest route back to my dwelling was the terrace, which had been sealed off by caution rope, filled with drone lights as Pedagogue kept the Artifact secured from public eye. But I wouldn’t have gone that way, had it been open.

  My legs were wobbly by the time I reached my neighborhood. I’d only taken two bites of pie all day, and had nothing to drink. The frock was no longer a blessing, but a burden. It’d weighed me down and covered me in sweat once the weather was clear. I walked the rest of the way home with it wadded and tucked beneath an arm. The entire time my eye insisted I stayed in Reascent. I ignored it, and as punishment it made my headache worse.

  I had my story straight, at least. All the walking had given me some time to think.

  “Merhit!” screamed my mother, not a second after I’d come into view of my dwelling.

  I flinched, looking around the row. There were several neighbors in front of our home. Biri was still awake; I saw his tiny silhouette scamper between the many pairs of legs at the entrance of our dwelling.

  All of this attention for me. How humiliating.

  I’d never seen my mother run, until now. Her face was puffy and tear-stained, and the sight of it brought on such a violent wave of guilt that I couldn’t help but cry as well. We embraced in the middle of the row, sobbing, and I knew then that my mother was not angry. She was terrified. And so was I.

  “Stupid girl,” she sniffled, cupping my face. “I thought something happened. The Artifact, it—,”

  “I was there,” I whispered. Her eyes widened, and again, I said, “Ema, I was there. I saw everything.” More tears. My mother held me again.

  “Come, tell me what happened. Let me get rid of everyone. They were worried for you, too. Look at all of them, here to make sure my Mehrit came home.”

  “I don’t want anyone to see me like this,” I said, wiping my eyes.

  “Just go inside. You don’t have to talk to anyone. Keep it together for a little longer, okay?” encouraged Ema, gently guiding me onto the walkway. “Biri is missing you. Go and put him to bed. Child, have you eaten?!”

  “Ema, stop—,”

  She fussed all the way up until I barged into the dwelling, avoiding the crowd assembled around the entrance. My mother thanked everyone and made excuses for me, while I hugged Biri in the small space of our entryway, wanting never to let go.

  A little while later, Biri was asleep in the hammock and I was eating amulcho and broth, too tired and drained to worry over what was in the food any longer. Abel had said it was okay, so it was okay. Ema gave me tea and we watched the quiet row, seated on stools in the entrance
of our dwelling. It wasn’t long after I’d finished my tiny meal that my mother badgered me about what had happened.

  The version I told her was that I’d gone to the terrace to pay my respects to the Vestals and God, and that was when the Artifact had killed everyone close to it. I’d spent the rest of the day helping the wounded and then wandered around—a little dazed, a little frightened—by the idea God was angry at us, like the Vestals and residents kept insisting. God would certainly be angry at me right now, with how convincing a liar I was. But I would lie a hundred times over if it meant keeping Ema and Biri safe.

  I cried a few more times. The tears were real, the reason I’d given Ema for them was not. My mother hugged me until she was too tired to stay up anymore, and then I was left alone to stew in my thoughts.

  I would have to return to work tomorrow morning, as if nothing at all had happened. According to Abel I would have to bear this burden and bury it inside of me until … forever. Why? What was the point of knowing the truth if you could not use it for something? If Pedagogue was not a part of God’s technology, then what was it? Who was it?

  Kwame, that bastard. I would have burned down that shop if I didn’t love Adella so much. If anything, I would be paying him a visit again soon—;

  My thoughts stopped as I caught movement in the shadows across the row. I held my breath and stared into the darkness, at the space between two dwellings where I’d seen the sudden shift.

  A person emerged then, coming into view once they slowly made it to the center of the row. It was a Vestal, but their face was concealed with a ritual mask. I’d only ever seen them wear traditional masks at important religious ceremonies. They stopped right in the middle of the street and stared at me—or at least in my direction; but I was the only person around, so of course it was at me.

  My eye sent warning tingles up and down my spine.

  I shivered, never daring to take my attention off the Vestal.

  I finally gathered the nerve to demand why they had been hiding in the shadows; but right before I opened my mouth, the Vestal turned and slowly walked away, down the row. Their posture and pace suggested they were not an elder. I watched them until they disappeared into the night, the red glow of their halo fading quickly thereafter.