“None of the faucets work anyway,” I inform her. “We have to work the hand pump at the barn.”
“The sheep and goats are happy,” she mutters, “those we have left. I don’t think Biters eat anything green.”
“At least they don’t eat us,” I say, and she shrugs, conceding the point. Ignoring tiny splinters of glass caught between the swept floorboards, we dump the blankets. Except for the ranker among us, I’ve become used to the smell of our bodies, the oily hair, dull dirt ground into my clothes. It’s the putrid breath that compels me to inhale through my mouth. Most of the Biters are missing teeth and yellow crud is almost a sign of good hygiene compared to the rotted stumps in Greeb’s mouth. I’d like to clean my teeth.
“Let’s go raiding,” I suggest to Mari.
Her eyes light up. “I’ll hit the kitchen.”
While Mari and her band of doves raid the food stores, I tow a dozen women to what’s left of the burned out men’s residence.
“We shouldn’t do this,” Angel complains as she trails behind me.
“No one ordered us not to,” I equivocate.
“We should ask Mag. What if we’re caught?”
“Forget Mag, Angel. If we’re caught, I’ll bear the consequences. We agreed.”
“And you think that makes me feel better?” she whispers.
At the moment, her cares aren’t my burden. This small feat of defiance has a grip on me as we dart around to the back of the charred building and up the ash-white stone stairs to a long balcony. The farther end of the structure appears thoroughly burned, the exterior walls blackened where the fire exploded through the windows. This end is singed and smoky, but for our purposes, intact.
My heart races, fingers tingling, my body warmed by the looming danger. Any room may host a beating, rape, or unexpected death. “Listen first,” I hiss at Leah and Natali, indicating open doors and gaping windows. They nod and tiptoe further down the balcony, scurrying over smashed glass, spreading the word to the other doves.
So far, I haven’t met a quiet Biter who isn’t sleeping or dead. My hand on a door latch, I wait for a sound with my breath trapped in my chest. Angel emits an audible gasp as I click the latch and press the door open. The space mirrors the one I grew up in, from foyer and spacious grand room with its high ceilings to modest sleeping chambers on the perimeter. The rooms bear the scars of Biters, nothing left whole that isn’t sullied by their abuse.
Slinking through the rooms, we step over broken chairs, torn clothes, soiled bedding, and shards of once precious, centuries-old possessions. I fill Angel’s arms first, with shirts and trousers, stuffing her pockets with socks and sending her stumbling through the refuse to the door. Into a blanket, I toss combs and hand-cloths, soap and tallow candles, medicines, scissors, mending supplies, more socks, teeth-cleaning powders, and a book not yet fed to the fires. I fold up the blanket’s corners like a sack and hurry to the door as if any moment a Biter’s muscled body will block the portal, imprisoning me inside.
Not until I burst into God’s House, do I breathe, a great gust surging into my lungs, a smile tripping across my face. Angel chews her lower lip, eyes worried, her booty of clothes at the wall in a brown and tan heap. Mari grins at me from behind a bushel of fruit, a sack stuffed with loaves of bread, and a wheel of cheese. “For washing,” she says, pointing to a colorful assortment of washbasins and buckets by the dais. More doves dart in through the door, shaking with relief. We begin to organize and sort our plunder. We’ll share with the women and children of Heaven if they need anything, but for now, we secure our stash in Mag’s domain.
“What the hell, eh?” Mag shouts from the doorway, her dark eyes narrowed and darting like wasps. Her chin points at us, head thrust forward from a craned neck and bent back. She hobbles in, staff thumping on the wood floor, Glory looking worry-eyed behind his smile. Rune leans on the wall, shaking his head. Most of the doves freeze and then drift like ghosts to the shadowed safety of the walls. Mari and I share a glance and I smile. Mag peers directly at me from across the room, her frown oozing condemnation, then reversing into a mischievous grin. “Time to teach the doves a lesson, eh?”
All sound snaps off except the echo of my heartbeat. I step back, deaf, painfully aware that I’m to be the victim of this lesson. Mag’s eyes blaze with intent, her focus riveted on my face as she conjures up my punishment. Angel stands by the wall, her mouth moving, the horror in her eyes invading my skin. My hands cup my ears, my thumb brushing the beaded loop piercing my lobe. I never realized how the world hums, the thousands of subtle rustles, hisses, drones, thuds and thumps, the distant voices of man and beast, the wind, the creaking wood, blowing grass, water dripping, fires crackling. I see doves watching me, Mag pounding her staff on the floor. I hear nothing, but I can see the noise. Then that too is gone.
Absolute blackness surrounds me. My eyes stretch open, straining for a glimpse of shadow in a vast, blank emptiness, blacker than a starless night sky. Blind and deaf, I’m isolated, utterly alone in the world as if I fail to exist. Fear roars out of the void, blasting into my body as I reach out for something to ground me, for Angel. I can’t tolerate this singular oblivion, this nothingness. Terror explodes in my brain; I can’t survive like this. My mouth opens to scream, but silence wraps around me. The floor tips, spinning the world, my balance lost. I twist and never hit the wood, the sensation of falling heaving up my guts. No sound of my retching or gasps, vomit never splattering. Just the acrid bile spewing from my throat and mouth. I’m fumbling, clawing at nothing, floating in an infinite wasteland devoid of sensation, screaming words I can’t hear.
Then heat sparks into my awareness, flaring in my chest, my body sweating, breathing the hot air. The Biter intends to cook me, burn me like the descendants of Paradise. My skin already hurts as if my body roasts on a spit, rolling over a fire I can’t hear or see, only the searing pain traveling my skin. I feel it, my hair ready to ignite around my face. I wait for the flames to scorch my lungs, blisters to erupt on my skin. I scream my agony in the silent, sightless void, sure my body will blacken and crack, its fat dripping and sizzling in the coals.
The pain unexpectedly eases, and I wonder if I’m dead.
“Learned your lesson, Dove?” Mag’s cackle rattles like thunder, rupturing the silence.
“Yes.” My voice is a weak mewling sob, yet it sounds so sweet. A dog barks outside in the courtyard.
“Don’t touch her,” Mag snaps.
My vision flicks on and I squint in the rheumy light, painfully bright after my imprisonment in the void. Angel kneels near where I lay, herself a vision, blurred by the golden halo radiating around her. She holds her palms toward me as if suspended by a puppeteer’s strings, waiting for the master to release her. Her eyes are a cloudy sea, wet and swelling with tears.
Slowly my body cools, a river of cold air washing the sting from my skin, every inch of me depleted, shivering with fever, too weak to rise. My hand crawls to my face, my skin unmarred, hair draped across a lip. I sprawl in my vomit, the smell thick in my nose, that too returning, though I hadn’t noticed its absence.
“Tie our feisty little hawk up outside and watch her…like a hawk,” Mag chuckles. “We’ll find out in the morning if we’ve clipped her wings.”
Bending over me, Rune grabs a wrist, hauls me up and carries me through a room alive now with whispers and horrified stares. Her face ashen, Mari’s eyes avoid mine as she quickly attends to an imaginary chore. The other doves appear equally cowed, obedient, the lesson well-learned.
We pass into the dreary twilight, indifferent wind, and a haze of sleet. Mag hobbles after us, gray and shriveled, as if drained by her own power, Glory at her back. She stops outside the heavy doors and holds her staff up before Angel can follow. “Close them up, Glory boy. We’ll keep them in their cage until tempers take a cool dip. What do you think of that, eh?”
“Getho.” Glory shuts the door in Angel’s worried face as if she isn’t there. He smiles happily at me as Rune dumps me by a fat pillar near the building’s front door.
“Be a good boy, Glory, and get me that stick.” Mag points a crooked finger at the spindle of a chair below the steps.
“Getho.” Glory retrieves the wood, and Mag shoves it through the door handles.
My cheek rests against the column, the stone colder than the icy drizzle soaking my clothes, my body shaking as I absorb the sensory sting of a broken world. Rune’s gone to fetch my bindings, to lash me to this stacked rock called God’s House of Law, my cage. He returns, and with my back to the stone, binds one hand, runs the rope behind the pillar and binds the other. I can place my hands on my thighs, but they can’t touch.
Without a word, Mag climbs on Glory’s back and rides around the corner out of sight. Rune sits against the pillar opposite the door, legs bent before him, forearms on his knees and hands dangling. We both stare east at the pine forest, its boughs muted by the wet veil. The sky hardens overhead, a solid, flat, gray stone.
“I figure you’re Rimma, right?” he says. “Only Rimma would do something so shit-ass stupid.”
His voice sounds wonderful despite the mocking words, his company a relief after confronting a loneliness that I thought would last forever. A tired smile creeps to my lips as I close my eyes. No doubt, I tempted fate.
“Anyone aside Mag would’ve slit your gut and made you eat your insides.”
“Delightful,” I remark.
“You got to be smart, Rimma. You’ll get used to our ways, but until then, you got to calm yourself. Dead is no way to help you or Angel.”
“Hm.” I breathe out the short grunt as shivers sweep my body. The cold damp gnaws into my bones and my teeth chatter. Burning alive half an hour ago and freezing to death now. I may not chew on my insides, but I’m dying out here nonetheless.
“Mag can’t untwist you two,” Rune continues, impervious to the weather. “She can’t figure your magic, but she says if you get your neck slit, probably both of you is burned up in smoke.”
“We’re twins. We look alike, but we’re not the same person,” I inform him, my voice shaking.
“The People don’t have twins that live more than a week, maybe two,” he concedes. “Mag says maybe bone wall twins got a special magic, but she don’t think so.”
“I don’t believe in magic.”
“Just shows how much your people don’t know about nothing.”
“Rune?” I roll the back of my head on the pillar, gazing his way. “I’m deathly cold. Is Mag leaving me here all night? Because if she is, just kill me now.”
The Biter eyes me, his hair shiny black with wet. “You look like you been fished from a river after drowning.”
“Sweet.”
With a grin, he works his way to his feet. “Don’t go anywhere.” I’m too cold to reply as he ambles away. While I wait, the sleet changes to fat wads of snow, plopping out of the evening sky and melting on muddy yellow grass. My first taste of snow and it will likely kill me.
When Rune returns, he brings someone with him, a short stocky Biter with a warped face, longer on one side so it appears slightly folded. A thick flap of skin covers one eye as if his face was fashioned of wax and melted when placed too close to a fire. “This is Mercy,” Rune introduces the man. “He got the Touch.”
The Biter nods. “Ya corld?” he slurs.
“Cold as can be,” Rune answers. He shakes out a blanket and tucks it around me, my bound hands useless. Sitting beside me, he covers both of us with a second blanket. “Ready,” he says to Mercy.
“Ready for what?” My voice carries an edge. Before Rune left, I’d asked him to kill me. Perhaps I’ve blundered into another mistake the Biters are happy to oblige.
“Mercy’s going to fire up the air.”
My hands jerk against my restraints, the bindings digging into my wrists. “No!” I panic, my lesson from Mag fresh on my skin. “No, Rune, I’ll stay the way I am.”
“Do it,” Rune says to Mercy, ignoring me.
“No, please, Mercy,” I beg. “Please don’t.”
“Do it.”
My eyes closed, I clench my teeth, every inch of my freezing body prepared for the screaming pain of fire. The air heats around me, penetrating my skin, warm on my breath. The moisture in my clothing steams in the icy wind until my clothes slowly dry.
“Good, that’s good.” Rune smiles. “A little more, Mercy.”
Every muscle in my body relaxes, the cold thawed, the pain of Mag’s lesson dissolving. I’m comfortably warm and weary. I would beg Mercy to stay all night but never have the chance; he turns and walks away. The winter wind closes in, but my clothes are dry and the blankets retain the heat. Rune doesn’t stir, his back to the pillar beside me while I sleep.
12
~Angel~
“You’re Angel, right?”
“Help me, Rune.” I’ve a bushel of purple beets that I’ve overfilled, too heavy for me to lift. Without the slightest grunt of effort, he totes it to the cart and hands me an empty one. Since the sickness came to Heaven, I’ve been in the fields digging roots, harvesting as much as I can before winter freezes the ground into one solid paving stone. The men cut down trees and once more burn our dead, clouds of black smoke trailing through the pines.
We, the vestiges of Heaven, are still discovering what this broken world intends for us. Winter never troubled Heaven before, our land fertile and fruitful throughout the year, our “weather” somehow timed. I thought it was God’s hand cradling our Garden, but now that belief seems sweetly naive and heartbreaking as we toil to save the last of our food.