“We can’t let them in,” I murmur.
“Then they’re all going to starve…if the Biters don’t kill them first.”
**
My hands trembling, I leave Max brooding on the roof and scurry down the ladder. When my toes touch grass, I blow out a shuddering breath and hurry around the hub, fingers scraping over its rough curved wall until I reach the gaping doorway where they brush only cool air.
Heaven forms a perfect circle, God’s hub squatting at its heart, a thick-slabbed, windowless structure with a domed roof, ringed by a spacious courtyard of granite paving stones. Two wide doors once sealed the threshold to the round building, metal panels rusted shut until the deacon’s determined that God wished them open. Perhaps centuries ago, the deacons possessed a key, but no longer. They ordered the doors pounded into ruins with sledges until the frame warped and hinges bent. What they discovered inside was God’s creation, a cavernous weave of pipes and thick wires, black glass walls and steel containers, blinking and streaming lights in brilliant colors, the drone of God’s voice speaking in ancient words of creation none of us understood. I’d seen it, prayed within the mysterious array of swirling energy, God’s voice humming through me.
My eyes peer into darkness, enthralled by the dance of lights, a fresh prayer forming on my lips. But the holy words clog in my throat despite how I yearn to speak them, the urge intense, cataclysmic. I crave God’s presence then and there, a small part of me terrified that He’ll reject my call, forsake me for my willful, sinful ways, for my foolish disregard, my ridicule.
At the other side of the hub, I dart through a grid of whitewashed buildings carpeted in ivy: the mills and cannery, our small library and huge dinner-hall. All chores forgotten, small groups gather in the stone courtyard and hurry between buildings. My mother leans on the jamb at the kitchen door, blue eyes worriedly scanning the road, her long pearl-white plait unpinned and escaping her bonnet in a silken rope. She fails to spot me in the commotion as I veer behind the mill and skirt around back to avoid her. The East Spoke stretches before me as my feet fly into a run, my mind fixed on my duty. I shall pray for the descendants of Paradise, fall to my knees at the wall and beg God for their salvation.
Each of the four spokes extends from the heart of Heaven to a steel portal in the shield. Descendants crowd the pathway, most marching the mile at a harried pace. Max’s words resonate in my head, not taunts to torment me but the truth, increasing my terror the closer I come to the wall. Midway there my pace slows, my side stitched by a cramp.
To my right our wheat fields flourish, straight and tall, their golden tips flopping heavy with seed. On my left vegetables burst in green bouquets, the first row in the midst of harvest, half-filled baskets abandoned by the roadside. When I gaze up, I behold the faint daylight sheen of God’s shield, the one protecting Heaven from the broken world, beyond it the stark blaze of a white sun. Would God leave us? Could Heaven fall?
Abruptly the fields erupt in showers of misting, arcing, swirling water, the sight beautiful, a beacon of His steadfast love. Rainbows bend in prisms of light and water, the display dazzling my eyes. For that moment of glory, I stop to admire God’s work, grateful for His blessings. I accept it as a sign, a sure indication that God hasn’t forgotten me.
A hard grip on my shoulder spins me. “What are you doing here?” A worried frown carves my father’s face, his steely eyes grinding into me, honed with frightening intensity. Ordinarily a kind and gentle man of devout faith, he holds my shoulder in a vise. I start wilting, bending beneath the pressure.
“Paradise…” I reply with a small gasp, a wince twisting my face. “I wish to pray for them.”
My father’s hand slides down my arm as he releases me. He drops his head back, inhaling with eyes closed, and when his gaze returns, his face has softened, gray eyes welling with sorrow. “Come with me back to the Garden’s heart, Rimma; you needn’t see this. Your prayers are as welcome in God’s ears there as here.”
“But they may find comfort in witnessing our prayers for them.”
“They will curse both God and Heaven,” he murmurs. “They will believe our prayers a mockery and plead for our fall.”
“Papa, no.” His words border on blasphemous, curdling my stomach. “They will see the truth of our hearts, won’t they? God will save them.” I’m struggling to breathe, drowning with uncertainty, my father’s cynicism crumbing the footings of my faith, a blind childish faith, Max’s words tolling in my head.
“I’ll not ask you again.” The edge in my father’s voice stiffens my back, his tone recalling scores of scoldings I’d received as a child, a child now grown.
“I’m a woman now,” I remind him, my eyes matching his severity, fingernails digging into my fists to steady me.
“Until you are wed, I am your father and you’ll obey me.” Had I been any younger he might have slapped me for my defiance, but I am right in this and he knows it. His jaw moves, but nothing he says can convince me. Then he whispers a word that breaks my heart, “Please.”
Almost, I almost turn around and trudge with him back to the kitchens, to my chores, to my child’s life, but I resist his call to comfort. Max called me a blind child, a taunt that stung my pride. I’m sixteen, old enough to court and marry and fornicate, and I won’t sidestep my duty as a descendant. “You can’t protect me forever, Papa. I will pray for Paradise at the wall.” I hug him soundly. “Only for an hour, and then I’ll come home.”
What truly can he say in reply? He nods and turns toward Heaven’s heart, hands in his pockets, head down in thought. I watch him go, simmering in my stew of emotions, a cauldron of worry, regret, pride, compassion, and terrible fear. A part of me wishes to skip after him and clutch his hand, smile up at him and cheer him, but I’ve made my supper, so to speak, and can’t walk away. I head for the wall.
Ahead of me, our timberland stabs at the sky, a forest of two hundred straight pines of orderly heights and thicknesses lined up like picture-book soldiers off to ancient wars. The only plants we don’t eat, the pines grow immensely tall, giants even to God’s House of Law. Since a little girl, I imagined the older part of the forest possessed an altered power, not as grand as God’s, surely, but a natural wisdom bordering on sentience, traveling back to a time before the breaking of the world. The forest of Heaven was my playground once, different than the rest of the Garden, a place to hide and climb branches and wonder over the world beyond the earthen hill that rings the outside of the shield wall.
Today I’ve no time to linger among the trees. I follow the path with Heaven’s other descendants, treading lightly over copper needles, silent in the cathedral of pines. Our final quiet procession through the trees feels fitting; for when branches thin and the last row of pines falls away, the wall rises in a sheer, shimmering skin of pearly light. This close, the shield emits a soft hum, a pulsing heartbeat, the terrifying power of God at my fingertips. A metal fence separates us from the wall, not so high that we can’t climb over it, but not one of us would dare such a feat of foolishness. To touch God’s shield is death, a taste of immeasurable might, of crackling blue light that burns birds and insects to flecks of ash.
Outside the shield, the earth rises twenty feet into a second wall that girds the entire Garden of Heaven and blocks our view of what lies beyond. As a child, I clambered up the pines to catch a glimpse of the broken world, but for those less agile and more civilized than I, there’s a metal viewing platform at the end of each spoke, a tower of sorts with zigzagging stairs. There our deacons crowd the narrow stand and stairs between the rails with the eldest of our elders, all jostling one another to avoid accidentally plummeting to the ground below.
The viewing platform isn’t necessary today. I see the descendants of Paradise from the very earth where my feet grow taproots affixing me to the ground. I’m certain they want to be seen, all of them, by all of us. They stand at the top of the earthen wall, twenty feet up in a line a quarter mile long, two thousands of them, weak, filthy, and hungry after the long trek from Paradise. Dust blows across their bodies and wind-tangled hair; gritty hands rubbing gritty eyes, horrified eyes streaked with grimy tears. Men, woman, and children cling together, infants and toddlers beside the old and feeble. In voices so near, unhindered by the wall’s presence, they beg. They plead for their children’s lives, mothers imploring us, at the very least, to save their babies. Sobs rise and fall, a keening wail, desperate lives terror-wracked, legs giving way to weakness and despair. As strident as the curses, prayers soar in God’s holy name. Some bow on their knees, praying for themselves, none praying for us. The loudest voices screech from faces contorted by hate, calling us devils in disguise, cursing us to the pits of Hell and laughing with bitter malice at the certainty that Heaven too will fall. Just as my father said they would.
2
~Angel~
From thirty-five feet high on a branch as thick as my arm, I watch my sister kneel and pray. Her head bows, her bonnet swathing her face in sharply angled shadow, palms steepled in supplication. We are twins, mirrors to each other, boyishly thin, our mother’s buttermilk hair iron-straight, our father’s eyes, gray pools reflecting the hues of the hour. Are my sister’s eyes jade-tinged by the grass she kneels upon or slate for the shadows circling her soul?
She doesn’t know that I spy on her and the descendants of Heaven and Paradise in our mutual hopeless destruction. No one knows I cower up here as my sister begins to break.
The cracks in Heaven’s shield splinter, no mere rumor. At night they crackle, blue light sparking and rippling in streams, opening voids like blots of spilled ink, empty black eyes to the night sky that snap closed again. I’ve felt rain, true outside-rain spattering on my face and arms when holes wink open.
How can she deny what our eyes see, our tongues taste, our skin feels. Our filaments flicker and dim. Lampposts cast scarcely a glow; at night, we light our chambers with candles to save our stubbed toes. Our water might gush or dribble depending on the day. The very air swelters or freezes as the broken world spins through its seasons. Crops wither and thrive; we wither and thrive. I fear we tiptoe on the rim of annihilation.
On the earthen wall, I behold the mirror of my family and neighbors, a cast-out community, myself. Are they me and mine, our own future crying out for deliverance? The youngest children whine and sniffle at their tiredness and hunger, writhing against their parents’ distress, incapable of envisioning the threat lurking in the days ahead. Older children appear immobilized, bewildered to the point of senselessness, their exclusion from our Garden incomprehensible to their experience, to all they’ve learned in their short lives. A dusty little girl in a once yellow frock comforts her mother as she watches my sister pray in the green grass. Does she, like my sister, believe God will answer all her prayers?
A flicker of movement distracts me, and I raise my eyes over the refugees’ heads. The afternoon sun sinks behind me, casting a golden light across a wilderness of thirsty grass and golden weeds, blood-red stones of a dry riverbed. Beyond crumbling banks, an expanse of barren dirt stretches toward a spindly forest, saplings sprouting like stiff gray hair on an old man’s head. Bronze mountains cut the distant horizon, ridges and valleys sharpened by the sun’s shadows; beyond them I dream of mirror lakes and copper-crested seas.
Movement stirs again at the trees’ edge. I’m not the only one who notices it. Deacons and elders on the metal tower still their bumping for position, voices silent as several point to the skeletal limbs. Those outside the shield turn, first a few, then more, until the whole line rotates to face the first sign of Biters.
**
The House of God’s Law swarms with deacons, elders, and most of the men, not a crevice spared for women or children, our presence deemed unnecessary. Rimma sneaks through the twilight around the hub, gathers her skirt in her teeth, and climbs the ivied ladder. I follow close enough on her heels to taste the soles of her shoes.
On the roof, she creeps toward the belfry and child-size door that opens to the bell loft. She needn’t lift the latch so gingerly or fret over squeaky hinges; the cacophony of male voices below creates a rumbling thunder that drowns our meager sounds. Inside the loft, we move more carefully, tiptoeing around the bell frames in the darkness and the holes in the floor where the ropes fall and light rises in dusty shafts. From here, we can hear every word said when the formal call to order silences the room.
Crossed-legged, Rimma leans forward, an eye to a hole, her face illuminated as she watches the stir of activity, men shuffling into seats, still arguing, many surely standing against stone walls beyond curving pews. Deacons cluster at the dais, red-faced and muttering. None of this turmoil do I need to observe with my eyes, the imagery so clear in my head, the scene repeated with only a twitch more panic than when the shield began to fail.
My knees fold up to my chest, chin resting on kneecaps, lips pursed as I watch Rimma listening. Neither of us speaks, and she avoids raising her eyes to me, as if I’m not here. So well I know her. She is me and I her. I reflect her expression, her gestures, the grace and awkwardness of her body, the tone and timbre of her voice. We are still fluid and undefined, shedding our childhood for an adulthood that disintegrates before our eyes. Heaven was once so predictable it was deadening, a generations-old pattern we weave just as our forebears did. Rimma believes the loom that holds the threads of our lives will last forever; I’m less certain. That describes perhaps the only difference between us for we are equally terrified.