**
If I lean precariously out Priest’s window, I can see the lower half of the fall where it smashes into the waterwheel, spilling and spraying, setting it endlessly spinning. I thought at first that Rimma was the water, plummeting down with an uncontrollable force, I the wheel pushed into a wild whirling without choices, without rest. Now, I wonder if the broken world is the crashing fall, the play of chance, or a destiny set in motion centuries ago by the faceless, nameless, long dead. Rimma is perhaps the wheel as much as I, as are we all, mired in a future beyond our control.
If God plays a role in all this, herds us along to some enigmatic purpose, I have a stern word or two for Him. Perhaps He’s the roaring fall, this world the madly spinning wheel, and Rimma and I the tumbling, uncontained spillage, slopping over banks, cast wildly to the air to fall where we will.
“Angel?” Priest’s voice murmurs from the door. I didn’t hear him enter and don’t want to face him, afraid of reading the answer in his eyes. He brings me the verdict,
my
fate whether we admit it or accept it. “We’ve decided.”
My fingers grip the sill; the fall thunders in my ears despite the distance. I’m grateful for his honesty, for including himself, for accepting his role in the Council and owning the choices that guide the Colony. He won’t share with me the details of the debate, sides argued or extremes of opinion, only the decision.
“Your sister is banished.” With those words, his breath slides softly into the stone room.
“I suppose I expected it,” I admit, my own sigh echoing his, filling the whole canyon. “Somewhere between death and forgiveness.” Tears well in my eyes as a small laugh leaves my lips, and I turn to face my love. “All those years of worry about banishment from Heaven, and here we are, banished anyway.”
“Not you, Angel.” A look of dread sweeps his face. “I’ll accompany Rimma to the Fortress. She’ll be safe there; it’s where she’s wanted to go since arriving here.”
“I can’t stay without her,” I tell him. “You know I can’t.”
“As long as she survives, I believe you’re…safe.”
His words scarcely make sense to me. “Because of our magic? What do you mean if she survives, I’m safe?”
“Nothing, I don’t know.” He offers a small smile, dismissing his prior statement and my concern. As he starts to pace, his hand rakes through the short wool of his hair. “I just want you here with me.”
“And I would like nothing more,” I assure him, the tenderness in his voice crushing me. Leaning against the wall by the window, I drop my head back, resting my eyes on the ceiling’s round beams. “Even if Rimma and I weren’t somehow bound in this twin magic, I can’t leave her. You told me not long ago that her love for me is tangled up in fear. You said she’s dependent on me and would cease to exist without me, that I’m her hope. How can I let her go any more than she can release me?”
“Angel,” he pleads, halting in front of me. “I argued for banishment to save her life, not for this.”
“Thank you.” I push off the wall and slide into his arms, my head resting on his chest. He smells good, familiar.
“This isn’t what I want,” he argues, holding me against him, a hand in my hair.
“When our father died and Heaven fell,” I whisper into his chest, “Rimma vowed that she would bear all the burdens of the broken world, that she would do whatever life required to protect me and keep me safe. She forced me to swear to guard my innocence and retain my hope. Mag called her the devil, and Rimma played the part well…so I could play the angel. And she did it; she succeeded. She brought me here, to the Colony, to you.” As I look up into his face, it all seems so clear to me now. “She needs me and it’s my duty to protect her, if only from herself. Only long enough for her to heal.”
“And if she doesn’t,” he asks.
“I won’t give up. I can’t give up on her.”
“Hope and innocence, Angel,” he mutters.
“Would you consider staying with us?”
“I would.” He holds up his withered arm. “But I’m not welcome at the Fortress.”
“Oh, Priest.” I don’t know what else to say, my noble resolve so swiftly frail, my hope paper-thin. Tears finally slip from my lashes. “When do we have to leave?”
“Tomorrow, love.”
And that is that.
21
~Rimma~
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you,” Simone’s parting words.
Another place, another life I leave behind, to which I’ll never return. The closest things I have to friends, Tannis and Chantri ride with us to the Fortress. Once we arrive, they’ll take the horses, and with Priest, backtrack to the Colony. My crossbow has already returned to the arsenal where Chantri plucked it when I requested my place on the wall. We’ll enter the Fortress as we arrived at the Colony, with the shirts on our backs, and I in the old trousers stitched from my skirt on the roof of Heaven.
My sister bites her lip to keep from weeping, and Priest is almost no better. They ride side by side, inseparable, dreaming impossible dreams of a fantasy world that doesn’t exist. I don’t dismiss or belittle their love for each other, but I don’t trust love’s power to overcome evil. Nothing lasts; the broken world breaks everything.
All my regrets about Angel I keep locked in the back of my skull with my other maimed feelings. I envision a locked chest with a slot on top. In they go with no easy way out, leaving me lost in my comfortable, numb emptiness. That lock popped after I killed Sloot, and it took some time to stuff all that mayhem back inside.
For three days, we head due west along the same road that delivered us to the Colony, a cracked, weed-choked path I scarcely remember, my body splinted and bound then, so pain-racked that insentience proved a blessing. The road descends through bristly pines and juniper to woodlands of broadleaf cottonwoods. With the waste in sight, we swing north, sticking to pale green forests and muddy waterways. Nearly a week later we camp within a stand of willows. A spring bubbles from beneath an overhang of ledge, collecting in a still pool and escaping in a pitiful version of a brook. In the morning we top our flagons and water sacks and veer into the waste, the Fortress two days’ ride distant.
The road is a broken track, a lifeless gap in a pocked land of sparse grass, saltbush, and gray sage as far as my eyes stray. We pass steel skeletons jutting from patches of earth like the rusted ribs of long dead giants. The sun blares, burning exposed flesh, and the constant wind whispers, a sly hiss as it slithers through the grass, making the world quiver. Dust blows up in brown clouds, in dancing whirlwinds.
“Why would anyone want to live out here?” my sister asks Priest on our second day in the waste. She wears the floppy grass hat Kya fashioned for her to keep her face from crisping.
“No one has since the breaking,” he replies. “The land no longer sustains life beyond a few roaming herds. The Dead City lies that way.” He points west with his goateed chin. “Everything here retains remnants of old poisons.”
“For how long?” She swivels in her saddle, scanning the stark landscape, pained eyes meeting mine beneath the scarf that shades my head.
A shrug rolls Priest’s shoulders. “I don’t know, Angel, but we aren’t free of it yet.” He holds up the stump of his arm as an example. “How old did your people grow in the Garden? A hundred?” He chuckles and shakes his head. “That seems inconceivable when forty is considered a blessedly long life at the Colony.”
“And at the Fortress?” I ask from behind them, swatting at flies that buzz my ears.
“No different.” His dark eyes look back at me. “The Fortress sits on the same river that flows to the Dead City, but this far up it’s as clean as rivers can be. They face the same challenges; they simply choose harsher solutions.”
The sun bakes overhead, the sky pure blue, Chantri-eye blue, without a hint of clouds. Ahead of us, a leaning shelter creaks in the wind, its rusted metal sides intact though all the glass windows are long gone. Priest and Tannis rein their horses past an old gate twisted in the sage, dismount, and enter through a gap in the wall. “We’ll camp here out of the wind,” Priest says as he emerges from the shelter. “We’re six hours or so outside the walls.”
“Why not go on,” I ask Chantri as we guide our mounts from the track.
Swinging a leg over her saddle and dropping to the dust, Chantri glances back at me. “So we can plan our arrival. The Forerunners aren’t particularly welcoming to anyone who’s Touched. And you and Angel aren’t exactly
normal
according to their standards.”
“We not deformed…disabled…compromised, whatever you call it,” I assert.
“How about calling it what it is,
spectacularly
enhanced
.” She blows a little extra heat my way and rolls her eyes. “And no, you’re not Touched; you only take turns being fucking invisible.”
“Huh.” The possibility that we’d be somehow unfit to enter the Fortress never occurred to me.
Inside the hovel, the wind abates. My eyes slowly adjust to the dusty shade. The charred remains of an old fire blacken a ring of stones along with a few charred bones, leftovers of a meal. Little else remains, everything useful carted away long ago, the rest rotted down to nothing.
“We need to prepare,” Priest says when we’ve finished with our tasks, the horses brushed down and watered as best we can. Chantri scalds a pot of rabbit stew and hands out chunks of bread.
“Chantri and I plan to wait outside the wall with the horses,” Tannis starts off. “We won’t be any help on the inside, and there’s no reason to stir things up.”
“I won’t go in there anyway,” Chantri informs us all. “They didn’t want me; I don’t want them. And I know when to walk away,” she adds for my benefit.
“Fine,” Priest says, “thank you.”
“Just doing my part.” Chantri smiles.
“You will find the Fortress similar to the Colony in some ways, different in others,” Priest explains to me. “Like the Colony, survival depends on the participation and cooperation of every able individual. However, within the Fortress walls, there are no accommodations. Everyone produces or faces a penalty including expulsion and death. In the lower city, outside the walls, they’re less strict, but life is also more severe. As a new arrival, you’ll be assessed, Rimma. They’ll consider your age and health, any infirmities and your skills. My guess is they’ll appreciate what they see, except…”
“They won’t see us both,” I finish for him.
“Exactly,” Priest says. “I don’t think it’s wise to share your…situation. You aren’t Touched so you can answer that question to the negative.”
“They’ll find out.” Angel’s gaze flickers between Priest and me, her gray eyes fraught with worry. “They’ll know.”
“Eventually,” Priest agrees, taking her hand, “but not initially, I think, not if you’re careful. You’ll find no people like Chantri or me in there. You’ll enter as Rimma alone.” He shares a pained expression with my sister. “I’m sorry, Angel.”
“I hardly exist anymore,” she whispers and her eyes fall on me. “There’s only you.”
“Then stay with Priest,” I tell her. My voice sounds bitter, but I don’t mean it to. She should leave me; the last thing I want is to lug her misery around on my back. “Go back to the Colony.”
“No,” she says firmly, turning back to Priest. “Go on.”
“Angel’s here, isn’t she?” Tannis confirms, narrowing his eyes.
“That’s who they’re talking to, you dumb fuck.” Chantri punches him in the arm.
“Gah! That hurt,” he complains, squishing up his face and knuckling his injury.
“Despite my
spectacularly enhanced
body,” Priest continues with a smile for Chantri, “I’m not a stranger to the Fortress or its hierarchy. We have our differences, Rimma, but we’re far from enemies, and they possess knowledge and skills we need. I travel here once or twice a year, simply to maintain a presence. I’ll introduce you to Mikel, the Commander of the Forerunners, essentially the leader of the Fortress. If you impress him, you won’t be subject to as much scrutiny.”
“Impress him?” I feel my teeth clenching, the insinuation grating. “You mean fuck him?”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Priest snaps back. “The social order within the Fortress is governed by men, not unlike the People, but capable women populate positions of respect and power—if they earn it. The Forerunners live according to laws, Rimma, written laws, harsh laws they follow from top to bottom without exception. I suggest you learn them.”
“Wise advice,” Chantri says. “Since you’re rapidly running out of options.”
**
In the morning, we reach the first farms, the homes and outbuildings dug into pits in the hard ground and topped with slanted, pole-framed roofs. Their low walls rise from the dry dirt stuffed with brush and grass and packed with reddish clay. Bordering the dwellings, patchy gardens suck dry what little moisture they find in the thirsty soil. The horses drink from a trickling stream while we wash the grit from our faces.
“Perhaps we’ll see you again,” Chantri says to me as we prepare to hike the last miles in. She and Tannis will wait for Priest by the stream with the horses.
“I’m banished,” I remind her. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be a better friend.” The statement is true, the sentiment the best I can manage. I kiss her cheek and squeeze Tannis’s hand.