22
I walk into the grove with my mother. Another woman follows us a few steps behind.
I turn to her and say, ‘Hello.’
She bows her head slightly. She looks about the same age as my mom and wears a midlength coat with a hood that covers her head. Beneath the coat, a dress falls to her ankles and drapes over her slippers. There’s something familiar about her dress, but the thought flitters through my mind and gets pushed out by bigger things.
‘She’s with me,’ says my mom. I’m not sure what to make of her. My mother usually doesn’t have friends, but it’s a whole new world, and maybe I don’t know as much about my mom as I thought.
The grove is quiet except for the crunching of our feet and the sound of someone running toward us. I look back and see Raffe fast approaching on foot. He’s almost invisible with his dark trench coat and cap. He must have come running when he heard me scream during the hellion attack.
Both my mother and her friend freeze when they see his figure, but I put out my hand and nod to show that he’s with me. They continue into the grove while I drop back to wait for Raffe.
My mom looks back to keep an eye on us and doesn’t even try to be polite about it. She’s fully vigilant, scanning the shadows. Good for her.
‘You all right?’ His voice is soft, almost apologetic. I wonder if he thought that it would be better for me if the hellions didn’t see him fighting for me. There were too many for him to kill them all, so a lot of them would have escaped and told other hellions. Or maybe he couldn’t afford to have Obi and the others see him fighting full force.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Those ugly bullies were more afraid of my mommy than any warrior angel anyway. She’s far more scary.’
He nods, looking preoccupied and troubled.
‘What did Obi show you?’
‘He gave me a tour of the camp.’
‘He showed you the ramen supplies?’
‘He showed me their weapons stock. Their evacuation plan. Their surveillance system.’
I almost trip over a branch. ‘Why would he do that?’ The question comes out more forcefully than I intended. Alarm bells are going off in my head. ‘He was Mr. Paranoid the last time he saw you.’
‘He wants to recruit me by impressing me. And he’s more desperate for fighters this time. He can sense I have military experience.’
‘So are you joining the Resistance?’
‘Not likely. I saw their dissection tables.’
‘What dissection tables?’
‘Where they dissect anything that isn’t strictly human. They have a prime table reserved in case they ever catch an angel.’
‘Oh.’
I want to remind him that we’re at war with an enemy we don’t understand. But it’s pointless to argue. I’ll never be okay with Uriel’s experiments on humans regardless of what reasons he thinks he has, so why would Raffe understand any reason we might have to cut into his kind?
‘They’re also working on an angel plague that they hope will wipe out my entire species.’
‘Really?’
‘They raided the lab on Angel Island when they rescued their people and stole something they could tinker with. Apparently, Laylah is working on a human plague and generating various strains to optimize the damage. There’s one strain that they hope might work against angels.’
‘How close are they to creating this angelic plague?’
‘Not very. Otherwise, I would have had to kill them.’
We walk in silence, the concept of kill or be killed heavy between us.
I’m relieved when we reach Paige, if only to interrupt the silence.
My sister is sitting beside her locusts. My mother and her friend stop at a respectful distance and stare at the beasts.
Paige gets up, sending the locusts flying to the branches above, and runs to Mom. Paige is the baby of the family, and she has a different relationship with our mother than I do. Mom strokes her hair while Paige snuggles into her hug.
‘How did it go with Doc?’ Raffe whispers.
I take a deep breath and give him the bad news about Doc’s broken arm. He doesn’t say anything, but I know the news hits him hard. His amputated wings are withering every second they’re not on him, and I’m pretty sure they won’t last as long as they did last time. And now, the only doctor who can reattach them won’t be back in action for six weeks.
And then there’s my starving sister . . .
I feel drained. There must be another answer, but I’m too emotionally beat up to think. I just want to crawl into the vault in my head and close the door on the world.
I lean toward Raffe and feel his muscles against my arm. I close my eyes and relax into him. He feels so solid. I’m not sure if I’m giving him comfort or the other way around.
When I open my eyes, my mom’s friend is watching us. I quickly step away from Raffe and stand tall. It’s a strange thing for her to do – watching us instead of the locusts or the cut-up little girl.
‘Somebody is looking for you,’ she says.
Oh, right. ‘Yeah, I heard.’ The angels, the hellions – who doesn’t want a piece of me right now?
She nods toward Raffe. ‘I meant him.’
Do they have a bounty on him too? He had a red mask over his face when we were fighting the angels, so they must have thought he was just some demon, right?
‘I have a message for you,’ says the woman to Raffe. ‘The message is, freedom and gratitude. Trust, my brother.’
Raffe spends a couple of seconds taking that in. ‘Where is he?’ he asks.
‘Waiting for you downtown at the church with the stained glass.’
‘He’s there now?’
‘Yes.’
He turns to me. ‘Do you know where that is?’
‘Sort of,’ I say, having a vague memory of a couple of different churches in Palo Alto. ‘What’s going on?’
He doesn’t say anything.
I wonder if the twins got their message wrong. Maybe the angels are looking for Raffe and not me.
‘Do you need anything more from me?’ the woman asks. She’s creeping me out a little with her calm and peaceful voice.
‘No, thank you.’ Raffe’s thoughts are far away.
The woman takes off her hood. Her head is shaved, looking particularly pale.
She takes off her coat, letting it fall to the ground. A sheet is wrapped around her body, tied at one shoulder. Her dark eyes look huge in her bald head, and they gaze at me with peace and serenity. Her hands are together with her fingers interlocking in front of her. The only thing that mars her old-world look is the pair of white tennis shoes she wears beneath her sheet.
She gives us a little bow before turning toward my sister. She doesn’t say any of the rehearsed recruiting statements that I would expect from someone so obviously part of an apocalypse cult. She just moves toward my sister quietly, then stops in front of her.
My mother bows to the lady. ‘Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for volunteering.’
‘Volunteering for what?’ I ask, feeling uneasy.
‘Don’t worry about it, Penryn.’ My mother waves me away. ‘I’ll take care of this.’
‘Take care of what?’ I’m not used to seeing my mom dealing with people, and I’m certainly not used to seeing her interacting with people the way she is with this woman. ‘Take care of what, Mom?’
My mother turns to me with exasperation, as if I’m embarrassing her. ‘I’ll explain it to you when you’re older.’
I stand under the trees and blink several times at her. It’s all I can think to do. ‘When I’m older? Seriously?’
‘This is not for you. I know you, Penryn. You don’t want to see this.’ She shoos me away.
I take a few steps back and join Raffe to watch in the shadows. My mother gestures for us to move farther back, and we turn and walk away. I slip behind a tree to watch when Mom stops looking at us. Raffe stands beside me but doesn’t bother to hide.
The cult woman bows her head and kneels humbly in front of Paige. A part of me wants to leave, never knowing what’s about to happen. But another part of me wants to barge in between them and break it up.
Something is going on with my mother’s full approval that definitely needs supervising. Are they trying to recruit Paige into a cult? I feel no guilt about spying right now. I’m normally big on privacy, but I just need to make sure that there’s nothing . . . well, crazy going on.
‘I am here to serve you, Great One,’ says the woman.
‘It’s okay,’ says Mom to Paige. ‘She volunteered. We have a whole line of cult members who volunteered. They know how important you are. They’re willing to make sacrifices.’
I don’t like the word sacrifices. I rush over to them.
Paige sits on a fallen tree, looking down at the woman now kneeling in front of her. The woman loosens her sheet and tilts her head to the side to expose her vulnerable neck.
I stand frozen, taking in the scene. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Penryn, stay out of this,’ says Mom. ‘This is a private affair.’
‘Are you offering her as meat?’
‘This isn’t like the other time,’ says Mom. ‘She volunteered. This is an honor for her.’
The cult member looks at me awkwardly with her head still tilted to the side. ‘It’s true. I have been chosen. I am honored to nourish the Great One who has resurrected the dead and will lead us to heaven.’
‘Who wants to go to heaven anymore? There’s nothing but angels there.’ I look at her to see if she’s joking. ‘You actually volunteered to be eaten alive?’
‘My spirit will be renewed as my flesh nourishes the Great One.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ I look back and forth between my mother, who is nodding seriously, and the woman, who must be on drugs or something. ‘What makes you think she’s the Great One anyway? The last time we were here, this camp tried to draw and quarter her.’
‘The doctor from Alcatraz has told Obadiah and the council that she is the Great One, the chosen one who will be our savior. The rest of the camp doesn’t believe, but we of the New Dawn know that she must be the Great One meant to save us from this holy tragedy.’
‘She’s just a little girl.’ I want to say the word normal, but I can’t.
‘Please don’t stop this,’ says the woman, her eyes pleading. ‘Please don’t interfere. If you reject me, someone else will have the privilege, and I will be disgraced.’ Her eyes actually fill with tears. ‘Please allow my life to mean something in this world. This is the greatest contribution and the greatest honor I could have in this life.’
I stand there with my jaw slack, trying to think of something to say.
My baby sister, though, doesn’t have any problems turning her down. She shyly shakes her head no and crosses her legs, sitting in her monk pose. We’d always called her our little Buddha since she decided to be a vegetarian when she was only three.
Tears stream down the woman’s cheeks. ‘I understand. You have different plans for me.’ She looks like she’s been personally rejected. She gets up slowly and ties her sheet firmly back into place, giving me a glare.
The woman bows and backs out, refusing to turn her back to Paige.
My mom sighs beside me in exasperation. ‘This doesn’t change anything, you know,’ she says to me. ‘I’ll just have to go back and find the next one in line.’
‘Mom, no.’
‘They want to do this. It’s an honor for them. Besides,’ she turns to follow the woman, ‘they come with their own sheet for easy cleanup.’