Chapter Text
When I pray, I pray for a miracle. I pray to reach backwards through time and speak to the person I was, begging her not to stay, but to run anywhere else.
Once, I would have thought that wish was impossible. Day by day, it becomes easier to believe.
I stretch my arms, still unused to the feeling of spandex shifting over my body, a pristine white skin covering my own. As I lower my arms to my sides, my attendants creep forward, feet almost silent save for the squeaking of the floorboards. They’re young, all of them. All girls, the youngest eight, the oldest seventeen. Old enough to be a friend, if we weren’t who we are.
I feel their devotion, the careful purpose in their steps. As one of them draws close, my fingers brush against the edge of her perfectly white hooded dress and she flinches back half a step as though struck, heads turning to her in silent admonishment. Six lives, reduced to nothing by a lifetime of indoctrination.
They mantle me in finery worth more than everything they’re wearing now and every outfit squirreled away at home, in the cubbyholes and niches in the RV they share with their whole family, or a near-derelict house their family shares with three more. All endured without outward complaint, because it’s the only life they’ve ever known.
I feel their doubts and they know it. It terrifies them, religious guilt magnified a thousandfold, as though I might reach out at any time and tear them apart, condemn them in front of the only support structure they have in the sure and certain knowledge that everyone who loves them would discard them in an instant on my word alone.
Their doubts don’t scare me, nor does the power I wield over them. What terrifies me is the eight-year-old girl who believes it all and loves me with all her heart, who believes that she is blessed by simply being in my presence, even as her arms tremble under the weight of my mantle.
She’ll carry it a while longer. A chair has been placed at my back. I sink down into it, back straight and eyes closed as one of my attendants kneels in front of me, dipping a brush into a pot of white body paint before carefully anointing my face, brushing right up to my bleached-white hairline. Easier to dye it back to blonde than turn blonde to white before every ceremony.
The oldest attendant works around her younger sister, lowering a silver necklace over my hair so that the pendant rests against my sternum. It’s a small thing, a glass vial capped on either end by filigreed silver. You can’t really see what’s inside it, that almost microscopic speck of dead cells suspended in clear resin. It almost burns.
With all my features washed away into a perfect statue from some classical museum, the painter bows and withdraws, her older sister waiting patiently for me to rise before removing the chair.
Then the youngest attendant is relieved of her burden and the heavy mantle is set upon my shoulders. Layers upon layers of swan’s feathers woven together into a thick cloak that falls almost to the floor, open at the front so my congregation can see in me the body of the divine.
I hate what I’ve become, but I chose every part of the ensemble myself, from the spandex costume to the ammonia burns that melted my bottle green eyes into a cloudy white. Anything to survive. Anything to keep my mind my own.
I start to walk, four of the attendants forming a procession behind me even as two move to open the doors. I no longer need my power to tell me how many steps there are to the door, or where one floorboard has sunk just a little lower than the rest. I was prepared for worse when I blinded myself, so long as it kept me safe from Valefor’s power. I needn’t have worried; as soon as I became divine I could have found any number of worshippers to serve as guides.
But divinity is a limited resource in our circles and walking unaided while blind only increases my share of it.
Rain O’Fire Fraizer waits for me beyond the threshold, where he has maintained his vigil. He isn’t as naïve as the girls; he knows I can see every doubt that’s wormed its way into his heart since he triggered, since our ‘cousins’ traded him to us as part of the exchanges that keep our three extended families on just the right side of incest. A soldier of fire sent to serve the light, long after he’d woken up to the truth of what all this really is.
He thinks I’m toying with him; stringing him along because blackmail makes for reliable soldiers, because I find it fun knowing that I could crush him at any moment. He doesn’t understand that his doubts are what make him so valuable to me, but that’s not his fault. After all, in my own way I am a true believer.
My congregation is a short walk away, down a little side passage connecting the emptied office to the nave of the Church. It’s too small to have a transept, too small to have much of anything beyond walls that haven’t yet fallen over and a roof that only needed minor repairs, but it’s not too close to the town and the landowner was willing to take cash in hand.
There weren’t any pews, but we don’t use them. To be seated in the presence of the divine suggests a degree of mutual respect that doesn’t exist in our faith. We know that our world is shaped by powers that utterly eclipse us, that may not even see us in any way that matters. What possible form of worship can there be beyond abject submission to her divine plan?
Unless, of course, you’re fortunate enough to have been touched by the divine.
My people kneel on cushions and rugs, tattered scraps of fabric brought from wherever we could find. It’s uncomfortable, degrading, but that’s the point. It brings them low before myself and the representation of the divine hanging where we tore down the Church’s old crucifix.
We don’t make art of Her. There’s no point, because an artistic depiction isn’t really Her. Above the altar is a photograph blown up to immense proportions, stretched across the wall in an ornate frame handcrafted by the congregation from wood and feathers. The photograph is from Lausanne, as almost all of them are. We worship a true image, hoping that some of its truth will reach us through it.
They bow their heads as I enter the room, averting their gaze as I stride past them to my proper place, between them and the image of our divinity. As my attendants join the congregation and look away themselves, only Rain remains standing to guard me in my private worship, kneeling for a moment before the altar, hands clasped and head bowed.
I don’t pray. Not now. Not here.
When I rise, I turn and raise my hands to the sky, mantle flaring out like wings.
“She sees us!” I declare. “She knows us! She has a place for us in the world! Now look and see Her!”
The ritual is familiar. I made it myself and designed its choreography for maximum effect. I make them look away until I’m ready for them, arms wide, feathers stretched, body as perfect as marble in the sun streaming through the church’s windows. The photograph of Her behind me, forever linking us together in their minds, creating a fleeting impression of mother and child. Worship refined like an industrial process to fuel my own apotheosis.
I let my hands fall, arms trembling after holding up the mantle, but a little less each time. I preach to them for half an hour, choosing my topics on the fly based on whatever insights I can lift from them. I preach to their fears and their hopes, for the children to remain faithful, obedient and to keep our secrets safe as they attend the local schools, which I have positioned in their mind as an enemy to be deceived.
I feed them deceptions of my own, shifts in our uncodified doctrine that draws them further from the orthodoxy of my siblings and mother. I remind them that this is a sacred place, a promised and prophesised land. I tell them to set down roots here, to become part of the fabric of this town, because every tie draws them further from the nomadic lifestyle of the rest of our clan. I tell them to be wary of those who would draw us away from our paradise and let them conclude that those lures can come from within as well as without.
With the sermon done, I perform the confession, calling up individual worshippers and declaring whatever sins my power can read. I lay my hands on them, drag their secrets into the light – affairs, theft, hatreds and jealousies – and let them endure the scorn of their peers before declaring a penance through which they might absolve their guilt and be embraced back into our society.
The secrets are trivial things. No real traitor would risk coming here and enduring my scrutiny, which is why I currently have a young man locked in a basement for attempting to reach out to Haven in a moment of spiritual crisis. Everyone knows where he’s gone. They don’t know why, but they don’t ask. They won’t, whether he returns to the flock or not.
The last ceremony is to bless the pilgrims. The risk is too great to bring fresh converts here – one look at the altarpiece and anyone with even a shred of doubt would run right to whichever authority they prefer, secular or divine – but I welcome visitors from the rest of our family. Anything to spread my doctrine amongst our nomads and tie me closer to divinity, elevating me above those who only interpret the will of the divine.
I let them approach, let them see me and make myself see them. I don’t touch their secrets, instead telling them about themselves. Their families, their friends, their thoughts in that moment. A loving kind of miracle, providing them with what all our worshippers desire; the knowledge that some vast and powerful presence has seen them.
Then it’s over, the congregation looking to the floor again as I leave for the office, exchanging my raiment for a modest dress and a pair of tights before letting one of my attendants stay behind to dye my hair blonde in a bucket of water. By the time I’m finished my flock has departed, leaving only a car waiting to take me back to our slice of Delphi, Indiana.
I chose Delphi because it had a good name that could easily be spun into a prophetic vision. I chose it because it put an entire state between myself and my family’s stomping grounds in Missouri. My mother suggested that Delphos in Kansas would be good enough, but even she couldn’t hold against a prophesy spoken in front of a full congregation, no matter how many reasons she had to doubt its legitimacy.
It’s been three months since I brought my followers here, claiming to be refugees from a town down South that fell to the Slaughterhouse Nine. Just one more lost Evangelical sect in a State full of them, who purchased half a dozen empty homes on the edge of town next to a plot of land they turned into a trailer park, and who pray in the old church nobody goes to anymore.
One hundred and four people came with me, though the County authorities are only aware of about two thirds of them. More come and go in a regular stream, on business or in pilgrimage to the Oracle of Delphi. We keep to ourselves where we can, and the rest of the town is happy for us to stay that way. They gossip, but that’s as far as their curiosity goes.
I took one of the houses for myself and filled it with a family; two parents and two siblings. My parents had never met each other before I appointed them to the role. My father was a priest, and if anyone asks then he still is the priest for our little Church. He’s a mediator between ourselves and the County, a friendly face in an otherwise isolationist group. My mother is a criminal accountant who found her faith in prison, because I like to keep on top of my books.
I made Rain O’Fire my younger brother, no matter how much it hurts to have any kind of brother. My sister is the attendant who stayed behind to dye my hair, a thirteen-year-old blonde who plays the part of our youngest sister and sneaks away when she can to visit her real family a few doors down. I hate that I took her, but power or not I’m still blind and I can’t bear the thought of depending on even a fake mother for help.
Both go to school. Most of the children do, for their benefit and mine. You get less government questions that way, though I’ve pled disability to keep myself homeschooled.
I could have claimed the best room and filled my house with luxuries, but like the priest I need it as a bridge between myself and the world outside our cult. A Potemkin home where my father can drink beer in the garden with the friends I’ve told him to make, all of them looking at me with so much misdirected pity.
We arrive home as a family, my father waiting until we’re inside before telling me that this week’s packet has arrived, intelligence from my mother printed out in braille for me to analyse, plus enough treats to last until the next packet. I gesture for him to follow me into my office – which everyone thinks is his – then sink down into the chair behind the desk and hold out a hand for the folder.
As I take it, my hands make contact with his and my power recoils in a sudden flood of embarrassed information like it’s making up for lost time, the rapid stabs of data making my heart shudder in my chest, needles tingling in my head even as I put on a perfectly genial smile. It’s a woman’s hand, one I know.
“Mama,” I say, rising from the desk and curtseying. “You do love your surprises.”
“As much as you love being a smart mouth,” Mama Mathers says in a friendly but chiding tone as she takes the seat at my desk, her movements abruptly audible as my power latches onto the information and uses it to fill in as much detail as it can.
“Did you enjoy the sermon?” I ask, because I know she would have watched. “And yourself?” I ask the wall, where Valefor has pressed himself flat in a juvenile attempt to see if I can still pick him out.
“Stirring,” he says, moving in close even as I move back, hating myself for how much it feels like flinching rather than natural survival instinct.
Mama notices, of course, tutting in disapproval.
“Poor girl. I wish you hadn’t done that to yourself.” She waves the folder in the air. “Braille printing is astonishingly expensive. Besides, now you’re too skittish for your own good, when you know full well I don’t like controlled followers. It’s no substitute for faith.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I say, head bowed in long-practiced contrition. “I was scared, but I don’t miss my eyes so much anymore. I see the world more clearly now. I think it’s good for people like us to rely on our powers more than our bodies.”
The flattery lands. Mama Mathers hasn’t opened her mouth at all during this conversation, instead using her power to feed her words straight into mine and Valefor’s ears. She lives for these illusions, getting high from controlling the world of everyone around her.
“Just make sure you don’t do worse,” she snaps, but she doesn’t care as much as Valefor. After all, she can still affect me just fine. “I can’t have my people mutilating themselves unless I order it. It’s wasteful.”
“I understand, Mama.”
“Anyways, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear we’re only checking in. We’re passing through the area on business, and I decided to pay you a visit. You’ve set yourself up well.”
“I still have more work to do before our place is fully secure, but I think I can start inducting new converts by the end of the month. Fresh blood and somewhere to call home, as promised.”
“I’m glad you’ve mentioned blood,” she preens, and I want to kick myself because I know exactly where this is going.
“I had my doubts about this endeavour of yours,” she says, not mentioning that most of them were because she knows this is a blatant grab for power, “but I’m beginning to see the value in a spiritual centre like this. Our own Jerusalem, but what is Jerusalem without its thousand year legacy?”
“Mama…”
For a horrid moment, her voice is my mother’s, lifted from whatever video she managed to find.
“You have a responsibility, Sarah.”
It feels like a stab in the heart and makes the return of her own voice a strange relief even with the horror of her words.
“I don’t have to spell it out for you. All my girls know, and only some of the boys have to be taught. We carry grace within us, but its light can burn us out very quickly. Better to pass it on when you can, to see that it lives on. After all, who knows what purpose She might put it to in time?”
“It’s-”
“I know you’re scared,” she preens, the words sadistic as her bony fingers wrap around my shoulder, pulling me in close and manoeuvring me until I’m seated on the desk. I never met her before I blinded myself, but I can picture her with perfect clarity now. A tall woman in her thirties, whose emaciated body and bleached hair lends her a crone-like appearance, dressed in sacred white clothes that hang off her body.
“You’ve got to get over your squeamishness, girl,” she whispers in my ear, the words harsh and grating. “I was younger than you when I gave birth to Elijah.”
And he triggered young. And he took control of you. And that’s why you have powers. I try desperately not to look at Valefor, succeeding only because I can’t look at anything anymore.
Then his hand is on my other shoulder, sliding over my neck.
“I’m not so bad, surely?” he asks, voice as smooth as a curved dagger. “It’d be like our own royal wedding, and imagine what my power can do when mixed with yours?”
“But that’s just it,” I say, turning to meet Mama’s gaze with my dead eyes and gathering every scrap of decorum I can. I need this to work, even if only holds for a day. Even if it means forcing words that taste like bile through my mouth.
“I’ve been thinking. Of course we have to leave a legacy, of course I need children to pass my power onto, but I think we can refine the process. I mean, it’s eugenics, right? We have to refine it; mix the ingredients we have into the best formula.”
Something in that landed. I feel it through her hand and almost jump at the shock. Some part of what I’ve said resonated with her. With her thoughts, her past, her suppressed fears, it doesn’t fucking matter. Not now, not when I need to be composed, rational, not a wreck of a girl driven by blind panic.
“And what’s wrong with my son’s components?”
“He’s a Master,” I explain, “to borrow the feds’ terms. I’m a Thinker. Mix the powers and you’ll get a mix of both, which probably isn’t stronger than either. I think we’d get better results from matching like for like. I’ve put together a file of Thinkers in the area who I think could work. All we’d need is a sample, then I can use one of the flock as a surrogate. We run multiple mixes at the same time, even, without having to wait. The carriers would be honoured.”
I might hate what I’ve become, what I do, but I’ve long since passed the point of hating myself. I know I’m a monster. I know I sacrifice lives to spare my own. I’ve made a kind of peace with that, as much as I can.
“Sparing you from motherhood,” she points out, like it’s the most cutting insult she can bring to bear.
“We worship an angel who makes machines. Yes, she’s divine, but so are her tools. We’ve got the pieces of a machine here, but we haven’t built the machine itself. Heartbreaker’s just one man but he can almost match us in numbers because he doesn’t care about family, just the end product. We have all these hangers-on who’d strap bombs to their chests if we asked them to, why not use them instead of losing half our strength to pregnancy for most of a year?”
Mama’s hand leaves my shoulder, Valefor backing off as well as he watches his mother. He doesn’t like the idea, I can tell, but mostly because it’d be less fun for him to fuck a petri dish.
“You’re not as clever as you think, but I’ll consider your science project,” she answers, and I don’t even try to hide my outpouring of relief. Let her think it’s one more hook to hold over me. “Now then, I’ll leave you to your recreation.”
There’s nothing feigned about the way my hand lurches towards the small pot she pulls out of her pocket, the contents shaking like maracas. Mama Mathers just smiled, pressing the pot into my hand and closing my other hand on top of it before standing and leaving the room, Valefor following at her heels.
I stay seated on the desk, gripping the pot like a lifeline as I count down ten minutes in my head, then reach into a desk drawer and pull out a cylindrical device. It shakes once I activate it, lasers washing over the room and outlining it like a sonar, providing me with a picture indirect enough to throw off Mama Mather’s power, creating a patch of distortion that tells me she if she’s still here.
Rain built it for me, but I don’t know for certain if it works. She hasn’t stuck around so far. Still, I can’t hold it in any longer.
I drop to the floor, the bottle clattering down as I claw at a bin in the corner of the room, barely managing to bring it to my mouth before the vomit comes tumbling out of me, dissolving my words in a flood of acid reflux. I know I’ve crossed a point of no return, made a deal that cannot be unmade without risking everything, even though I’m more powerless now than I ever was before.
“Water!” I shout, listening to the sound of frantic movement before my assistant hurries through the door, another visible reminder of the monster I’ve become.
I swallow the glass in one, handing the bin to the girl and ushering her towards the door.
“Tell Rain O’Fire I’m taking communion. I’m not to be disturbed.”
The child nods, not even glancing at the bin. More than any of my attendants, she knows that I am a flawed divine. She worships me anyway, and it makes me sick.
I sink back into the desk like a woman drained of all life, reaching down and scooping up the pill bottle before unscrewing the childproof cap. The pills inside are green and my power tells me the dose is twice as high as before. Mama Mathers wants me hooked even worse than I already am, spiralling down the rabbit hole until I’m as mad as my Ancient Greek counterparts. It’s the safest state for an oracle you don’t control, but I don’t care.
I don’t need her to provide me with LSD, not three doors down from the house I turned into a meth lab. When I blinded myself, when I realised how hopeless my situation was and started to look for any form of escape, she came up with these. The drug itself is pure enough but blended into the tablet is an entire cocktail of chemicals mixed in one specific lab by one specific parahuman, worming their way into my immune system until I can’t live without them. She doesn’t need her son to hold me when a chemical dependency will do.
In spite of that, they’re the only real weapon I have. She couldn’t stop my prophecy of Delphi because I made a quarter dose look like a whole tablet and she can’t stop the strange escape I’ve found in this eclectic mix of cocktails, my brain chemistry and the esoteric compounds put in by her parahuman pill pusher.
I swallow the pill dry and soon slip sideways out of the world.
It doesn’t take long for Rain to join me, a chemical anaesthetic rendering him unconscious in his bed upstairs. As the drug takes hold, I can almost hear the machinery hidden in the walls, creations of Rain’s that do little more than saturate the air with his power so that my own has something to latch onto.
I join him in his dream, in that nowhere place he shares with the others who gained their powers at the same time as his. A space of faces I know as well as him, people I could identity if he ever asked. I know them well; they’re the only faces I’ve seen in a year.
But the drugs carry me onwards, pressing against the walls of the dream room until they start to crack like so much glass. Rain and his peers freak out at that. They never like my visits, never like to see a stranger doing something strange in a space that’s wholly theirs, but I never stay for long.
I fall sideways through the world, glass walls shattering into a thousand knives that cut with other sensations than simple sharpness. Every moment of regret, of loss, of misery I’ve endured since this fucking cult first snatched me off the street comes flooding back all at once, all at the same time, a blinding, maddening onslaught of pain and I feel my power revel in it all.
I hit the ground. Insensate, screaming, rolling onto my back and staring up at the sky with bottle-green eyes, brushing blonde hair off my face. Of course, there is no sky here. Just the monster, vast and incomprehensible, perched above the dream room like a mountain of crystalline shards, vast tendrils reaching down to play with its dolls.
It pays me no mind, like I don’t even exist, but I still have to be careful as I rise to my feet, taking in the ground that surrounds me, a ground formed of red crystals layered on each other in impossible fractal shapes that my mind simply slides off rather than comprehend.
They offer me no insights, no whispered secrets. This is the only place where my power doesn’t answer me. It is the source of all things, the world through which all our works are made real. My congregation prays to photographs of the Simurgh, gather in families to watch old Lausanne newsreels on the VCR every night in a uniquely American form of idol worship, but they have no comprehension that they’re praying to a finger puppet.
My Goddess is in here, among these islands of shards hanging in a black void. The pilgrimage to Her is a familiar one, but it never gets any easier. I can see here, but human sight struggles against this alien geometry. I stumble, I fall, I cut myself in ways that sometimes leave phantom scars on my skin, as thought I really slip out of reality and bring my body with me when I come here.
It isn’t a long journey. I’ve kept Rain O’Fire close to me for so long and taken communion so frequently that She orbits his own island like a satellite, waiting in feigned indifference for my arrival. She could meet me the moment I cross the threshold, but She never does, instead waiting for me to pick my way through thickets of crystals as high as my waist and sharp as scalpels, jutting out at awkward angles so that at times I have to crawl, until I finally crest a ridge and see my Goddess.
I’m standing in a tear in the landscape, a wide scar of ground where an entire swathe of crystals have been swept to one side. She looms over it, expectant, waiting, features forming in the landscape like a magic eye picture.
A woman. Maybe that’s just my own mind anthropomorphising Her, maybe it’s Her forming Her shape based on my own self-image, maybe everything I can see, feel and experience is nothing more than my mind making sense of the incomprehensible, like a CD player trying to run a DVD.
“Hello there, you shitty bitch,” I snap.
More of Her comes into focus, the landscape of ridges and hills changing under observation to form a body like a statue carved into a mountain. A cone atop a cone becoming a woman’s body in a toga-cut dress like a mockery of the divinity I claim before the congregation, constantly moving in hyperactive, spine-snapping jerks and twists.
Her head is eyeless, mouthless, little more than a nesting ground for the forest of cables that flow down like hair, that twist and coil around her body before connecting to the forest of crystals around us. To the crystals that are Her true form, not this representation that is as feigned as the Simurgh.
I’ve prayed to Her time and time again, wandering through herself in search of way to deepen our connection, to take more of the great and terrible power contained within this place than the morsel She cares to give me, a thin ration She makes me pay for using with the tiniest possible rebuke that floods my brain with crippling headaches. She eased off a little with my blindness, but only because it made me creative. That was how I knew there was a will behind my power. That was how I knew to come here, to pray for Her intercession like any supplicant dwarfed before their Goddess.
I approach the avatar, watching the motes of light pulsing up and down the cables in a never-ending stream of data that flashes into life as images on the crystals around me. I reach out a hand. Not for Her five-fingered clump of shard-stuff, but for the tendrils that provide Her humanoid avatar with a link to the inhuman.
I grasp them, bundling them tight in my hand even as the data flows into me like lightning, and speak to Her. I feel myself become Her for one awful moment, the eighty-six billion neurons in my brain dwarfed into insignificance by the multitudes She contains, before She takes my mind and sets me apart again, tearing my consciousness away and reassembling it from the last backup.
Then we can talk, which is very different to speaking. It’s a flow of data conveyed not as words, but as raw electrical impulses. She doesn’t understand my brain, not truly, but She can read it as trivially as I might read an email, can gleam desire and intent and can deign to grant them.
Usually, She doesn’t. Usually, She leaves me to work within the restrictions She sets, to stumble along in a hell of my own creation because I asked too much of my Goddess, because I forgot my place.
Sometimes, though, sometimes I word it right, form the right thoughts and let the drug take me to the right mindset until I have a request that fits, that promises something new, something interesting. A vector of attack that She finds fun.
The world shifts, the forest of crystals scintillating around me as their rigid surfaces collapse into an oscillating mass of movement. The avatar remains, barely, flailing limbs striking me as I keep my grip on the cables, keep the exchange of data flowing as we hunt through this firmament for my prey.
When we settle, She’s holding me in her arms, my body sunk halfway into Hers with my face emerging from Her featureless visage. I let go of the coils. They’re going into my head now, Her avatar a willing participant in this endeavour.
Images flash on the forest around me, but I barely see them through the flood of data that pours into my head as my power turns itself on another mass of shards floating in this void, hunting through the immense entity for those eighty-six billion neurons on the other side.
I find her. I find her mind, her intent, where she is and where she’s going, and I smile. I laugh. I cry myself hoarse even as the avatar expels me from Her form, leaving me curled on the floor in a ball, trembling helplessly as the LSD starts to wear off.
Gradually, I come back to myself, the alien surface beneath me disappearing until I can feel carpet against my cheek, a bruise on my left shoulder where I struck the desk when I fell off the chair. The sky outside is dark; my communion has taken all day, but it was worth it. Six months of data, six months of planning and verification, all vindicated.
I thought she’d made me when she showed up this morning. Maybe she had, before I fed her another part of myself and left her satisfied in her control. I needed to be sure. I needed to know for certain where she was, which meant I needed to observe her in the one place where her power can’t reach.
I haul myself upright until I’m leaning against the desk, reaching into a drawer and pulling out the cheapest phone I could buy. It’s taken me half a year of careful preparation, of seeds planted in friends and enemies alike to manipulate events across entire States, casting a web so wide she’d never realise she was caught in it. All to lead her into one specific meeting, with one specific group, in one specific place.
Standing on top of a bomb and a long-life battery I had an agent bury beneath new concrete four months ago.
I enter a number into the phone, hit a button and kill mother and son with a single blow. Relief floods me, tears springing to my face as I crawl towards the corner of the office, trying to make myself as small as possible as I let out every emotion I’ve suppressed, every regret in my soul, every sin I’ve committed that has led me to this point. I cry myself to sleep, exhausted and trembling as the last of the drug settles into my system, to sit dormant until it starts to fade and my body starts to fail.
I expect to wake to a world on fire. Instead, when I finally emerge from my office, I find that everything is as it was. Word hasn’t spread, our sect hasn’t descended into bloodletting, my congregation haven’t come to burn me as the antichrist. It feels normal, and I let myself enjoy it. I stretch the cramps out of my body, burn through what’s left of the morning’s hot water in the shower and dress myself in cheery colours.
It’s too late for breakfast, but my parents would make something if I asked. Instead, I text Rain O’Fire and my attendant and tell them to join me in town for lunch. I let the sun wash over me, breathe fresh air, and decide to enjoy this strange dream before it all comes crumbling down.
It happens when I’m halfway through the burger I split with my youngest sister. Footsteps on the wipe-clean floor, a woman walking in low-heeled dress shoes. She slides into the booth next to me, expensive fabric brushing against my arm – a suit in an old-fashioned cut that would be incongruous even in a large city.
She draws a gun from the jacket with her left hand, aiming it under the table at Rain with her body hiding the weapon from any outside observers. I feel my power flood back, insights filling my mind with almost sadistic glee, as if my Goddess is asking whether I enjoyed my moment of time away from my divinely appointed penance. She whispers in my ear, until I understand it all.
“Mama Mathers didn’t gain the power to overcome her son’s,” I say, no longer caring what my two followers hear. “You gave them to her in exchange for service, but the power she got made her hard to control.”
I lean back in the seat, stretching my right arm over the back of the booth as I turn to face this human avatar of a greater power.
She looks at me with such purpose in her eyes, such dedication and intent that it makes a mockery of my every performance at the pulpit. I focus my attention on our surroundings and find us in a providential moment of isolation, with the chef turned away and the waitress busy at the other end of the room with the only other customers.
I reach down and wrap my left hand against the barrel of her gun, pulling it and her unresisting arm out from under the table before pressing the muzzle against my forehead.
“There are so many ways to control me. Help me survive Mama Mathers’ death, help me finish my work and raise me above all the pretenders who’ll come crawling for what’s mine by right, and tell me what the Fallen can do for you.”
My power grants me insights into many things, but my greatest realisation is one I reached on my own, a long time ago. This world is shaped by powers that dwarf us, that can eclipse any human effort no matter how much you struggle against it. I have power over others and perhaps I can undo some of what myself and my family have done to them, but only within the boundaries set by those with power over me.
Nobody can free themselves from that reality, but sometimes you can choose who holds your leash.