45
CATS OUT OF BAGS
The next fluttering of commotion to sweep through the kasbah had a different feel from the start. No Insh’Allahs or gazing skyward this time. There was disbelief, rancor, and… they appeared to be looking at… Eliza.
Eliza had had a problem with paranoia all her life. Well, for a good chunk of her life, it hadn’t even been paranoia, but the foregone expectation of rote persecution: simple and nasty and certain. People were looking at her, and they were judging her. Back home in Florida, in a small town in Apalachicola National Forest, everyone had known who she was. And after she ran away, well. Then it was the chill at the nape of her neck, the dread of being found or recognized, the always looking over her shoulder.
That had gradually faded—never completely—but when you lived with a secret, the paranoia was never far beneath the surface. Even if you’d done nothing wrong (which in her case was debatable), you were guilty of having the secret, and any searching glance cast your way took on this ominous meaning.
They know. They know who I am. Do they know?
But they didn’t. They never knew. At least, they never had before, and for that, Eliza had a particular perversity of the church to thank. They shunned “graven images”—not just of God and their “foremother,” but of the prophets as well, and after Eliza’s first vision, no more pictures of her were taken. Not that there were many before that. Her family wasn’t exactly preserve-memories-for-posterity kind of people. They were more like prepare-for-Armageddon, guns-in-a-bunker kind of people. The photo used on the news had been taken by a tourist passing through Sopchoppy—that was the actual name of the town near which their church compound stood—who, alerted by a local, had snapped a picture of “those angel-cult freaks” when they came in for supplies.
“Those angel-cult freaks” had been a local story for decades, but had only exploded nationally when Eliza disappeared. Her mother—the “high priestess”—only reported her missing weeks after the fact, desperate enough for help finding her lost prophet to go to the officials she scorned as idolaters and heathens. Of course, it had looked fishy, and society is not predisposed to give cults the benefit of the doubt. The headline had snagged the national imagination like a briar: CHILD PROPHET MISSING, BELIEVED MURDERED BY CULT.
That’ll do it.
Eliza could have cleared them at any time. She could have come forward—she was in North Carolina by then—and said, “Here I am, alive.” But she hadn’t. There was no pity in her for them. None. Not then, not now, not ever. And, as a body was never found—though it was looked for, assiduously, for months—eventually the law had had to leave them alone. Lack of evidence, they’d cited, though this had swayed neither public opinion nor the minds of the investigators. It was a sordid affair, and you had only to look into the eyes of the mother, they said, to know the worst. One of the detectives had gone so far as to state, on camera, that he had interrogated the Gainesville Ripper in his career, and he had interrogated Marion Skilling—her name, it was not lost on the tabloids, contracted to Marion’s killing—and they gave you the same sense in your soul of pitching headlong into a dark hole.
“I find it difficult to sleep, knowing that woman is free in the world.”
A sentiment shared wholeheartedly by Eliza.
The upshot was, the girl Elazael must certainly be buried somewhere in the vastness of Apalachicola Forest. There was not an iota of doubt.
At least, not until today.
“Eliza, come with me, please.”
Dr. Chaudhary. He was rigid. Behind him, Dr. Amhali was… worse than rigid. He was livid. He was breathing like a cartoon bull, Eliza thought, her mind taking refuge in inanity even as she understood what must be happening, at long last, after seven years of dreading it.
Oh god, oh god.
Oh godstars.
Another tarot card turned over in her mind and gave that to her. Godstars. It tickled her memory, but she couldn’t stop to consider it, not just now. “What’s the matter?” she asked, but Dr. Chaudhary had already turned and walked away, fully expecting her to follow. And they were in the middle of nowhere, in a hot, killing land, at the center of a military perimeter. What else could she do?
The cat was out of the bag. The corpses were out of the pit. Karou hadn’t even considered this possibility. It felt like a violation, as if her home had been invaded.
Some home, she thought. She had been deeply miserable here. It was a chapter of her life she had no wish to revisit, and yet she couldn’t help circling nearer, peering down at the figures moving beneath her. She passed in front of the sun and saw her own shadow—tiny with distance—hover and flitter like a dark moth among the folk down below. She could disguise herself, but not her shadow, and someone—a young black woman—caught sight of it and looked up. Karou moved back, drawing her shadow-moth away with her.
She could smell the rankness of the chimaera corpses even from up here. This was bad. Her whole plan of avoiding a conflict that would pit “demons” against “angels” was up in smoke. Or rather, stupidly, not up in smoke. “I should have burned them,” she told Akiva, whose presence she felt by her side as heat and the stir of wingbeats. “What was I thinking?”
“I can burn them now,” he offered.
“No,” she said, after a pause. “That would be worse.” If all the corpses were to suddenly combust? No matter that it was seraphim who commanded the fire to do such a thing, it would look… infernal. “There’s no undoing this. We just get on with it.”
He didn’t answer right away, and his silence was heavy. It was a mercy they couldn’t see each other, because Karou was afraid of the pain she would find in Akiva’s eyes, as they moved further into their purpose here, obeying their heads and not their hearts. They would return to Eretz when they had done their part here, and not before. And what would they find when they did?
There was an odd feeling of half death settling over her with the realization that the best they could hope for now was not very much at all, even if they succeeded here and drove Jael, weaponless, back to Eretz. What then, for themselves? There wasn’t even a future of tithing and bruises now, life squeezed in around the edges, and stolen tastes of “cake” to sweeten a difficult life. Cake for later, cake as a way of life. All of that was gone, smothered by a falling sky, shadows chased by fire: an enemy that was, simply, as Karou had known all along, too great to defeat.
How had she managed to hope otherwise?
Akiva. He had persuaded her. A look from him, and she’d found herself ready to believe in the impossible. It was a good thing that she couldn’t see him now. If his belief had kindled hers so completely, what would the sight of his despair do to her, or hers to him? She thought of the despair that had surged through them all in the cave and wondered: Had it been Akiva’s own? Did such darkness exist in him?
“How?” he asked. “How do we find Jael?”
How? That was the easy part. Bless Earth for telecom. All they needed was Internet access and an outlet to charge their phones so she could call some contacts. Mik and Zuze would probably like to let their families know they were okay, too. The two of them were on the ground now with Virko, a couple of miles away, hiding in the shadow of a rock formation. Even in the shade it was dangerously hot. Deadly hot, in fact, and they needed water. Food, too. Beds.
Karou’s heart hurt. Contemplating even these bare thresholds of life felt like unspeakable luxury. But it’s a different matter to take care of loved ones’ needs than it is to take care of one’s own, and for that reason she considered seeking food and rest. Zuzana hadn’t spoken a word since they came through the portal. Her first close encounter with “all this war stuff” had taken a toll on her, and the rest of them weren’t much better off.
“There’s a place we can go,” Karou told Akiva. “Let’s go get the others.”