I take a few steps, trying to process the information. It doesn’t want to process. “Fuck.”
“It makes sense. I’ve seen other Knights or Pawns in the Ratel suddenly change personality completely. They wouldn’t seem to know me, even if we’d spoken the day before. Think how dangerous that makes this drug.”
“Whether it’s in the hands of the Ratel or the government.”
“Exactly.”
“So you think … the Ratel overwrote Adam’s personality, and made him Vuk?”
“Yes. I do.”
“What does this mean for us?”
“It means we stick to our original plan for the SFPD. It’s all we can do.”
“If we take the Ratel down, though, then the government will have Verve.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t look happy about it.
“There is no good and evil in this scenario, is there? There’s only bad and worse.”
We keep walking through the streets for hours. At some point, Nazarin’s warm and callused hand takes my own. I don’t pull away.
FIFTEEN
TILA
I feel sorry for those still left in the Hearth.
I’ve tried to put the Hearth behind me and to forget as much as possible. But I don’t think I can ever forget. Not completely. All those people, following Mana-ma’s rules set out in the Good Book, listening to her sermons, their voices rising up in song. Did they really think that by following those rules they’d achieve salvation, and have their pick of next lives in the Cycle?
I never knew how many people were actually happy there, and how many people were just pretending. How many knew the truth of Mana-ma?
Mardel discovered it, in the end. True enough, he stopped drinking alcohol. The problem was, he also stopped drinking everything else.
No one noticed right away. I heard my father comment that Mardel looked weak and wasn’t able to pull his weight in the fields, but he put it down to alcohol withdrawal. By the third day, Mardel was badly dehydrated. They tried to make him drink water, but he’d start shaking and spit it out. They managed to force some down him. We tried another Meditation, urging him to drink water rather than alcohol. It didn’t quite take, not like the first time. Perhaps our fear lowered efficacy. He lingered a few more days. Then he died.
Mana-ma found a way to spin it. God had simply called him home. I saw it for what it was: a failed experiment. Would she try to change us again in Meditation, and if so, who would she choose next? Would it go wrong?
I didn’t want to stick around to find out.
My parents were from San Francisco. They’d joined as idealistic teens and I think, somewhere over the next twenty-odd years, they realized they had made a mistake.
Our mom helped run the accounts and our dad was in some ways Mana-ma’s muscle, along with Uncle Tau (not our uncle by blood). They didn’t often have to be muscle, thankfully, but if people weren’t pulling their weight they’d have a quiet word with them. But they weren’t Mana-ma’s right-hand men; her most trusted advisors were Kieran, Niran and Daniel.
When we were sixteen, Kieran, Niran and Daniel were aged about twenty-seven to thirty. They’re probably still her main muscle. She’d groomed them for the role since they were little. Loyal as watchdogs, and just as scary.
After our heart attack, everyone in the Hearth was very nice to us. We didn’t have to do our chores (we couldn’t really, anyway, we were so weak). Our friends came by the house a lot and we played cards. Taema and I played on the same team because otherwise it’d be too easy to cheat. Our friends were shy around us, not wanting to meet our eyes. They knew we were probably dying, and it embarrassed them. Made me want to force them to look at us, right in the eyes; but if I’d done that, they probably wouldn’t have come back and played cards again.
We’d ask Mom and Dad how much time we had left, but they didn’t want to answer. We heard them murmuring at night in the other room, but even though we pressed our ears to the doorjamb, we couldn’t hear anything. We knew they were talking about us, though, from the tone. Hushed, worried. Nervous.
We were in bed late one night when I finally asked the question I’d been wondering ever since we had the attack: “They could fix our heart out there, couldn’t they?”
Taema was silent for a moment, and then ran her fingers through my hair. I loved it when she did that. I found the faint tickling so comforting. I ran my hand through hers, offering comfort back.
“They could,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. Mana-ma won’t let us go.” Getting past the swamp was difficult, even with a boat. And Mana-ma had eyes everywhere. My sister didn’t say it, but I knew what she was thinking: if we got out, we’d be Impure. Despite everything, she still believed a hell of a lot more than I did. It was so frustrating. Couldn’t she see how messed up this place was? It made me angry at her.
“Some have made it out,” I whispered. “Remember Mia? She left, even though Mana-ma didn’t want her to.”