And Morgan didn’t hear the rest, because someone gasped, “It’s Eliza!” and then the others erupted in a frenzy.
And that was all right. Frenzy all you want, my fine idiots. Frenzy away, thought Morgan Toth, strolling back to his lab. It’s good to be king.
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.”
46
PIE AND DANDELIONS
“How could you think… how could you think I would do this?”
Eliza was aghast. It was so much worse than she’d feared. She’d guessed that Dr. Chaudhary had found out who she was, and oh, he had, but that wasn’t the extent of it, and this… this…
It could only be the work of that weasel, Toth. No. Weasel did not begin to express the depravity of Morgan Toth now.
Hyena, maybe: carrion-eater, grinning jut-toothed over the carnage he had wrought.
She didn’t know how he had found out about her—People with secrets, she recalled with a shudder, shouldn’t make enemies—but she did know that only he could have accessed the encrypted photos. Did he even know what he had done by exposing this gravesite to the world? The real question was: Did he even care? He’d been smart, though, and kept himself invisible in all of it. She could just imagine him, flipping his bangs off his too-high forehead as he set catastrophe in motion.
Dr. Chaudhary took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. A stalling tactic, Eliza knew. They had come into the nearest of the tents at the bottom of the hill, and the death smell was ripe around them, even in the chill of the refrigerated air. Dr. Amhali had shown her the broadcast on a laptop, and she was still trying to process it. She felt sick. The pictures. Her pictures, seen like that, without proper context. They were horrific. What was the response, out in the world? She remembered the chaos in the National Mall two nights ago. How bad was it now?
When Dr. Chaudhary lowered his hand, his look was direct even if his eyes were slightly unfocused without his glasses. “Are you saying you didn’t do it?”
“Of course I didn’t. I would never—”
Dr. Amhali butted in. “Do you deny that they are your photographs?”
She swung to regard him. “I took them, but that doesn’t mean that I—”
“And they were sent from your e-mail.”
“So it was hacked,” she said, an edge of impatience coming into her voice. It was so obvious to her, but all the Moroccan doctor could see was his own fury—and his own culpability, since he was the one who’d brought them here to drag his country into infamy. “That message was not from me,” said Eliza, stalwart. She turned back to Dr. Chaudhary. “Did it sound like me? Unholy ignominy? That’s not… I don’t…” She was floundering. She looked at the dead sphinxes behind her mentor. Never had they seemed unholy to her, and never had the angels seemed holy, either. That wasn’t what was going on here. “I told you last night, I don’t even believe in God.”
But she could see the shift in his eyes, the suspicion, and realized belatedly that reminding him of last night might not be the best strategy. He was looking at her as if he didn’t know her. Frustration welled up in her. If she’d merely been framed for leaking the photos to the press, he might have believed in her innocence and been willing to support her. If she hadn’t had an apparent depressive episode on the roof terrace and cried enough tears to flood a desert. If she hadn’t been unmasked as a dead child prophet. If if if.
“Is it true, what they’re saying?” Dr. Chaudhary asked. “Are you… her?”
She wanted to shake her head. She wasn’t that blurry girl with the downcast eyes. She was not Elazael. She might have changed her name more decisively when she ran away and shed that life, but in some way, “Eliza” had felt true to her. It had been her name of secret protest as a child, the inner “normal” she’d clung to in games of pretend and mental escape. Elazael might have to kneel in prayer until her knees were white-hot, or chant until her voice was as rough as a cat’s tongue. Elazael might be forced to do many things—many and more—that she did not want to do. But Eliza?
Oh, she was outside playing. Normal as pie and free as dandelions. What a dream.
And so she’d kept the name, and lived it as best she could: pie and dandelions. Normal and free, though in truth it had always felt like an act. Still, from the age of seventeen on, it was Elazael who was the secret self locked inside, and Eliza who lived in the open—like the prince and the pauper who switched places: the one elevated, the other dispossessed. Of course, the prince and the pauper, she was reminded now, had eventually changed back. But that wasn’t going to happen to her. She would never be Elazael again. But she knew that wasn’t what Dr. Chaudhary meant, and so, reluctantly, she nodded.
“I was her,” she corrected. “I left. I ran away. I hated it. I hated them.” She took a deep breath. Hate wasn’t the right word. There wasn’t a right word; there wasn’t a big enough word for the betrayal Eliza felt, looking back at her childhood with an adult understanding of just how seriously she’d been abused and exploited.
From the age of seven. Home from the hospital with a pacemaker and a new terror so big it blotted out even her fear of her mother. From the first moment her “gift” made itself known, she had become the focus of all the cult’s energies and hopes.
The constant touching. So many hands. No sovereignty over her own self, ever. And they’d confessed their sins to her, begging forgiveness, telling her things no seven-year-old should ever have to hear, let alone punish. Her tears were collected in vials, her fingernail clippings ground into a powder and mixed into the communion bread. And her first menstrual blood? She had to avert her thoughts from that. It was still too sharp a shame, though it was half her life ago. And then there was sleep.