He shrugged. “The whole game has changed, Bonnet. Dogma’s gonna change. You can’t say that things weren’t changing when you were placed under the
Bann
.”
I frowned. “The Elders were acting . . . beyond the
Ordnung
.”
“To put it mildly. They tried to kill me. They imprisoned your Hexenmeister, denied the evil when it was on your doorstep. In the crucible of a crisis, Bonnet, power corrupts.”
I could not argue with that. “But I have been sent away. If I came back, under the
Bann
, no one would speak to me or open their doors to me.”
“Even if you had the only means of survival?”
My voice was small as I spoke aloud a dark thought, my worst fear that had begun to grow deep in my chest, chewing into my lungs with black roots: “If there is anyone left.”
“They may refuse it,” Alex said. “But you could offer them a choice.”
I thought of my parents. Of my little sister. And the incredible possibility of having the power to save them all.
It was too seductive.
I had prayed to God for guidance.
I went to the little church in the center of Water’s Edge to see if perhaps God would hear me more there. The building was cold, empty. My breath made ghosts in the air as I knelt before a wooden altar, as I had seen Ginger do. A carved wood cross cast a shadow down upon me.
“Please,” I said. “I know that I’ve been selfish and willful. And that I have no right to answers, to question your divine will. But please . . . tell me what I should do. Give me a sign.”
Sunshine burned through high windows. I watched the dust motes stir. Doves warbled in the rafters above.
There was no answer.
I knew that I was safe here. I could stay here at Water’s Edge, eat down the stores of food in the household pantries with the rest of the inhabitants. I could listen to the lake, lose myself in that roar. I could spend the rest of my days here, on my knees, asking for forgiveness from God and hoping that my soul would be saved. I could wait for the finality of the end of the world, for God to say “Enough” and bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.
Or I could fight.
My knees ached when I climbed to my feet. I felt anger. I had devoted my life to God but had received no answers. I felt betrayed. That anger scorched my throat as I whispered, “How could you let this happen?” And that damning whisper echoed incredibly loud in that bitter, vacant space. I felt tears dripping down my chin, and my fingernails pressed into my palms. “How could you let this happen if you loved us?”
Doubt overtook me. What if Matt was right? What if all our safe places and holy relics only held some molecular evidence of our beliefs, and there was nothing behind them? No God, nothing but atoms and molecules aligning in crystalline forms?
I left the silent church without an answer from God. But I had an answer from within.
***
I asked Matt for the serum.
I rationalized it, told myself that it was no different from getting an immunization. Many of the children in the Amish community received immunizations when they were available. But I knew an immunization would not change me in the way that this shot would.
I was a coward about it, looking away when the needle slipped beneath my skin. I felt a hot burn of metal and something spreading within my veins. It scalded like the snake’s venom, and I feared I had made the wrong decision. Maybe it was the right one, but I had come to it from the wrong source, from rage and anger. Either way, I would have to live with it.
Alex took me upstairs to bed. He murmured soothing words, scraped my hair out of my face as I vomited. When my fever grew high, he shoveled me into the shower and turned the frigid water on. He wrapped me in blankets and told me it would be over soon. I felt Cora’s cool hands on my forehead and the murmuring of Matt and Judy.
And I dreamed. I dreamed, in my delirium, that I had returned home, under a thick and leaden winter sky. I had come back to houses razed by fire, to blackened and hollow barns. I searched for my home and found it still standing.
The old Hexenmeister stood at the door. He was nearly translucent in his paleness.
“Herr Stoltz,” I said. “What has happened?”
The old man’s rheumy eyes filled with tears. “The Darkness came. And I could not root it out alone.”
I reached out to steady him. I could see that he was too frail to fight now. His hand shook on a cane, and I knew that it was too palsied to write, to script another
Himmelsbrief
or paint another hex sign.
My hand seemed very strong beside his. Young. Powerful.
“My family?” I choked.
“Go see.”
I walked into my house. The screen door slammed behind me. I could see the Darkness moving inside.
And also light. I saw the green glow of foxfire, seething within.
Only the green glow wore the faces of my family members. It was an eerie incandescence, uneven under mottled skin and fading into my mother’s and sister’s hair and my father’s beard. I felt no heat from them, nothing but the pale light of their hands.
I reached for them, expecting them to be as solid as the people I’d met at Water’s Edge. They had been convinced to take the serum. I had saved them. I felt my heart sing in happiness at seeing them whole and alive, no matter their form.
But my hands passed through them, and I realized that they were no longer alive. They were just apparitions. Ghosts. Dead and gone.
The light faded, and I was in darkness.
Alone
.
I stared up at the ceiling, awake, knowing that I had made a terrible mistake. I heard the ticking of a clock, heard the thin roar of waves outside and the sound of voices downstairs in the kitchen.
I sat up in bed. Alex was gone. I thought I heard his voice downstairs.
I looked down at my hands.
They glowed. I could see tiny pulses of light in my palms, pushing blood and light from my wrists to my fingertips in a smear of phosphorescence. I rubbed my palms together, but the light wouldn’t rub off.
With dread, I crept to the mirror above the dresser. I lifted my hands to my face. My skin shone with a dull luminescence. My eyes were like stars and each faint freckle part of a constellation. My jaw fell open and the interior of my mouth shone, backlighting my teeth, light leaking around the edge of my lips, as if I’d just eaten a handful of bright berries.
I felt dizzy, my weight shifting from foot to foot and heart hammering. I was not myself.
I was incandescent.
I was beautiful.
I snatched up my coat and slipped it on over my nightdress, jammed my feet into my boots. I fled down the steps and out the back door before anyone could stop me, into the darkness that I had feared for so long. The wind lashed at my legs, and I instinctively ran to the water.
Shivering, I stood on the rocks and stared up at the sky. I knew that I shone brighter than the full moon. My fractured green reflection in the waves was more luminous. I felt terrified. But not numb. Every nerve ending felt abraded and open. My frozen breath even reflected the green gloaming.
I stumbled down the jagged rocks to the edge of the water to press my hands to its shocking coldness. I wanted to scrub the light away. I wanted to reassure myself that I was still human, could still feel.
I waded into the water. I sucked in my breath as the cold invaded my boots. My nightdress floated around my knees, my coat opening like a black wing. I knelt down, reached for my reflection in the water.
“Bonnet.”
I whirled. Alex approached me, Fenrir at his side. The wolf ran into the lake and began to whimper. My wet hand strayed into the soft fur between his ears.
Alex glowed like I did. The planes of his face were illuminated in odd angles. Like something terrible, other than human. I was reminded of Eve’s awful choice in the Bible, of being tempted by the serpent and the knowledge of good and evil. I wondered if she thought she could protect Adam from it by knowing it.
Alex sloshed into the water. He wrapped his arms around me, and I sobbed into his shoulder.
“What have I done?”
“Shhh. It’ll be all right, Bonnet,” he said.
But I didn’t believe him.
***
Something had moved between us.
I think it was more than just one thing. It was this . . . evolution into something else, something more than human. Matt called us “
Homo luciferus
.” It made me shudder every time I heard him say it.
It was also the knowledge that we were going to be apart. Alex was going north, to his family. And I, having done all that I had done, felt that I had no choice but to go south. To try to see what was left of my home, to see if I could save anyone.
And it was also time that moved between us.
We lay in darkness, in silence. I closed my eyes when we made love, against the light and the idea of the humanity we’d lost. I could not bear the idea of losing him, of letting go.
“I love you,” he said. His forehead rested heavy on mine.
“And I love you.” My palm rested on his cheek.
But there was nothing to be done for it. I rationalized it: We came from different worlds. It would not have lasted, under even ideal conditions. But a part of me wanted it to. A large part, larger than I wanted to admit.
When the time came to leave, maps were spread out on the kitchen table. All the people who were young and healthy traced their routes out on the maps and packed their bags. Matt would stay here, it was decided, nursing the mother algae culture. Cora and a few of the others would stay with him. Cora had carefully sectioned off pieces of the mother culture into plastic bottles for us to carry, and Matt was cleaning and writing out instructions on sterilizing needles and dividing the daughter colonies to provide cultures to the people we’d hopefully meet along the way.
Peter and Judy were among those who were leaving. I saw Judy lacing up her snow boots.
“Where will you go?” I asked.
She nodded to the map. “South. I have family in Tennessee. I expect that it will be hard, but”—she double-knotted her boot laces—“I think that there must be some survivors.”
“And you?” I asked Peter.
“West. He put his hands in the pockets of his tan coveralls and grinned. “I always wanted to see Colorado. Maybe I’ll get that far.”
“Katie, the best way for you to get back to your community is by water,” Matt said.
I wrinkled my brow. I had been practicing a bit, with the small boats at the edge of the lake. It seemed simple enough when I was within sight of shore. My concern must have shown.
“Don’t worry. It’s easy. The water shouldn’t freeze for another few weeks.” Matt pointed to a blue line on the map. “You can follow the water south and east, mostly downstream. We’ll send a map with you, and you can cross off the bridges as checkpoints to see where you are.”
I nodded. The idea of navigating a river alone frightened me. But I didn’t want to say I was afraid. There were others heading off by themselves, on boats, on foot, in twos and threes. We had an elixir to save the world. My fear didn’t matter.
“What about Horace?” I asked.
“I’ll take Horace,” Alex said quietly. “North.”
I knew the horse would be in good hands. But it hurt me to hear Alex say that they weren’t coming with me. I blinked back tears and stared down at my boots.
The handful of men and women leaving by water gathered down at the dock. Cora had given me a plastic bottle and a package of needles with instructions to keep the culture cold and dark. Judy armed me with a fishing pole and a kiss on the cheek.
I gathered my supplies into the boat as Alex handed them down to me. Other boats slipped away, down a narrow stream to the marshlands Alex and I had seen when we walked here.
I had hoped Fenrir would accompany me. But he whimpered and stayed on the dock, afraid of the water. Or perhaps he loved Alex more.
Alex held my hand. Neither one of us wanted to let go. I could feel it in the way our cold fingers laced together.
“Be safe, Bonnet.”
And he let me go, out into the water and into the world alone.
***
The light I’d been given provided no warmth.
Cold radiated from the water through the bottom of the aluminum boat, soaking into my cramped legs and feet. Wind pushed at my back, and I huddled down in the seat. I paddled hard against the current, making slow progress until the river turned into a new watershed basin. Then I followed the fast current of the little rivers south, dipping the oars into the water to keep the boat from nearing the banks, where trees reached in with long brown branch fingers. They trailed into the frigid water, providing haven for cold-sluggish fish.
I ate from the supplies I carried with me and the fishing pole Judy had given me. I let the line trail behind me with a hook made from part of a floating pop can top. My success was small. Every night, I dragged the boat up to the edge of the bank, built a fire, and slept alone.
Mostly, I lay in the bottom of the boat, tangled in my sleeping bag, staring up at the sky. I had traveled far from home, farther than I could imagine. I had gained a great deal and lost much. I expected that they would turn me away when I reached home. But I would know that I had tried, that I had attempted to bring this terrible temptation of survival to their doorstep.
I would bring them the choice.
I thought of what Alex had said in his delirium and his honesty, that he had thought of forcing the serum on me. I vacillated on that. Perhaps it would be easier if he had. There would have been no element of free will, no choice. God would not blame me for being a victim.
But Alex respected me. He let me choose.
And that was part of why I think I loved him so much. No one else in my life had really given me choices. My parents had given me some latitude, but I always felt the weight of their expectations upon me: that I would grow up, be baptized in the church, continue living life on the same land and in the same way that they had. I also had felt the weight of Elijah’s expectations on me: that he assumed that I would marry him, become a certain kind of wife. And the expectations of the Elders: that I would obey them and their interpretation of the
Ordnung
without question.