The Tithe Read online

  “Good morning,” Josh announced into the silence. She waved a bandaged arm.

  “Have a seat,” Marcus said from his usual place in the front of the room.

  Josh thought about mentioning a little word called “please” but decided channeling her energy into not falling seemed slightly more productive. She sat with Blue in their usual place on the circular couch.

  She wondered suddenly how many people over the decades had thought of this as their place on the couch.

  “Josh, please tell us what happened last night,” Marcus said.

  Okay, he’d managed to remember “please” that time, but she still pursed her lips at him. Some warning about a public interrogation might have been helpful.

  “Someone came into my room last night and . . . attacked me,” she said. She looked around the room, gauging reactions. Unfortunately, no one looked down guiltily or cackled maniacally.

  Blue sat next to her, closer than usual but not touching. Her right side felt cold.

  “With what?” Marcus asked. He presided at the front of the room, sitting in one of their chairs, on the same level as the rest of them, but above them nonetheless. Truth be told, there was no “front” to this room, but Marcus’ position in it made one. His blond hair gleamed like sunshine under the overbright fluorescents.

  “Stealth,” Josh said.

  “No, I mean . . .”

  “I know what you mean.” She raised her bandaged arms as if unaware everyone had been staring at them since she entered the Great Room. “My attacker had a knife.”

  A couple of people gasped, but most remained silent.

  “Did you see the presence?” a woman asked.

  Presence? “No,” Josh replied slowly.

  “Did you see the knife?”

  Josh shook her head.

  “Then how do you know it was a knife?”

  “Well, most people don’t file their fingernails quite that sharp,” she retorted.

  “How do you know it wasn’t a . . . an angel?”

  The room silenced, the air stilled. She wondered if even their hearts refused to beat till she responded.

  Luckily, Blue ended their hushed contemplation. “She’s here,” he said. “If the angels wanted her, she wouldn’t be.”

  That pretty much summed it up.

  “So what do we . . .?” Marcus began.

  “It had to be the angel!” a man’s voice cried.

  “How is it that you’ve managed to escape the angel two times?” the original woman called.

  “It wasn—” Josh began.

  “Is it because you fight it? Maybe Elovah doesn’t want those who aren’t willing,” someone said.

  “Everyone fights the angel. You’ve heard the screams,” a young man snapped. Josh could barely see him sitting on the couch behind a larger Tithe. “She wasn’t attacked by an angel. Angels don’t need sharp objects.”

  “Who are you to say what angels do or don’t need?” the woman cried. “They are Elovah’s instruments. They can do anything She envisions, be anything She needs.”

  “So true!” the young man agreed. “In fact, this sausage could be an angel right now. Oh, dear! Someone better stop me before I eat one of Elovah’s instruments!” He noisily stuffed the link into his mouth and made loud, satisfied sounds.

  “That’s enough!” Marcus called.

  “Yeah, it is,” Hollyn, the woman with the crutch, agreed.

  The room fell silent once again. For a moment.

  “I know why she escapes the angels,” a childish voice, the one who protested purple’s smell, said. “She’s an imrabi. The angels wouldn’t take a holy woman.”

  Several voices murmured agreement.

  “I’m not an imrabi,” Josh called out. “I was raised as an orphan by them.” Wait, why was she even engaging in this silly conversation? “But Marcus was—”

  “No one is without sin,” a voice called. “Do you think little Chaney was sinful?”

  Several eyes turned back to Josh, squinting against the glare of her wickedness.

  “How have you managed to elude the angels?” a feminine voice asked. Josh looked, and it was Netta, the older woman from last night. “We all held hands last night, and you and your . . . friend refused to participate. Do you think you’re different than us?”

  Josh remembered Blue’s words, his claims that yes, she was very different than all of them. “I’m no different,” she told Netta, Blue, everyone. “Last night was a person, not an angel. Angels don’t smell like they forgot to shower for the four days they’ve been stuck in this underground gaol.”

  “What about the first night?” someone called.

  Josh shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe the angels have a schedule and I wasn’t on it the first night.”

  “Apparently no one was on it,” someone said.

  Josh felt trapped in the middle of fifty-plus gazes.

  “Enough!” a voice lashed, and Josh jumped. Blue’s jaw had clenched. Otherwise, his face enjoyed its usual placid lines. “Josh has told you everything she knows. You will not punish her for being abandoned in a hallway by cowards and then stabbed by an attacker too stupid to realize they’re the walking dead.”

  She imagined she wasn’t the only one in the room who realized he wasn’t talking about their sacrifices as Tithes.

  “As I was saying,” Marcus said smoothly. “What shall we do about the attack?”

  “What can we do?” Josh asked. “Everyone was sleeping.”

  “When did this happen?”

  Josh shrugged helplessly.

  “It was near two in the morning,” Blue replied. Really, the man had either a hidden audio watch or a gift for sensing the movement of time.

  “Did anyone hear anything last night around that time?” Marcus asked. He must know no one would speak up in public even if they had heard someone moving around.

  As she’d known it would, the room remained silent. “If anyone has any information or ideas, please talk with me,” Marcus said.

  Josh the sinner, the imrabi, the unusual and remarkable defier of angels, sat silently on the couch, rubbing her aching calves and ankles with the opposite foot. She thought about escaping back to Blue’s room, or maybe a new one altogether, but knew she wouldn’t. No matter people’s thoughts of her, she couldn’t live in the shadow of their prejudices. The best way to seem normal was to force everyone to engage with her, flaws, strengths, and all.

  Lynna, hands full of a platter of sausage and two coffee mugs, sat down beside her.

  Josh smiled her thanks and devoured her portion.

  She wasn’t used to eating these kinds of foods. True to the teachings of the Bitoran, the imrabi focused their pleasures on serving Elovah. Foods were plain, music quiet, perfumes discouraged, quarters unadorned. Her tongue sizzled under the salty-spicy vat sausage and danced in the warm creaminess of the coffee. The townspeople who had stocked the Tithes’ kitchen apparently thought they’d earned some tasty treats during their last days.

  Josh’s arms stung under her bandages, but she lived with pain and knew how to weave it into the background of her moments.

  After breakfast, RJ joined the three of them and entertained them with stories about her childhood. She’d been quite the disobedient child. Lynna delighted in RJ’s childish disobedience, or perhaps merely in the storyteller herself.

  “What about you, Blue?” RJ asked after a while.

  “What about me?”

  “Exactly.” RJ snorted. “I mean, what were you like as a child? I can’t imagine you being a little coyote like me, bugging everyone older than you. Have you always been so serious?”

  He never had anything to smile about, Josh thought.

  “Am I serious?” Blue asked.

  “Usually,” Josh said.

  “Too serious?” He wasn’t asking RJ.

  Josh inhaled. When did she become his teacher in social propriety? Who are you kidding? The minute you told him to stop staring
, to offer to do dishes, to say good morning. If she didn’t want to accept the effects of bossiness, she needed to, well, stop being so blasted bossy.

  “No,” she said. “You’re fine.”

  Was this the same man who calmly told her he would kill the person who hurt her? The man who would have kept kicking Kann had she not ordered him to stop? This man, who hadn’t drunk tea or done dishes or chopped an onion before becoming a Tithe? This little boy of a man, who asked if he was too serious? This old man, who, just last night, had understood her innermost secret and comforted her with warmth from his body?

  “I don’t remember a childhood,” Blue said.

  Lynna nodded, ever helpful. “Not everyone remembers it so well.”

  “No,” Josh said, shaking her head. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut when the women turned to her. “He means he didn’t have a childhood.”

  “Yeah?” RJ asked.

  “I don’t remember my life in blocks like that,” Blue clarified. “I lived in the basement of the rab’ri. There were times I knew less about the basement and the services they piped in, and times I had the context to made sense of it all. That’s all.”

  They were silent.

  “Didn’t you have any friends?” RJ asked after a bit.

  “A few times, other people stayed a time with me, but most of the time I was alone,” Blue said. His voice smoothed over them, devoid of feeling.

  Josh thought about asking for his hand, but she didn’t have the courage. Maybe another time, another dark time.

  The day smeared onward, slow and uneventful. After last night, Josh appreciated the latter. Dinner came and went, all without any assistance from Josh or Blue; RJ forbade her to help cook while wounded. (Her exact words were slightly less charming: “You work with bad legs. Now you don’t even have both hands. Go fold towels or something.”)

  Following dinner, conversation grew sparser, eyes brighter and quicker, and the air acquired an expectant heaviness. It tasted metallic on Josh’s tongue, like dread.

  We live these days in gentle waves, she thought. Waves that flow toward this one moment in the day, when we find out whether we live or die. She tried to think of a metaphor of life or death to fit the wave analogy but couldn’t. Maybe if she’d ever actually seen an ocean wave she could have.

  After the dishwashers returned from the kitchen, Avery once again proposed they all scatter throughout the bunker and see how or if it affected the angel’s return.

  “Afterward, we should reconvene in the Great Room and compare notes,” he said, a sparkle in his eye.

  Josh tried not to feel offended that he found their life-and-death experiments so fascinating.

  She retreated with Blue to his room. Seated on the narrow bed, she informed him she would find her own bedroom that night.

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “You’re not sleeping alone,” Blue said, his voice as dry and impersonal as the desert wind.

  Her eyebrows slammed downward. “I most certainly am.”

  “Your attacker could be any number of people. You heard them today. I can’t let you stay alone.”

  Josh leaned back and twisted to the right to better face him. “I didn’t lock my door last night. I know better now. I’ll be safe.”

  Blue sat on the bed, facing the door, hands resting on his legs. He blinked but remained otherwise motionless.

  Josh stared at him, eyes narrowed. Finally, she nodded and said, “Okay, then.”

  As the night wore on, Josh wondered if the angel had come and gone, but after last night, she dared not return to the Great Room and ruin Avery’s experiment.

  After a particularly jaw-cracking yawn, Josh moved their conversation to the mundane and lighthearted.

  “Do you believe in Elovah?”

  “Yes,” Blue replied. By then, he sat next to her, back against the wall where a fancier bed would have had a headboard, feet stretched out on the bed. His feet almost reached the end of the bed.

  She nodded. Not surprising, given his upbringing.

  “And no,” he said.

  She waited a minute. “So, which one?”

  “Both,” he said. “I believe in a conscious being that exercises powers we humans can’t understand. But is this being omniscient, omnipotent, capable of answering every prayer?” His doubtful tone answered the question.

  “Big words,” she teased. Then, “Have you ever prayed?”

  “No. Do you really believe in Elovah?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. Funny how here, among other divine sacrifices, she found her beliefs questioned. “I think townsfolk have extrapolated rituals and belief systems from the verses in the Bitoran, and that stuff is iffy. But is there an Elovah? I think so.”

  “Extrapolated?”

  “You used big words. I figured I needed to keep up.”

  He rewarded her with a small smile. “Do you ever wonder why you bother to pray if Elovah designed humans to have free will?” he asked her.

  She nodded her head. “Yeah, I do. I guess . . . I think we’re given free will and we can choose to exclude Elovah from our everyday lives, but if we let Her help us, She will.”

  “Then why don’t all your prayers get answered?”

  “I guess She knows best if I should or shouldn’t get what I asked for.”

  “Then why bother asking for anything? To be consistent, shouldn’t you just ask Elovah to do whatever needs to be done? And if She’s in charge of that, doesn’t that nullify your free will?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Josh put out a hand. “I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking, but let me try this. I have free will. I can”—She held up a finger—“reject Elovah and forge my own path.” She held up another finger, although it occurred to her Blue wasn’t benefiting from her visuals. “I can ask Elovah to ‘do whatever needs to be done,’ as you said.” Josh held the final finger aloft. “Or I can do my best and ask for guidance.”

  “But what if your prayers counteract someone else’s? What if the good you’re asking for infringes on the rights or welfare of others in ways you can’t know?” Blue asked calmly, his hands laced over his stomach.

  “Well, that’s why I ask for guidance and trust Elovah to make the best decisions that benefit the most people.”

  “If you admit you want what’s best on the large scale but don’t know how to get there or what it looks like, why bother praying for anything specific?” Blue asked.

  Josh threw her hands up. “I just like talking to Elovah,” she snapped. “She and I, we’re pals.”

  To be her surprise, Blue smiled again. “That I understand,” he said.

  She huffed out a sigh. “Blue Lenwood, how can you not understand what tea is but you’ve thought through the moral obligations of free will?”

  “I’ve had a long time to think,” he said.

  She imagined he had. Her tone lightened several degrees as she asked, “And where did you learn words like ‘omnipotent’?”

  “Over the years, I’ve heard thousands of services. You’ve heard them, too. Listening to the minnabi would expand anyone’s vocabulary.”

  Josh snickered. “Are you implying the minnabi like the sounds of their own voices?”

  “Yes.”

  Her grin widened. She was never sure whether to—

  The air grew abruptly heavy. Josh rolled it around her tongue, tasting it. She hadn’t experienced it often, but she imagined the air before a storm felt like this: sharp, laden, so thick it almost clogged her throat.

  The ceramic lamp didn’t extinguish, didn’t even flicker; it continued to shed its thin light in the tiny room.

  Josh turned to Blue, her eyes wide. “Do you think it’s the angel?”

  “Yes,” he clipped, and pulled her against him.

  Josh’s face met his chest, her arms wound around him. His heart beat, rhythmic and loud, near her ear. His breath stirred through her hair. The room wasn’t chilly, but she found their combined warmth, the abs
ence of any non-biological noise, reassuring.

  They clung to one another for several minutes, waiting for the crack of wings. Meanwhile, the air caked in their mouths, tangled in their hair. Was it always this thick and cloying? Josh pressed her lips against Blue’s shirt and inhaled his warmth.