The Irreversible Reckoning

  ***

  Three days passed. Three days of Macie sobbing and screaming intermittently, Akio and I trying to subdue her when she fought us to go after Paul and Caspar, of Savannah coming in to keep her calm (read: sedated), and of the three of us trying to keep Millie away from the madness. In the meantime, the virus ripped through one of the afternoon church meetings, killing men, women, and children indiscriminately, as viruses and Old Spirits tended to do.

  “It’s like a reckoning.” Savannah told me one night after she had come out of Macie’s room. She had held her for almost two hours before Macie had finally stopped fighting the drugs. “The way the virus kills, the violence of it. It’s them.”

  “Are you high?” I asked her as I laid back on my lawn chair and looked up at the stars, “That sounds like stoner logic, Savannah Mack.”

  “I did just take half a Sleeping Tonic. You caught me.”

  “Are you seeing pink elephants yet?”

  “No, not yet, but surely they are just around the corner.” She pointed into the shrubbery just in front of our porch, “That bush is laughing, though.”

  “No, that’s just the wind moving it.”

  “No, it’s laughing. It thinks we’re funny.”

  She laid back on the lawn chair and closed her eyes.

  “I do not want to have sex with my husband tonight.” She told me.

  “Oh, my God, Savannah!” I exclaimed, before we both burst out laughing, “I mean, I sympathize, but Jesus…”

  “You know who I would like to have sex with? Lucy’s man. I wonder if she’d share him.”

  “What man?” I asked, even though I already knew. I sat up and turned to face her, leaning forward.

  “You know, the man. Bearded, short hair, expensive suits. He works in City Hall, but he is a Contractor. He goes out on the road a lot. I ran into him in Estersea. He was there doing an appraisal on the underground tunnel.”

  “Please tell me you don’t get this chatty around Paul.”

  “Of course not! I am in full control of myself right now. I thought you knew about him.”

  “I thought he was a dream. I thought he was something I made up. Does he have a tattoo on his upper arm of an eagle?”

  “How should I know? Expensive suits, remember? But God, I hope so. That would make him even hotter.”

  “Savannah, you have gotten so horny in your old age.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you?!” She asked, “Paul was kind to me once, but I didn’t want to end up married to him, for God’s sake.”

  “Don’t let them hear you say that. That’s the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “Well, none of those pious assholes in that church took the Lord’s name in vain, and look at what happened to them. Father Cale started coughing, and they all contracted the fever, and just like that, everyone was dead, just like the last time a church got hit. Reckoning. I mean, come on, the symbolism of that? They all died in a church!”

  “Yeah. They were infected and died that quickly. It’s a mutated version of the original virus. I don’t see any Reckoning in it, Savannah. I just see a virus that is getting stronger. It’s like the more people it kills, the stronger it gets. It’s like taking their lives is feeding it.” I stopped, and then laughed, “Did you slip me some of that Sleeping Tonic?”

  She giggled, and pulled a hippie voice when she said, “You’re just getting on my level, man.”

  I laughed at that, but when silence fell between us, our serious moods returned.

  “I don’t think it’s Reckoning. At least, not one from God.” I told her, “Do you know why? Because I think it is a person doing this. I think there is someone getting these people sick. Lucy said that it would be nearly impossible to weaponize the virus, but I don’t think that’s true.”

  “If Lucy doesn’t think it’s possible, then…”

  “Look, she’s a certified genius, but she doesn’t know everything. It’s all Noble families! It’s all the people who want to be here. The Mass was the first Mass of the day, and you know that’s the Mass of the worst people. They’re so pious, they have to get there first.”

  “Violet, that seems awfully complex. The person doing this would be leaving far too much up to chance. There are just too many variables to ever be able to sufficiently plan an attack on that scale. Plus, the risk would be astronomical.”

  “Not if it was someone really, really smart doing it.” I looked at her, “Has Paul been acting strange?”

  She burst into hysterical laughter unlike anything I had ever seen come from her.

  “Look, Paul is smart, but he ain’t that smart. He knows nothing about anything medical. The man can barely open a Band-Aid!”

  “But maybe that’s an act! Maybe…”

  “Violet. Sweetie.” She reached over and grasped my hand, “It’s all coincidence. Maybe it’s a Reckoning, maybe it’s not, but it is definitely all coincidence. It is definitely not a person doing this. It’s nature.”

  “No. My instincts are telling me there is more to this, and whoever it is, I wish I could shake their hand. They’re doing us all a favor. They’re killing them from within, and they’re doing it in a way that looks natural. I seriously wish I could shake the person’s hand.”

  “Are you sure you would want to after he had just been up to his elbows in Rossoeruttar?”

  I looked over at her, irritated slightly at how little she took my theory seriously. But when I saw how she was beaming, I could not help but laugh.

  “Look, sweetheart…” She said, “I don’t think it’s possible, but if you’re right, I’ll eat my words. I’ll say that I will never doubt you again. That’s all I can give you. It’s not like we can put a bet on it, and I can give you money, because my female mind does not understand the intricacies of addition and subtraction, so I am not allowed to have my own money. Never mind that I wrote my dissertation on multiple prescription drugs combined in various dose sizes used to treat chemically-induced bipolar disorder in lab rats. Never mind that I spent my days on Earth writing prescriptions. I simply thought that I understood Math. But I understood nothing, Violet. Nothing!”

  “I know. I was in Pre-Calc by the time I was in the tenth grade, and I passed my AP test with flying colors, something even the most arrogant boys in my class could not do. But goddamn the simple adding and subtraction of dollars and cents! It boggles my feminine mind!”

  We burst out laughing, more hysterically than we had all night, but our happy moods immediately disappeared when we heard a hard knocking on our front door that echoed all the way into the backyard where we were.

  “Open up!” A male voice said, not forcefully, but not without authority, either.

  “Hide!” I told Savannah softly, “We don’t know who he is!”

  “I’ll be right here.” She ducked behind the wall just beside the back door, “If he tries anything, I’ve got your back, okay?”

  I nodded, and walked to the front door.

  “Who is it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady and laden with my own authority, though it was weak.

  “Violet…” I heard her manage to gasp out, and I threw open the door before she could say, “Do not open the door!”

  Lucy was almost on her knees, she was slumped so far over. The man holding her was the one I had seen in my dreams, and he was doing his best to keep her upright, but she was slipping from his grip. Her clothes were in tatters, but the coat of his expensive suit was wrapped around her, shielding her body from my view. Worse than any of that, though, was how her breaths were rasping. Coming in or going out, they were slow, tinged with that awful rasping in the back of her throat that sounded excruciating. Blood was dribbling from her nose, from her ears, and out of her mouth.

  “It went through the prison like wildfire.” The man said as he pushed past me and walked her into the house. “Someone gave it to a guard, who gave it to a prisoner, who gave it to another guard… Everyone is dead.”

  “No,” Lucy cried as he carri
ed her over the threshold into the house, “No!”

  “Oh, my God.” Savannah said as she came around the wall.

  “NO!” Lucy managed to shout, and she held out one blood-covered hand to stop her from coming any further forward.

  “She did not want to come here because she did not want to infect any of you, but her last moments would not be there, with them, in that terrible place.”

  “Last moments?” I repeated quietly, even though I knew, from the sickening feeling in my stomach, that of course they were her last moments. She was in the final stage; she had lost so much blood already, and the eruptions had not even started yet. Soon, she would begin convulsing as her brain began to bleed, and then, the last of her blood would erupt out of her violently, and she would be lost to us.

  “No!” She wailed, when I went to walk forward. I had just wanted to sit beside her, to take her hand, to tell her that I would be with her until the end. But she did not want us to touch her. She wanted us as far away from her as possible. She was a doctor in that moment more so than she was just a human being; she knew the power of the virus, and she knew its violent need to find a new host as it killed the last.

  “No…” She breathed, before collapsing onto the ground.

  “Listen to me. Look at me.” The man said to her after he had scooped her up and laid her down on our couch, “Lucy. My love. Look at me.”

  Standing even within a foot of her, I could feel the heat of her fever. Her body was desperately trying to fight off the virus, to save her, but the virus was too strong. It was ripping through her body, dissolving her organs, tearing her apart.

  “Violet.” The man told me, and I looked at him, “In the basement, the eagle statue. The one that looks like this.” He tapped the tattoo on his shoulder, “Twist it round three times. Bring me the vial that is full of dark blue liquid. Almost black. Looks like nail polish.”

  “What? The basement only has…”

  “Trust me. A very, very clever man built this house. A good friend of mine. And I made sure that a very clever woman lived in it. Go.”

  I obeyed, even though Lucy was beginning to spew an alarming amount of blood out of her mouth. She was sweating profusely, her body twisting and curling because she was in so much pain, and the man sat beside her, holding her hand, kissing it, telling her everything was going to be alright.

  I walked down the creaking wooden stairs, sneezing as the wood kicked up dust. There at the end of the room, on the mantel of the filled-in fireplace, was the eagle with its wings spread. It was the same eagle I had seen emblazoned on the man’s shoulder. Everything around it was covered in dust, but the eagle was clean and shining bronze. My sweating hand grasped it, and it slipped slightly in my grip as I twisted it three times the way the man had instructed and then pulled it back. I listened as four consecutive clacks sounded behind the wall, like locks snapping apart, and then, the wall pushed outwards slightly, revealing a small crack into which I reached my fingers and pulled. And there it was. The tiny room. The laboratory.

  The source of the outbreak.

  I remembered a show about a man who cooked drugs in a camper, though the name of it escaped me. My friend, Miranda, had really liked it, and we had marathoned whole seasons of it, even though we had both been rather young to watch a show like that, and my parents would have been furious had they known that I had watched it. I remembered how the man had had tons of flasks and beakers and Bunsen burners, and many, many bottles of chemicals. In Lucy’s lab, there were the same items, but in the back, in a large curio cabinet plated in the front with unbreakable glass, were bushes upon bushes of Blood Fern.

  “Oh, Lucy…” I said to myself, “You would, wouldn’t you? You so would.”

  In the tiny refrigerator box, I found the vile of dark blue liquid that the man had described, and by the bottle, I knew that it required a syringe, so I ran all the way upstairs, carefully creaked open the door to Lucy and Macie’s bedroom, tiptoed past Macie as quickly as I could into the bathroom, where I procured one from the box they kept in their medicine cabinet.

  After running back downstairs, I was sufficiently out of breath. I handed the man the syringe and the vial, and watched as Lucy began to close her eyes.

  “No! Lucy, don’t!” I told her, and because she was too out of it to stop me, I reached forward and took her hand.

  “Illa?” She asked me, and her voice was on the verge of breaking as she turned her head to look towards the door, “Is that my girl there?” She pointed towards the doorway where she was looking. There was no one standing there, but Savannah, who was kneeling behind her head and stroking her hair, whispered that yes, it was Illa standing there.

  “My girl…” Lucy said, and two tears fell from her eyes, but no more followed them. “I have pictured you standing there so many times. Coming… home… to me…” She breathed in, because her heart and mind wanted to continue sobbing, though her body continued to fight it, even though she was so sick.

  “Can you hold her arm steady for me?” The man asked, and I let go of Lucy’s hand to hold her arm still. A very soft whimper escaped her when the man pressed the needle into the crook of her arm, into one of her veins. The dark blue liquid disappeared into her as the man slowly pushed the plunger down.

  “No.” She cried, “Illa, come back.” She reached for the doorway, before dissolving into another violent fit of coughs, “Illa! Illa! Millen, go get her. Bring her back to me.” She was speaking to the man, who was not Millen, who looked nothing like the picture of her husband I had seen on the mantle in hers and Macie’s bedroom.

  “Shh… She is just going out for a few minutes, sweetheart.” Savannah told her, “She’ll be back.”

  Lucy coughed again, but already, the cough was dryer, showing us that her lungs were clearing. Still, after each cough, she wheezed and struggled for breath.

  “A few more minutes, sweetheart.” The man told her, “A few more minutes, and everything will be healed, and this will pass.”

  Her feet were moving, kicking slightly as her breaths rasped and rattled. Savannah had run into the kitchen and run back in a blink, and when she returned she had brought a cold towel to put on Lucy’s head, which seemed to calm her slightly, probably because it began to bring her temperature down.

  “Relax, Lucy.” I told her gently, because I could feel the growing panic in her heart as she tried to draw in a breath but merely pained herself. “It’s the fever, but it’s also you. You’re afraid. You have to calm down.” I pulled her up into a sitting position, and her weakened body slumped against me. Her head naturally fell against my shoulder and burrowed between my jawbone and my neck.

  “Come on.” I told her, “Just breathe. Like what you tell me to do when I’m anxious. In for three, out for four. Come on.” She took in a breath, squeezing my hand, and I counted. When she exhaled, I counted to four. “Good. Good, Lucy. Again.” She took in a breath, and I counted. We continued until she was breathing close enough to normally that we were comfortable letting her go to sleep.

  “I will get her changed. Will you get me some new clothes for her?” The man asked me, and I left to get some clothes out of the dresser in hers and Macie’s room. By the time I had returned, Lucy was passed out cold, and though her breaths still rasped going out, we heard nothing as they went in.

  “Works fast.” I told the man.

  “The antidote?” He asked.

  “And the virus.” I said, and respectfully, I turned away as he began to change her out of her clothes.

  I could feel his anger bubbling over into rage, and I knew that if I were to look into his eyes, I would see that they were darker red than the blood that covered him.

  “Savages.” He murmured, livid, and I wanted to look, but I did not.

  “Alright.” He told me, and I turned back around, grabbing one of Macie’s hand-knitted throw-blankets off the back of the chair as I walked back to her.

  “I have to get home, or Paul is going
to come looking for me, and that will be more trouble for her.” Savannah told me, before kissing my forehead, “But if anything happens, send for me.”

  “I will.”

  She squeezed my hand, kissed Lucy’s head, and left, and suddenly, I was alone with this man I knew to be good from the dreams I had had about him, and from the past twenty minutes with Lucy. Still, I was nervous, because he was technically an Old Spirit Nobleman, but also, from what I had gathered, he had had a hand in helping Lucy create this terrible virus.

  “Who are you?” I asked, but then I stopped, because I had sounded very rude when I had said that. “I’m sorry. What’s your name?”

  “Tristan.” He answered.

  “I’m…”

  “I know who you are. She speaks of you very frequently, Violet.”

  “All good things, I hope.”

  “Oh, she could never say a negative word about you.”

  I almost scoffed, but I figured it would be inappropriate to do so. Besides, I did not want to think about any of the unpleasantness that had occurred between Lucy and me, either that day, or any day. Not when I had just come so close to losing her, and not after everything she had suffered.

  “Does Macie know about you?” I asked, and my tone was very confrontational, because I could not imagine what it would do to Macie if she found out that Lucy was seeing someone behind her back.

  “Of course she does. I have courted Macie for almost as long as I have courted Lucy. But Lucy and I see one another far more frequently. They have not mentioned me because I am, unfortunately, a Nobleman.”

  “Well, thank God you’re with her, or else you might have been another one of her targets for this whole Red Fever thing.”

  “She concocted that scheme, and I made sure she had all the items she would need to make it possible. I also made sure she would have what she needed to craft the antidote.” He looked at her and stroked her hair, “She is so clever. Her brilliance knows no bounds, and in this case, she paired it with her impeccable practicality and began to thin out their herd. God, if only she could get Caspar Elohimson. That was who she was trying to get tonight, when she started it in the prison. I almost wonder if he knew what she was planning, because he locked her up and then left her at the ‘mercy’ of the other guards. If only he had stayed. Then she would be free of him.”

  I almost told him that I had been the one tasked with killing Caspar but thought better of it. I had only just met him, and just because Lucy trusted him didn’t mean that I did. But it was strange, how readily I was going to tell him, how I had, by instinct, and perhaps because of his gentle nature, immediately wanted to trust him.

  “Where did you two meet?” I asked.

  “When she was sent out to Estersea for one of the Noble’s sons. He had contracted some other plague, and I had been there, appraising land for a new school.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Sixteen years.”

  “And she’s kept it a secret from me for all of that time?!” I asked angrily, “What the hell?!”

  “We agreed that our romance should be revealed to others only when they needed to know. But I have watched over her. When they imprison her, I use my high standing to pay her visits. To keep her fed and warm and hydrated, and when I can, to give her medicine that will keep her comfortable. The things that she has suffered at his hands…” He rested his hand on her stomach, and her shirt raised slightly, showing deep cuts there. Before he could stop me, I raised her shirt and then immediately pulled away at the sight of the carving in her stomach: it was a strange symbol, a circle at the bottom, carved right at the hemline of her pants, with a line extending upwards from the circle right up to beneath her breasts, like the body and head of a stick figure upside down. But instead of two arms and legs, this symbol had two arms on either side, extending outwards but breaking in the middle to extend upwards, like a snapped twig. Looking at it (when I could) I thought that it looked like some kind of insect, like a four-legged beetle or maybe a weird spider.

  “It’s the Four-Armed God inverted.” The man explained to me without a word, “It is the highest disgrace in this land, to have this symbol painted onto your body, and he did not paint it, he cut it. Whether you are Old Spirit, or a follower of Adam, one of the Forwards, or even for some Unallied tribes, this is the highest dishonor, it is the cruelest taunt, the filthiest slur... I would not paint this onto my worst enemy, Violet. I would not paint this onto Tyre, himself. I would not even paint this onto Caspar Elohimson.”

  My eyes were fixated on it now. I could not look away, though the sight of it burned my eyes. Even before he had told me the awful significance of it, I could feel the sickness and dishonor as a rolling tide right in the pit of my stomach. There was something about just the symbol itself, regardless of the meaning the natives had attributed to it. Just the look of it was so sinister, so… wrong. It had nothing to do with the religious implications. It had nothing to do with anything worldly. Just the design of it—a circle, a straight line extending up, four lines jutting out and breaking into a bend, two on each side of that straight line—was so wrong.

  “I have had my gripes with Adam.” He continued, because he knew that I was listening; he knew I wanted him to continue talking, and Lucy, in her sleep, even had her head turned towards him, though I hoped she was not listening. I did not want the symbol carved into her stomach to haunt her dreams. I just wanted her to rest easily.

  “But to my knowledge, he has never done this. Men who fear the true One God rarely do. Because the one God says that no man or woman on this Earth is worthy of this disgrace. Even Tyre would frown at this, and I will bring it to his attention when he arrives here so that he may properly scold my nephew. Perhaps he will even kill him. We could be so lucky.”

  “I know.” I said, “I wish.” My head jerked up and I looked at him, eyebrows furrowed, heart pounding, when I realized what he had just said, “Wait, you’re Caspar’s uncle?! So that means you’re Adam’s…”

  “Younger brother.”

  His eyes met mine for the first time, and I gasped sharply and covered my mouth.

  “The eyes are always a dead giveaway, as your kind says.”