City on a Hill, page 1
For Chisara
Who said, “Write it now.”
City on a Hill
By Ted Neill
Second Edition © 2017
Table of Contents
THE CITY Foreword
Chapter 1-Lindsey Mehdina
Chapter 2-Sabrina Sabryia
Chapter 3-Pursuit
Chapter 4-L’ved
Chapter 5-Joseph and Magdalene’s
Chapter 6-Angelo D’Agosta
Chapter 7-Scrit
Chapter 8-Durp and Xandes
Chapter 9-Anselem Jackson
LIGHT OF THE WORLD Chapter 10-Cell
Chapter 11-Acre
Chapter 12-Dead Lands
Chapter 13-5625
Chapter 14-Grapple
Chapter 15-Annaliese
REMEMBERANCER Chapter 16-Highway
Chapter 17-Kali
Chapter 18-Orange and Eucalyptus
Chapter 19-Believers
Chapter 20-Theopin
Chapter 21-Trial
Chapter 22-Darkness Full of Light
Chapter 23-Thieves and Murders
Chapter 24-The Wall
Chapter 25-Bran
A DREAM OF KALI Chapter 26-Zell
Chapter 27-Cage
Chapter 28-Commcamp
Chapter 29-Sprocket
Chapter 30-Sea of Blades
Chapter 31-Fallen Gods
Chapter 32-11.1.12-9 A Mother Without Mercy
Chapter 33-Annaliese Col
Chapter 34-Trinity
Chapter 35-Sylvia
VOLUME 1
THE CITY
According to Jewish legend there are men on earth whose righteousness before God saves all others from annihilation. They are the Lamed Vavniks. Without knowing it themselves, they are our saviors.
In Muslim tradition there are similar figures, the 40 Abdals. Both Lamed Vavniks and Abdals resemble the righteous men of Sodom in the book of Genesis. While these men, even as few as ten, stayed in Sodom, God would spare it from destruction.
Foreword
In the beginning, there was war, suffering, death. Mankind’s ignorance, his clinging to superstitious fallacies nearly led to his own destruction. It is not known which side it was—all had long legacies of crimes and guilt—but one band of extremists set off the first detonation in a city that had long been the fault line for centuries of conflict. What followed was a holocaust of worldwide proportions. All life was wiped off the planet as retaliations spread from country to country, continent to continent. Cities, villages, fields, forests, streams were reduced to radioactive waste. This was called the Cataclysm. No one survived except a few hundred people just south of the first detonation.
What followed was the Transition, when our Founders denounced superstition for the rationality of law. Walls were erected around the two remaining cities: Lysander to the north and Fortinbras to the south. The old cities were razed, all signs of the past erased, and a small sliver of enlightened people started again. These, the Twin Cities, are all that is left of humanity. We have learned from our ancestors’ mistakes. The nine precepts are our guide, rationality is our law, and the Head Ministry is our government. Religion is a disease.
— Twin Cities Ministry of Education, Fourth Grade Reader. Placed in all fourth grade classrooms by order of the Head Ministry.
Chapter 1
Lindsey Mehdina
“Lindsey has beetles crawling on her!” Sylvia squealed to her friends.
The four girls stood in a semicircle, cutting Lindsey off from the view of the teachers who gossiped on the far side of the playgroun in the shade of the school building. The building had taken on the drab colors of the playground, covered in the same dust that rose from the parched ground to settle on the goal posts, swing sets, and climbing bars—and by the end of recess—most of the children. Lindsey had put herself in this vulnerable position, choosing a distant part of the schoolyard to draw in the sand undisturbed. So isolated that she was too tempting a target for Sylvia and her gang. The nearest children were the five-year-olds—too young to help—swinging on the climbing bars. The older boys, who often liked the portraits Lindsey would draw for them, were far too engrossed in their pitchball game to notice what was unfolding.
Lindsey placed her hand over her breast pocket where she had hidden the beetles, one tumbling over the other like little gem stones. She remembered saying, “Don’t hurt them,” just before the seizure took her and the vision flickered before her eyes.
Once, after watching her across the breakfast table, her brother Sam told her that when she seized, her eyes tipped back in their sockets and rolled around like marbles. Her limbs shook, and sometimes snot came out of her nose. Sometimes she bit her tongue, and her teeth turned red from blood. It seemed an undignified state to her and at impossible odds with the revelations she saw with her inner eye: people, people she knew, people she had yet to know but would know. Sometimes she saw people when they were younger, often when they were older. Sometimes she saw landscapes: shady forests, heaving seas, tranquil rivers. She saw crescent moon dunes crossing deserts one grain of sand at a time. Suspended on threads of wind, she knew each grain, its golden, amber, or rose brilliance. A canyon. A cave. A thousand candles shining though glass.
Then she would come to with her cereal bowl turned over, milk on her lap, her brother resting his chin in his hand as he stared at his stopwatch.
“Forty-seven seconds,” Sam said.
“It felt like eternity.”
Lindsey was not sure how long this seizure and its vision had lasted. She never knew how long the visions were. She lost all sense of time. But Sylvia was staring down at her with her three friends, the sounds and shouts of other playing children continued uninterrupted, so she knew she was still at recess. No teachers’ faces floated above her, so she could not have been on her back long enough to attract much attention. Lindsey tried to prop herself on her elbow, but her muscles were still not responding. She flopped back down, hitting her head. The other girls snorted and laughed.
Lindsey had braided her locks so carefully that morning, tying them with fluorescent elastics to tame the wiry curls. Now they had escaped from their bands. One stood on end waving before her face, the sun winking behind it. Her head felt as if there was a vice clamped around it. She could taste blood in her mouth and feel mucus sticking in the back of her throat. Sylvia ground one of the loose elastics into the ground.
“Your teeth will fall out, and you will be ugly the rest of your life,” Lindsey said through panting breaths.
The laughing stopped.
“What did you say, you little spaz?” Sylvia said, her lip curling.
Lindsey swore inwardly. This also happened after an episode: she said thoughts out loud. Her brother always found it amusing, but it was far from funny now. Sylvia leaned in close to her, grabbed a fistful of hair, and pulled. Lindsey cried out but was unable to defend herself. She used what control she had regained in her arms to protect the beetles in her pocket. Sylvia was so close that Lindsey could feel her spit on her face. Those gray eyes, thin lips, and freckles were unmistakable. Lindsey had just seen them in her vision.
The whole of it came back then. She had been sitting on a tuft of grass, drawing in the dust with a branch. Sylvia had come over, dragging the soles of her shoes, scraping away the stars, the moons, the birds, and the butterflies Lindsey had worked so hard to render. Closer, Sylvia had spotted the beetles and cried out. Then the vision came.
It was not unusual for Lindsey to experience visions of a person standing right before her. So it did not surprise her that a piece of Sylvia’s future seemed to have detached itself from the bowl of sky and fallen on her. She had seen Sylvia, her freckles faded with age, her fiery hair turned to a more subdued auburn. She was not actually ugly. Her face was lean and had lost the softness of baby fat, but she was comely in an elegant sort of way. Grown Sylvia opened her mouth to call three children—Sylvia’s own children, Lindsey guessed—and where one of her front teeth should have been there was a gap.
Young Sylvia shook Lindsey back into the moment. “Did you call me ugly?”
“Ugly. So ugly. Your teeth will fall out,” Lindsey muttered as if drunk. If her brother had been there, he would have been laughing. Pain spread like fire across her scalp as Sylvia pulled harder.
“Let her go.”
A fifth figure had quietly walked up beside them without anyone noticing. It was the new girl, Sabrina Sabryia. She was lean and gangly, her hair always pulled back into a utilitarian pony tail, and her thick brows always furrowed into a scowl. She wore what she wore every day: a black, long-sleeved shirt and black trousers tucked into oversized boots. Her unchanging wardrobe would have made her the object of ridicule had she not arrived each day in a black ministry roll pod, long and spacious, with tinted windows, unlike the civilian roller pods (CRPs) that the other parents drove. Girls would not play with her because she looked like a boy, and boys would not play with her because she was a girl.
Lindsey, recognizing a fellow outcast, had tried talking to her once. “Your name is Annaliese,” she had said.
“No, it’s not. I’m Sabrina Sabryia.”
“Are you sure? I saw someone call you that in a dream.”
“Are you a little crazy?”
“I guess so.”
Now Sabrina was studying the other girls, her eyes scanning back and forth, the muscles in her jaw working as if she was trying to crack a nut in her molars. The fabric on the elbows of her long sleeve was threadbar
Sabrina did not notice. Arms akimbo, standing as a teacher might, she stared at Sylvia, a little dumbfounded that the girl had not obeyed her command. Yet the pressure on Lindsey’s scalp lessened, and she let out a small cry of relief.
“Why should I let her go?” Sylvia insisted. “You should mind your own business.”
“What did she do to you?” Sabrina asked.
“She called me ugly.”
“Did you?” Sabrina asked, turning to Lindsey.
Lindsey nodded and withered inside when she read the disapproval on Sabrina’s face. But it was fleeting. Sabrina’s eyes shifted to the ground. The new girl was silent a long while, turning her head, her body, even moving her feet delicately as she discovered the drawings below. Then she did something Lindsey did not expect.
Sabrina smiled.
Her smile lacked any self-consciousness, yet it looked out of place on a face that was always scowling. It floated there like an unexpected guest, lingering as Sabrina examined the work, even the images Sylvia had scuffed, as if she was trying to puzzle out what they had been before they had been destroyed. When Sabrina had completed a circuit around Lindsey, she turned to the other girls and spoke in a flat, soft, voice.
“Sylvia, if you touch her again, I’ll punch you in the face.”
The three other girls wore identical expressions of horror as they began to inch in the direction of the teachers. Sylvia stiffened, made to step back but then pirouetted on her foot, grabbed Lindsey’s hand and crushed her fingers together. Lindsey tried to relax her grip, but it was too late. The beetles’ shells cracked, and warm goo spread out of her breast pocket.
Sylvia’s laugh only lasted a moment before it was cut off. Sand ground beneath the sole of Sabrina’s shoe as she shifted her weight. That sound was followed by a hard, wet smack. The other girls were running now, screaming. Sylvia dropped to her knees beside Lindsey, holding her mouth, her two front teeth knocked askew and pink with blood. At the sight of red on her fingers, Sylvia’s face grew pale. One tooth became completely detached and rolled across Sylvia’s lip into her palm, where it rested like a gleaming stone. She turned to follow her friends, her shoulders beginning to shake with sobs.
“Ow,” Sabrina said, rubbing her knuckles before she become aware of Lindsey staring at her, at which point she shook her hand out at her side. The boys playing pitchball on one of the more distant fields caught her attention for a moment before she turned back to the drawings at her feet.
“I can draw more if you like, Annaliese.”
“I told you, my name is Sabrina,” she said as she leaned over more drawings: a spiral, a moon, a fox. The fox Lindsey had drawn with dimensions and depth, but it had not turned out quite as well as she had liked. Lindsey burned with shame. Sylvia had obliterated a much better attempt of a hare. She wished Sabrina had seen that one. The teachers were coming over now, crossing the field in long strides, their arms swinging straight and fast at their sides.
“I warned her.” Sabrina said with sincere wonder as she watched the teachers approach. “I warned her. Why would she do that?”
“It’s all right,” Lindsey said wiping the sticky, gleaming shells from her fingers onto her trousers. “We’re going to be friends until the day we die.”
“How do you know?”
A teacher arrived and yanked Sabrina’s arm so hard that her feet lifted off the ground.
“I’m just often right about these things,” Lindsey said as they dragged Sabrina away.
Ten years later.
Chapter 2
Sabrina Sabryia
“Stop spinning your gun, Cadet.”
Sabrina bounced the blaster upright so that it pirouetted briefly, its battery case on her knuckle, before she knocked it into her holster with a satisfied flick of her opposite hand.
“Unnecessary,” Sean said.
“A question, sir.”
Sean paused, his head turning a fraction of a degree towards her. The setting sun, streaming down the alleyway between buildings struck his face at such an angle that she could see his blue eyes behind his visor. The late afternoon light made his skin look tawny and the laughter lines around his eyes and mouth more prominent.
“Go ahead.”
“Do you disapprove because you can’t do it?” Sabrina asked, suppressing a smile.
Sean let out a gruff “Hmph” and returned to the screens projected before his eyes, his hands moving in the air in front of him as he switched between menus. “I like my face attached, that’s all,” he said. “Although, maybe some plasma burns could improve yours.”
“I’m reporting you to my supervisor,” Sabrina said, leaning against the wall and stretching her legs, the carbon fiber flex bands of her patrol suit creaking.
Sean completed his inventory of their shift assignments, lifted his visor, and started down the alleyway to the sidewalk. “Let’s go, one assignment left today.”
The sun shone directly into their eyes as they turned the corner onto Carnap Avenue. Despite the glare, Sean kept his visor up and told Sabrina to do the same. “The less distance between you and the residents, the better,” he said, tugging at his uniform jacket to cover up his blaster as well.
Sabrina zipped her jacket and doubled her pace to keep up with Sean’s long strides. The avenue between the row houses was crowded with produce and cooking carts, each surrounded by residents stopping on their way home from work. The air smelled of rosemary and aniseed. A young girl sprayed a golden cloud of mist on a wheelbarrow of kale and turnips, turning the lime leaves and pink tubers a dark emerald and bloody red.
The moisture and the bright colors created a convincing illusion of abundance, but dust still gathered at their feet, on their sleeves, in their eyes. The desert was never far, the sand pooling in the gutters and creating a haze over their heads was a constant reminder. Occasionally Sabrina could even smell it as a breeze carrying the scent of sage and tamarisk wafted over rooftops and down an alleyway.
Sean led them into the periphery of a pitchball match, delaying long enough that when the ball rolled his way, he had a moment to juggle it up and away from the children and kick it to her. She trapped it under her foot.
“Are we dispensing with all formality?”
“Bond with the community and you’ll have all the partners you ever need,” Sean said. “I do have the highest rate of solved cases in the station, and it’s not because of my interrogation techniques.”
Sabrina tipped the ball onto the top of her foot, before toeing it to her knees, her thighs, then her head where she balanced it for a few moments. The children cheered when she kicked it back to them.
“Look,” Sean said, nodding across the street to where the children’s mothers were also clapping for her. Sabrina felt her cheeks flush. “Don’t be embarrassed. They are proud of you. How many of them do you think wanted to play sports when they were younger, or even wanted to join the Security Ministry?”
Sabrina fell back into a steady pace beside him. “I can’t be responsible for all their hopes and dreams.”
“But you are,” Sean said, breaking stride for a moment to look her in the face. She felt a stirring within her, a tremor from her mouth down to the base of her spine when he turned his sharp, clear eyes to her. “You are. And you’re ready, too. Tell me about our friend Mr. Elias Orehem.”
“Repair shop owner, 23 years of age,” she said matching his stride again. “No prior arrests or citations. A few disciplinary actions while in school, nothing unusual for a non-academically inclined teenage boy. Apprenticed briefly as a machinist before inheriting his uncle’s shop here. Has not attended any tertiary education.”
“And your visor is up, you are reciting this from memory,” Sean said glancing sidelong at her.
