Dazzle Ships Read online

  And she was older than all the other women I’d seen so far. Most had been about my age, or a little older like Xandrie and her two helpers. But this new woman was wrinkled and tired-looking, very much like the few older women we had back in the Complex.

  Spent.

  Xandrie seemed pleased she’d made it. “Sister Valerie. Thank you for your service to the Sisterhood. I’ve come across some new supplies. We can now carry out your ascendance.”

  “Oh, great,” the older woman responded. “I was hoping you’d figure out a way to kill me so I didn’t have to wait around another lifetime.”

  “I’m sure you don’t mean that,” Xandrie pouted. “Everything I’ve done has been to keep us alive. Alive, so you and those like you can reach the Monastery. It has always been this way.”

  Valerie laughed. “If you say so.”

  “I say so,” Xandrie shot back, losing her cool.

  “And what about her? You find someone else to go with me? I’m not planning on contesting it,” she laughed with sarcasm.

  “She’s a—guest. Although,” she turned to me dramatically, “I’m still not sure how you got into our happy little refuge.”

  “You’re not from here? From outside? What’s up there? Can we go out? Are we—”

  “Silence,” Xandrie said with more impatience. “I’ll ask the questions.”

  Valerie smiled. “Of course. Ask her where she’s from.”

  Xandrie’s smile was long gone. Her eyes glowed in anger.

  “Dammit! I—”

  She turned to her aides. “Sorry, sisters, I should not have said that.”

  Back to Valerie, she continued. “I’m not going to do anything you ask.”

  They seemed to glare at each other.

  “I am from the outside,” I said calmly. “My home is called the Complex. I came here to get help tracking down a crazy man who doomed my people to die a horrible death. He's in a gigantic metal truck I last saw swimming across the lake.”

  Both women looked at me like I’d just explained fusion.

  How the hell did I remember that word?

  Valerie replied first. “The Complex? It survived?”

  “You know of it?” I asked with surprise.

  “Know of it? I built the damned thing.”

  5

  “You will not speak again” Xandrie cautioned. She motioned to her guards, who seemed to know she wanted them to grab Valerie’s arms and hold her.

  Valerie shook off the women’s hands but didn’t speak out. There was anger on her face, but also hope. She continued to watch me.

  “Valerie is one of our oldest residents, but also the craziest. If I had a journal of everything she’s said in the Remainder I could tell many exciting stories. Those include many impossible tales of how she built places like this one.” Xandrie pointed all around her, indicating her base.

  “But, there is nothing more important than meditative calm. Her words confuse our sisters and give them hope—false hope—of a returning world. She didn’t build this place any more than I did.”

  Valerie squirmed, clearly wanting to say something. Xandrie ignored her and walked over to the window overlooking the interior hall.

  “Time stands still in here, sister Elle. There are no clocks. No watches. No shift changes. No day. No night. No—”

  “There’s no friggin’ men!” Valerie blurted out.

  Xandrie bashed her hands against the window, just over her head. She kept looking down into the Great Hall—I mean Cathedral, but spoke to the room behind her.

  “Men are a distraction. The sisters have endured without a serious conflict since we entered the Remainder. And we’ve done it without men.”

  “I have to ask. What is the Remainder?”

  Xandrie turned around in a flash and didn’t appear happy, but she answered my question. “The Remainder is every second after the closing of the outer gates. That was the end of normal time. Every second since then is leftover—some call it throwaway—time. We’ve been inside this prison waiting for the Goddess to come claim us.”

  “But why? Time is still passing, you know,” I said as if it were perfectly reasonable to state.

  “No, it isn’t, visitor. Time is not passing.” Xandrie strode over to me.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  There were two answers to that question. I certainly didn’t look my proper age.

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “Exactly. And how old do you think I am?”

  She looked to be about twenty. Maybe twenty-one.

  Old enough to drink. Wow. That’s old.

  My inner voice was speaking as a seventeen-year-old. Even if I wasn't entirely sure what its words meant, it helped me pretend.

  “Twenty?” I didn’t want to miss by too much.

  “And her?” she nodded to Valerie.

  “Forty?” I really had no idea, even in normal time. Anyone over twenty might as well be forty, so I always used that number. Except when they were clearly much older, in which case I thought they were one hundred.

  “And Patience and Felicity?”

  They were closer to my age, I was sure of that.

  “Eighteen.”

  Felicity smiled and shook her head just a drop. I’d evidently guessed wrong.

  Xandrie laughed. “Ha! Wrong. Every guess was way off.”

  I was genuinely surprised. “Was I close?”

  “Off by many decades, I'm sure,” she said with a conspiratorial grin. “But we don't keep track of time in this place. So how would I know?” Her smile revealed the truth. She knew. And the only reason she wouldn't say it was suddenly obvious. Felix wasn't lying about his age.

  Uh oh.

  My own red lights went off. I’m sure my face expressed what had to pass as confusion, as it dawned on me they were as old as I was. I hadn’t even considered the possibility, but it would explain why a young-looking woman was in charge.

  “Not sure? What the hell. I'll tell you the truth,” I said dryly. It seemed wrong to pretend I didn't know how old she was. I wanted to find out why she was keeping it from everyone else. “I was alive the day the Complex was closed. I was the last one in, actually. And that makes me one-hundred-and-four.”

  Everyone stared at me in total silence.

  “I came here because our people had been tricked into thinking they’d only been in the bunker for a short time—months—when in fact they’d been there for close to ninety years. Everything fell apart when the man who wiped our memories finally had to give up that game. Our whole society had been built on a lie.”

  “Good God,” Valerie said in a breathless hush.

  “We’re not the only ones,” Xandrie exclaimed, “who don’t age?”

  She looked at Patience and Felicity. I could watch as she sought the answer to the complicated questions I’d dropped in her lap. Whatever game she’d been playing with her people, I’d just upset it.

  “We’re not the only ones,” she repeated, in a softer voice. At the end she added, “Lies.”

  “No. That’s a good thing, though. We can help each other. If we go outside we can track down the Commander. We can stop him from hurting his hostages. We can be partners.” I spoke with calm, though I was so excited I could almost shout.

  “This can’t be possible,” Xandrie replied. “We are still in the Remainder. Time must end.”

  “No, it never ends,” Valerie responded with her own certainty.

  I didn’t want to reveal our secret, but I assured myself there could only be one explanation for the coincidence.

  “You’ve got that 204-year-old man down in the jail. But do you also by chance have some really old sisters in your, uh, base?”

  Xandrie looked at me with great surprise. Then she coughed deliberately and called her helpers to her. “Take Valerie to the Icer, and I’ll be right down.”

  They hesitated a moment too long.

  “Do it now,” she blared.

  “Yes, sister,”
they said in unison.

  Xandrie and I both watched the other women pack up and leave. Valerie walked with an air of defeat, but the other two didn’t seem much happier. Not anything like when they first came with me into the room.

  “Did I say something wrong?” I asked, knowing I did.

  She seemed to consider. “No, the fault is mine for involving you at all. I should have talked to you in the prison, though there is never enough privacy.”

  “The pregnant girl?” I countered.

  “Her, yes. But also Felix. They are problems awaiting solutions, though I’m starting to see answers to some of my more important questions.”

  “Why is she there? We would have killed to have babies in the Complex.” I spoke in a friendly manner, assuming we were discussing something useful toward sharing information between our groups.

  “Just shut up! God! I should push you through the Icer, too. And Scarlett. Hell, why not Felix. Just get rid of all these messy problems.” She wiped at her pristine white skirt as if the mere mention of problems had sullied her cloth.

  “What are you talking about?”

  She found my staff from behind her door and looked at me with a stern face.

  “Come with me, and I’ll show you how we deal with troublemakers.”

  I gulped, but she tilted the staff in my direction to make it clear it wasn’t a polite request.

  Chapter 6

  I followed Xandrie back down to the main floor and into their Cathedral room. Their Great Hall had been covered with metal planks, exactly as they’d done in the Standing Quarter. It kept the floor dry, but whenever I put my feet down I heard creaks as they adjusted to my weight. They traded one annoyance for another.

  A good number of the sisters were crowded around one vertex of the hexagonal-shaped room. A small dais had been constructed near the cafeteria entrance, and a hundred or more white-skirted women had gathered around it. They turned around as if someone had told them we were nearing.

  The sea parted for Xandrie. I trailed in her wake, aware many of the girls watched me from the corners of their down-turned eyes. The crowd fell totally silent so only our creaky footfalls made any noise. I walked on the sides of my shoes, desperate not to make a sound, but the creaks and groans of the planking made that goal unreachable. All told, the air was creepy.

  Xandrie motioned for me to stop at the front while she climbed the three steps to stand on the platform. Valerie was up there, as was Felicity and Patience. It was difficult to understand what was happening as neither held Valerie. She stood between them with no bonds on her hands. I thought she was a prisoner, but I wasn’t so sure.

  “My sisters,” Xandrie said in a voice loud enough to be heard by those in the back, “the Goddess has smiled upon us. She’s bestowed a great gift that will allow us to fulfill the destiny of Sister Valerie—one of our oldest and most beloved friends. Our time in the Remainder has been difficult. Ascensions had to stop while we waited for this fortune to return. Well, now it has.”

  Without explaining her intentions she walked over to the back wall where a pair of thin black columns stood about six feet apart. Each was about six feet tall, with a black threshold on the floor between them making it seem like a box without a lid. The one on the right had a small access door propped open from top to bottom, as if someone had been working on it.

  She shoved my staff into the door and seated it inside the column. That drew my attention to the other one, but its door was shut.

  “My sisters. I give you the return of the Ascension Halo.”

  Xandrie touched the black box and an energy beam filled the space between the two boxes as if a curtain had been pulled from one to the other. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the color.

  “My staff.” The words spilled out before I thought about my surroundings.

  “My staff, Sister Elle, is what allows us to link to Heaven. Link with the Goddess. Your staff is back in my office,” she said with finality. I didn’t think that could possibly be true, but I doubted myself. She could have had several staves. I didn’t see her take mine specifically, though I should have been paying better attention. The rope made of Alex’s shirt would have given it away.

  Write your name on it next time.

  I shook my head at my own stupidity.

  Xandrie continued. “Sister Valerie will soon be Saint Valerie. She will go ahead of us and walk the hill to Heaven as all our sisters have done before us.” She waved her hand to various parts of the room. I couldn’t tell if she was signaling the girls in the audience or the women on the hologram around us.

  “There she will maintain the path for the rest of us to follow. Through her labor and perseverance, in addition to the intercession of our Goddess, we will all be guided out of the Remainder of time and finally start our next life.”

  “The Goddess gives us life,” she said in a monotone voice.

  “And we give it back,” the sisters repeated.

  “And we give it back,” Xandrie said by herself. She crushed her hands together like she was smashing two pieces of bread between them, and then looked upon the gathered crowd.

  “Is there anyone who wishes to join our sister on her journey?”

  She craned her neck as if expecting takers, but there were no volunteers. I wasn’t sure if that was normal.

  “Does the petitioner wish to contest her destiny?”

  Xandrie hardly looked at Valerie and had started to say something else when Valerie spoke.

  “I wish to contest!” she said in a loud voice.

  “You do?” Xandrie blurted out. Totally out of character for the ceremony.

  “I wish to contest,” she repeated, although at a much quieter volume. That was fine because the room had dropped to absolute silence.

  “You wish to contest?” Xandrie offered again, sounding no better.

  Valerie nodded.

  Xandrie half-smiled and seemed to stumble for something to say. She looked out at us, including at me, and then spoke as if reciting from a cue card: “A supplicant may, when certain she has been wrongly accused, contest of the verdict, which carries the weight of two additional sisters who must join her journey.”

  As I had no idea what was going on it meant nothing to me, but everyone around me seemed stunned.

  “I choose Sister Felicity and Sister—”

  It seemed as if everyone leaned forward as Valerie hesitated on the second name.

  “Xandrie. I choose you two as my heavenly guides. I beseech you to bring me strongly and swiftly to the hilltop.” She smiled a pleasant smile, but the victory in her eyes was unmistakable.

  Xandrie looked at me. “A supplicant may contest the will of the Sisterhood, but in doing so she enables two other sisters to share in her ascendancy. The rule is designed to prevent a malicious accuser from needlessly enabling this ritual for fear of being being forced to join her.”

  I didn’t know if she was talking directly to me, but I wasn’t shy about responding. “Isn’t this a good thing? Don’t you want to ascend?” I pointed to the sisters walking the path on the hologram.

  “Yes. Of course,” Xandrie replied. She seemed to gain strength as I watched her. “But I’m afraid I am not eligible. It has always been this way. I am the oldest. I’m immune from such accusations. I am … infallible.”

  Valerie smiled with a malicious grin. “Ah, but you are very fallible my dear sister. I wasn’t going to contest when I knew there was no hope. Now, everything has changed. As Sister Elle so eloquently described to us not an hour ago, there is a resident down in the prison wing who is 204 years old. That person is the oldest among us, and therefore the eldest rule cannot apply to you. Sister Patience and Sister Felicity can confirm. Or shall we all go down to the prison, if that be your will?”

  There were various exclamations of surprise from the girls in the audience.

  “No. You can’t do that,” Xandrie complained, just loud enough I could hear her.

  Valerie kept on smilin
g.

  2

  Xandrie began to cry. And not in a “I’m gonna miss you guys” sense, but in a “This is so unfair” way.

  “I’m so sick of being disobeyed all the time. You can’t do this,” she snapped.

  Valerie was unaffected by her sobs. “My sisters, you know the rules. I have the right to contest. I have done so, and chosen my champions. It must be done.”

  “No. You tricked me. This is all a cruel trick.” She looked at me. “You!”

  I stepped back, as did everyone around me. I suddenly had a halo of clear around me, like I suddenly smelled bad. Okay, worse than usual.

  “Where are you really from? Did she instruct you to bring that pipe back to our holy shrine? Tell me!”

  I stepped back once more, but the sisters did not clear a space for me. I bumped into someone.

  “I have no idea what’s going on here. I thought you wanted to do whatever this ceremony is. What’s the big deal?”

  “What’s the … ?” She came down the steps and stood in front of me. I could smell her breath. It was more pleasant than the Commander’s horrible stench, but I’d suddenly found myself not liking the otherwise pleasant-looking and pleasant-smelling woman.

  “Of course this is a good thing,” she said through gritted teeth.

  I nodded, unable to fathom what she wanted to hear.

  “Of course this is a good thing,” she continued. “A very good thing.”

  She brushed the tears from her eyes.

  “My sisters. You’ve seen how Sister Valerie has bestowed this great honor upon me. I accept this honor with an open heart.” She drew her hands to her chest as if clutching it.

  “But I have so much I must do as your leader before I ascend. I’m simply not ready. You’re not ready to let me go,” she declared, while pointing around the crowd. “Please. I beg you. Help me find a proxy to take and hold my place in the line until such time as I can afford to go.”

  She raised her hands and pointed toward the blue glowing ribbon between the two black towers. “Will you not help your dearest Sister Xandrie, so she may in turn help all those who are forced to stay behind?” Her voice came out as a hoarse croak, as if it was the most important sentence she’d ever uttered.