The Alleluia Files (51 page)

It was morning before she woke again to the instant sensation of health. Her body felt light, hollowed out but clean, no longer harboring pain or the mysterious clouds of the brain. She shifted position under the bunched sheets, testing the resilience of her muscles, and the bed creaked beneath her weight. She heard the angel in the nearby chair rustle to his feet. She pushed herself to a seated position and turned to smile at him ruefully.

But it was not Jared who stood there watching her, half hopeful and half afraid; it was not Jared whose presence had calmed her in the night and watched over her fretful dreaming. Tamar stared unsmilingly at Lucinda, and her sister stared back.

The mortal woman was the first to speak. “Was it you here all night?” she asked in a neutral voice.

Lucinda did not come a step nearer; she appeared to be waiting for an invitation: She twisted an emerald ring on her finger as if she could not check the nervous gesture. “All night,” she said, “though the others came by often to check on you. Jared came to the door almost every hour. He was extremely worried.”

Jared. And there was a problem she would have to consider very soon, for how had it happened that he had become so essential to her peace of mind, so necessary to her happiness, that his Was the first face she looked for when she woke? “I think I feel better,” she said cautiously. “Someone gave me some medicine.”

“Conran. He thought it would help you. Jared says you were hit on the head.”

“Well, I’ve been hit on the head before and it never knocked me senseless for five days,” Tamar said irritably. Lucinda smiled, then tried to hide it.

Tamar studied the face so like her own, truer than a mirror image. Of course the hair was not a ghastly shade of half-dyed brown, as hers was, and the eyes were not shadowed with a week of delirium, but it was her nose, her chin, her own hesitant, questioning expression. “I don’t like angels, you know,” she offered. “None of us do. I have been taught that they are the source of all the wretchedness in the world.”

Lucinda allowed her smile to grow, and she came two steps closer to the bed. “Well, I wish I could say that I’ve heard only dreadful things about the Jacobites, but to tell you the truth, I never heard much about them on Angel Rock. So I have no long-standing prejudice against you.”

“I still cannot quite believe it,” Tamar said. “No one ever told me I had a sister.”

“They told me you were dead,” Lucinda said earnestly. She had gathered the courage to push her closer to the bed, and now she sat beside the invalid. “I used to ask my aunt Gretchen to tell me the story over and over again, till finally she refused to repeat it one more time. I think I was always hoping it would have a different ending. Not until last night did my hopes come true.”

“I can hear you, you know,” Tamar said abruptly. “Singing.
And I can feel you flying. At first it frightened me, it made me dizzy, and I didn’t know what was happening. But after a while I grew to like it even when I didn’t know what it was. Then Jared took me into his arms and flew across the river, and I recognized the sensation. Flying. I must have felt it every time you took wing.”

“I think I have been having your dreams,” Lucinda said in a quiet voice. “Dark and violent, full of despair and bloodshed. I would wake sad and wondering in the middle of the night.”

“Some of them were not dreams,” Tamar said.

Lucinda nodded. “That’s what I was afraid of. That makes it even worse. But how could this be? I never dreamed of you before.”

“Not until the Gloria,” Tamar said. “That’s when I had the Kiss installed in my arm. I hoped it would make me invisible to the Jansai, which it did not. All it did was make me dizzy with your flying and put your singing inside my head.”

“My singing? Surely you could not hear my voice.”

“Oh yes, I could,” Tamar said. “Things without words. One song over and over again.” And she hummed the first few bars of the music she had been hearing for the past two months. Lucinda grew very still.

“That’s impossible,” the angel whispered. “No one knows that melody but me.”

“And the descant,” Tamar added, and hummed a few notes of that for good measure. Lucinda appeared almost stricken.

“I believe you,” she said, still in that low, amazed voice. “But I do not see how it can be so.”

“The first time I heard you was the morning of the Gloria,” Tamar said. “I was standing on the streets of Breven and your voice came from some transmitter, broadcast all the way from the Plain of Sharon. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. My Kiss actually ached in my arm. I thought it was because I had only had it installed the night before. But it must have been responding to the sound of your voice.”

Lucinda was shaking her head as if shaking away the doubt, and when she spoke, there was the barest teasing edge to her voice. “And does that make you more likely to believe in the existence of Jovah, that he could make your Kiss respond to the sound of your sister’s singing?”

“It makes me more convinced of the existence of the computer
Jehovah
,” Tamar retorted, “for only a machine could track the lives of separated siblings.”

Lucinda laughed aloud, a sound both rare and familiar to Tamar; so, too, did she laugh, on the infrequent occasions when she had cause. “You Jacobites have an answer for everything, as I have been learning,” she said gaily. “But it will take more than a little plausible scientific theory to make me discard my god.”

Tamar smiled back. “I am willing to try to convert you,” she said. “I am willing to tell you all about the life of a Jacobite— and then I suppose I must ask you to tell me all about the life of an angel.”

Lucinda’s smile faded, and she grew instantly sober. She gazed at her sister with a serious, intent expression. “I am afraid of you, a little,” she said in a quiet voice. “Because your life has been so hard, and my life has been so easy. Because you have no reason to trust me or Jared or any of us. And because I want you to like us—to like
me
. I have only known you for one day and already I am afraid to lose you. You have no reason not to walk away from us, from me, and I don’t know how to make you stay. I don’t know how to tell you how much it means to me to have found you—after all this tragedy, after all this time.”

Tamar was not in the habit of adopting strangers; she was not used to making room for newcomers in her heart. But this woman, this stranger … All Tamar’s habitual wariness deserted her. All her defenses undid themselves of their own accord. “I don’t know that I could leave you behind even if I wanted to,” she replied slowly. “Even if I crushed this Kiss in my arm, I think I would still hear your voice. I have become attuned to you.
Jehovah
woke the bond, but I think it is a bond past breaking. I am afraid, too, but not of losing you. I am afraid of what it means to have found you.”

Lucinda flowed to her feet and threw her arms around her sister. Neither was Tamar used to indiscriminate hugs from chance-met acquaintances, but she did not draw back. This felt familiar, this felt right. Even when those delicate wings came curving around her shoulders, wrapping her in a texture that was half lace and half sinew, she did not pull away. It was as if she was embraced by her own soul, insubstantial but indestructible.
She felt her bones give up their accustomed fight and her blood go dancing backward in her veins.

The sisters talked without pause for the next two hours. It was not until a voice outside the door offered the enticement of food that they were willing to allow a third party to disturb their long reminiscing. They had been right to keep the door closed so long, Tamar thought with disfavor as the room was suddenly filled with an army of well-wishers: not only Conran and Jared, but Reuben and what must be half the Jacobites living in Sahala. Two of them swept her off the bed into energetic embraces, then began to interrogate her about the details of her last three months. Tamar sighed, smiled, and submitted.

She caught Jared’s eyes on her from across the room, but could do no more than nod when he raised his eyebrows at her in a questioning look. Yes; much better. To prove it, she ate more food than she had managed in the past forty-eight hours, and for the first time in twice as long did not feel nauseated when she had finished her meal. Some wonder drug in Conran’s potion, but that was hardly a surprise. If there were such a medicine available, Conran would know about it and have some at his disposal. Conran knew everything.

Except the location of the Alleluia Files. None of them knew that.

It was another hour before Tamar was able to convince them all to leave the room so she could bathe and dress herself. Of course, no one left until Conran ordered a general exodus, and even then two or three of the Jacobite women were indignant to learn that he had included them in the general retreat. The two angels also left the room, both with regretful backward glances, and Tamar luxuriated in the first solitude she had known for what seemed like months.

But she was back among her people, ready to take up the fight again. She cleaned herself and put on fresh clothes and rejoined them, feeling lighthearted and happy as she had not felt since she left Luminaux for Ileah.

The instant she descended the steps she was caught up in their fervor again. “Tamar, Duncan says the Edori engineers have found a way to communicate over long distances with a simple transmitter device. It works over a thousand miles, can you imagine?” “Tamar, Horace says there is a merchant in Semorrah
who is sympathetic to the cause. Christian Avalone, have you heard of him? They say he is a very powerful ally.” “Tamar, how many were killed at Ileah? Jani wants to record the names.”

This
was the community she remembered, urgent and speculative and knocked about by dreams. Whatever kindness she had been shown by well-meaning strangers in Jordana, in Semorrah, in Bethel, these were the only friends she could remember. She answered their rapid-fire questions when she knew the answers and shot back questions of her own when she did not; she laughed when the remarks were outrageous and grew sad when the news was grim. She knew the cadence of every voice and the history of every last soul, and she rejoiced to be among them again.

But as she talked with one eager group and waved to another, her attention was caught by a still, waiting figure in the back corner of Conran’s living room. It was Jared. He watched her without intruding, without reaching out a hand to separate her from her comrades, without questioning their doctrine or railing against their heresy. And she thought, almost at the same time,
He has returned me, against his deepest principles, to the circle of my friends
and
I would leave them all for him
. And the thought made her shudder and turn away from him, because she could no longer withstand his grave and searching look, and she did not want to go to him before all her friends and take his hand in hers.

Not until late that evening did Tamar have a chance to speak to Jared privately. As she had expected, Conran had turned her homecoming into an occasion for a celebration, and so the whole Jacobite population of the village turned out that evening for a bonfire. Horace had gone hunting with some of the Edori and brought back two deer and the carcass of an unidentified beast whose cooked flesh tasted much like rabbit. These were roasted over the fire (“specifically,” Tamar overhead someone say, “so that half will be burned and half will be raw and the whole will be inedible”). The meat was supplemented with a marvelous array of fruits, potatoes, breads, and sweets, and Tamar ate to the point of pain. Some of the food was wholly unfamiliar to her—raised, she supposed, in this strange and fertile terrain. It all tasted wonderful.

As darkness fell and spirits rose Tamar was able to slip away from the close attention of her Jacobite friends. Over on one end of the campground, Conran was telling stories by the magical yellow light of the fire; a few yards away, others were standing in a group, gossiping. It was not hard to spot the angels, their wings making distinctive silhouettes and menacing shadows against the uneven illumination of the fire.

“So odd,” Jared was saying to Lucinda as Tamar strolled over. “At any other gathering I’ve ever been to, this would be the point at which someone would come up to me and ask for the favor of a song.”

“Yes! I was just thinking that!” Lucinda exclaimed. “Even on Angel Rock, everyone considered it such a treat to hear an angel sing.”

Jared laughed softly. “Well,” he said, “I think we must concede that we are out of favor here.”

“Not entirely true,” Tamar said, and they both turned to welcome her. “They are pleased to have me back among them, and they thank you for that. But no one really knows what you want with the Jacobites or how long you plan on staying.”

“That’s a question I’ve pondered myself,” Lucinda said with a sigh. “Not that everyone hasn’t been extremely kind to me, but I cannot hide in Sahala the rest of my life. And I doubt that the Jacobites would want me.”

“They probably don’t want me, either, but I’m staying,” Jared said. “I came here to learn about the Alleluia Files, and I’m not leaving until I learn where they are and what they say.”