When She Woke (17 page)

The enlightener followed her into the corridor, shouting, “ ‘And I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb’!”

Doors opened, and the pink male faces of other enlighteners peered out curiously. Hannah staggered down the hall, down the stairs toward Reverend Henley’s office, with the raving enlightener on her heels.

“ ‘The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew’!”

Reverend Henley’s door flew open just before Hannah reached it, and he stepped into the hallway with Mrs. Henley just behind him. Their faces were almost comically shocked.

“What is going on here?” demanded Reverend Henley.

He looked in confusion from Hannah to the enlightener, who was vowing, “‘And they shall pursue thee until thou perish’!”

An odd calm descended on Hannah. “I’m leaving now,” she said quietly to the Henleys.

The reverend held his hand up for silence, and the enlightener sputtered to a stop. “What did you say, Walker?”

“I said I’m leaving.” Hannah pulled the cross from around her neck and held it out to him. “I’d like my NIC back now. And my clothes.”

Reverend Henley’s face filled with consternation. “If you deliberately step off the path, you’ll be consigning your soul to perdition.”

“This woman is already damned,” declared the enlightener. “She’s a witch who has willfully turned her face from God and embraced Satan.”

“’ Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’” said Mrs. Henley. Her eyes were blades. They darted from Hannah to something behind her.

Hannah looked over her shoulder and saw that a large crowd had gathered in the hallway. The faces of the enlighteners looked pallid and sickly surrounded by the rainbow faces of the women.

Hannah turned back to Reverend Henley and said, in a carrying voice, “You promised I could leave whenever I wanted and that you would give me back my belongings. Are you going to keep your word?”

His face darkened. “How dare you question my integrity?” he said, snatching the cross from Hannah’s hand. “I cast you out! Go and wait in the foyer. Someone will bring you your things.”

But the malicious gleam in Mrs. Henley’s eyes said otherwise. Without her NIC, Hannah wouldn’t have access to her bank account, health insurance, medical records, anything. And if she were stopped by the police and didn’t have it on her person, they could add as much as a year to her sentence. “I’ll wait here,” she said, thankful for the watching crowd.

“Shameless whore! We should cast you out naked,” Mrs. Henley said.

“‘Yea, let thy nakedness be uncovered, let thy shame be seen’!” said the enlightener. His eyes dropped from Hannah’s face to her breasts.

Reverend Henley shook his head. “No, Bob.”

Bob?
Hannah thought, with a kind of surreal incredulity.
This monster’s name is Bob?

“And why not?” said the enlightener. “She deserves that and worse.”

“Because,” said Reverend Henley, “I gave my word.” To his wife, he said, “Fetch her belongings.”

For a moment Hannah thought Mrs. Henley might actually defy him, but finally she gave a stiff nod and went into her parlor. Hannah waited in the charged quiet of the hallway. A few minutes later Mrs. Henley reappeared, holding her clothes. Her NIC, she was relieved to see, was on top. She took the bundle, half expecting the Henleys to order her to strip and change right there.

“’ Cast out the scorner’!” Reverend Henley said, in a stern, ringing voice. “Go now, Hannah Payne, into the cruel and savage world, and reap the wages of your sins.”

As she turned to leave, the enlightener
—Bob,
she thought again, suppressing a hysterical urge to laugh—hissed, “Jezebel. Witch.” Some of the women echoed his words, jostling her aggressively as she walked through their ranks, but most moved silently out of her path. Eve was one of the latter. The admiration on the girl’s yellow face made Hannah stand taller.

And then the women were behind her, and she was opening the door to the foyer, and she was through it and blessedly alone. The air was refreshing after the oppressive closeness of the hallway, and for a moment Hannah merely leaned with her back against the door, drawing deep breaths into her lungs. Suddenly the high neck of her dress felt unbearable, a noose choking her. She stripped it off, and then the rest of it—the cheap, ugly underwear, the black shoes, the thick tights, the hated bonnet—letting everything fall to the floor in an untidy heap. She put on her own clothes. The formerly high-waisted skirt fell to her hips, and her blouse, which had been loose when she’d left the Chrome ward, now hung on her. Finally, she unpinned her hair. It cascaded across her shoulders and down her back, and she realized how much she’d missed the comfort of its weight, how exposed she’d felt without its protection. The thought made her lift her eyes to the painting of Mary Magdalene, her sister in sin, clad only in her own hair.

“Wish me luck,” Hannah whispered.

She stepped out into a cold, drizzly December day. The door closed behind her, and she heard the bolt click shut—a sound of exquisite finality. She lifted her face to the sky, relishing the bracing air and the feel of the rain misting her skin.
I’m free,
she thought, though she knew the notion was absurd; she was anything but. She was trapped in this hideous red body, forbidden to leave the state. Wherever she went, she’d be a target. Even so, she felt a rush of exhilaration. She wondered if Kayla had stood here this morning and felt this way, if she’d had this same irrational sense of liberation and possibility. The thought of her reassured Hannah. She’d walk to Becca’s—Cole would be at work for several hours still—and call Kayla from there. If she’d found TJ, the two of them would help her. If not, she and Kayla would figure out some sort of plan.

Hannah reached into the pocket of her dress for the scrap of paper with Kayla’s number on it. Only when her fingers found no pocket did she register that she wasn’t wearing the dress, that it was lying on the floor of the foyer. She hadn’t memorized the number; she hadn’t had time. She didn’t even know Kayla’s last name.

Hannah whirled and reached for the handle of the door, knowing before she pulled on it that it was locked against her.

THREE
THE MAGIC CIRCLE

H
ANNAH’S EBULLIENCE DWINDLED
and eventually disappeared during the long, wet walk to Becca’s. Female Reds were rare enough that she was a target of curiosity. People ogled her from cars and shops. An elderly couple crossed to the other side of the street when they saw her coming. A guy on a bicycle was staring at her so intently he nearly got hit by a bus. “Watch out,” she cried, but the sound was swallowed by the simultaneous blast of the bus driver’s horn. The biker swerved, and the bus just missed him. He slammed into a parked car and was thrown to the pavement.

“Fucking red bitch!” he yelled. Pulse racing, Hannah quickened her stride. The drizzle turned into a steady rain. Before long, her blouse and skirt were drenched, and her hair was a cold, sodden mass against her back. Her feet in their thin flats made squishing sounds with each step.

Somebody whistled loudly. “Hey, Scarlet, want a ride?” Hannah looked and saw a car pacing her. A kid in his late teens was leaning out of the passenger-side window, leering at her. She crossed her arms over her breasts, aware of how her wet clothes adhered to her body. “Bet you ain’t been ridden in a while,” he said.

“Juicy thing like you needs regular squeezing,” called out his buddy in the driver’s seat.

“I’ll make the juice run out of you, sweet thing.”

Hannah ignored them, staring straight ahead, trying not to let her fear show. She was well aware that if they pulled her into the car, no one would stop them. They could take her anywhere, do anything to her.

“Come on Scarlet, I never had a Red before, but I always did like my meat rare.”

“Yeah, baby, with you in the middle and us on either side, we’d make us a nice roast beef sandwich.”

She wanted to run but knew instinctively it would turn her into prey, so she kept herself to a purposeful walk. Finally, they tired of their sport and drove on.

Halfway to Becca’s, the skies darkened and then opened, loosing a torrent of water. Hannah took shelter under the awning of a pawnshop, shivering from cold. The window was filled with the sad and obsolete detritus of people’s lives: gold wedding bands and watches, old corded appliances and 2-D vidscreens. She felt a forlorn kinship with these dusty former objects of desire, abandoned by the people who’d once possessed them.

The door to the shop opened and a middle-aged woman stuck her head out. “You got something to pawn, honey?” She had a shellacked quality: dyed maroon hair sculpted into a rigid beehive, face coated with thick, shiny makeup.

“No, I’m just trying to get out of the rain for a few minutes.”

With a jerk of her chin, the woman said, “Stay dry someplace else. Chromes are bad for business.”

“Do you have any raincoats for sale?” Hannah said. “Or umbrellas? I can pay.” Even more than the quaver she heard in her voice, she hated the glimmer of pity that briefly softened the woman’s shrewd eyes.

“Wait there a sec.” The woman went back inside and reappeared shortly holding a cheap plastic poncho, which she thrust at Hannah. “Here, take this.”

“How much do I owe you?” She fumbled for her NIC.

“Forget it,” the woman said, with a dismissive wave of one ring-encrusted hand. Her fingernails flashed miniature holograms of Elvis. “Now move along, before I call the cops.”

The poncho swallowed Hannah and had an unpleasantly musky odor, like it had been used as a bed by an unwashed dog. But it covered her from head to toe and, mercifully, had a hood. She drew it up before moving on, into the indifferent fury of the storm.

T
HE PONCHO RENDERED
her unremarkable, just another figure hurrying home through the rain, and she made it to Becca’s without further incident. She paused on the sidewalk in front of the house, a cookie-cutter three-bedroom ranch thrown up quickly and cheaply in the boom days of the 1990s, renovated after the Second Great Depression, and now, like most of its neighbors, sorely in need of another makeover. A pinecone wreath with a bright red bow hung on the door. Hannah had totally forgotten about Christmas, and its existence in light of her current circumstances seemed preposterous, a bad joke. She imagined her red self wrapping presents, singing carols, decorating gingerbread men. What a festive spectacle she would present.

Her feet dragged as she went up the walk, and she stopped at the foot of the steps leading to the porch. What if Cole was home, or Becca had company? Maybe Hannah should find a netlet and call first. But it was too late; the house sensors had detected her. Hannah heard footsteps approaching, and now the door was opening, and in the instant before she bowed her head to hide her face, she had a brief glimpse of her sister behind the screen.

“May I help you?” Becca said, with the characteristic sweetness she showed to everyone, even a bedraggled stranger on her doorstep.

Hannah was paralyzed. She couldn’t make herself lift her head, couldn’t bear to see the inevitable shock, revulsion and, worst of all, pity on her sister’s face. But then she heard a hissed intake of breath, followed by the creak of the screen door opening and the scrape of Becca’s feet on the steps. And then hands were gently pushing back the hood of the poncho, and Hannah felt the rain drumming against her bare head.

“Hannah,” Becca said. Just that, just her name, infused with sorrow but also with such love and faith that she knew it would be all right, Becca wouldn’t despise or repudiate her.

Hannah looked up, and then it was she who was gasping in shock, because her sister’s eyes were swollen from crying, and one of them was encircled by a livid purple bruise. She opened her mouth to spew her rage at Cole, that despicable, cowardly, pathetic—

Becca forestalled her with an upraised hand. “Please, Hannah, don’t.”
Don’t judge me. Don’t pity me.

That, Hannah understood all too well, and so she swallowed her words, if not her anger, and bowed her head slightly, leaning forward in invitation. After a few seconds she felt the soft touch of her sister’s forehead against hers—their childhood ritual, performed after they’d had a fight or one of them had been bullied at school (usually Becca) or grounded by their parents (usually Hannah). They stayed like that for some time, comforting each other silently, and as always, pulled away at the same moment.

“Come on,” Becca said, taking Hannah’s arm and leading her up the steps. “Let’s get you dry.”

Inside, Becca clucked over her pitiful condition and shooed her off to the shower. Hannah was chilled through, and the hot water was bliss. When the brake cut it off, she stood under the warm air of the dryjets until long after her hair and skin were dry.

Afterward she examined herself in the mirror. Her body was gaunt. She could count her ribs and see the sharp jut of her hipbones. A lump had formed on the side of her head, and her right ear was bruised and tender, but the skin wasn’t broken. Nor, she thought, with a flicker of satisfaction, was she. Bob and the Henleys had done their worst, and she had survived—if not unscathed, then at least intact.

She borrowed a soft wool sweater and an old skirt she’d made for Becca’s eighteenth birthday, which their mother had insisted Hannah let down because it was too short. She could still picture her fingers angrily ripping out the thread, and Becca telling her it didn’t matter, the skirt was still lovely, and herself trying in vain to explain to Becca why she was wrong, why two inches made all the difference between lovely and not. Now, her teenaged indignation over such a small thing seemed impossibly distant, a far green shore of irretrievable innocence.

Hannah joined Becca in the kitchen, where she was greeted by the homey smells of coffee and beef stew, overlaid by the crisp aroma of pine from the Christmas tree in the living room. She was famished, and she quickly downed a bowl of the stew, scalding her mouth in her haste. Becca took the bowl and went to the stove to refill it.