Dawn bristled. “Take it easy! He’s surrendering!”
A gloved hand grabbed Dawn by the face and shoved her roughly to the ground. Jed struggled, both against the men and against his conscience, but it was too late.
With Jed restrained, the troopers turned their attention to Dawn, and soon had her cuffed as well. The soldiers had just lifted both arrestees to their knees when a Transport officer walked up and lifted the visor on his helmet. He stared at Jed for several seconds without saying a word. After a few more intense moments of silence, he shifted his gaze to Dawn, and then back to Jed.
“So you’re Jedediah Troyer, eh?”
Jed nodded his head. “Yes, sir.”
The officer knelt down on one knee so that his face was only about eight inches from Jed’s face. “Well Jed, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Teddy Clarion, but you can just call me Clarion. Only my mom calls me Teddy.”
Jed nodded his head again, but said nothing.
A small airship hovered in from the east and landed softly about seventy feet from where Jed and Dawn were being held. Clarion moved some of the soldiers out of the captives’ field of view, and Jed and Dawn watched as two more arrestees were dragged from the ship. These men were also cuffed, but in addition they had black bags over their heads that had been tied loosely around their necks with white rope. They were thrown violently to the ground by Jed and Dawn, and struggled to rise to their knees in protest against their captors. Clarion walked over to the two new arrivals and, one at a time, loosened the ropes and removed the bags from the men’s heads.
Jed recognized the men immediately. They were Hugh Conrad and Officer Rheems, formerly of Transport and currently rebels against the state.
Clarion pulled a pistol from his holster, and without any cinematic soliloquies or impassioned or sarcastic speeches, shot both men through the head. Their bodies flipped backward and shook on the ground, gyrating in their violent death throes.
Clarion watched the bodies as they twitched. “Disturbing, isn’t it? Jed Troyer, I’m sure you haven’t watched many movies, but the lady probably has. It’s criminal they way they show people just falling over dead when they’re shot in the head—flopping over like a sack of grain. In reality, the nerves and synapses continue to fire for some time. Muscles twitch, even if the whole brain is destroyed. It’s quite gruesome and troubling, wouldn’t you agree?”
Jed and Dawn just stared, neither of them able to respond.
Clarion walked back over to Jed with the pistol in his hand and pointed it at Jed’s head. “So you surrender?”
Jed watched the bodies of Conrad and Rheems as the nerves that animated their spasms died, and their sickening jerks and twitches came to a halt. He just nodded his head.
Clarion stared at Jed with a fierce intensity—attempting, it seemed, to peer into Jed’s soul. After a long pause, he jerked his head a little to one side and smirked.
“Pity.”
Just as the mystery of the word struck him, Jed was grabbed from behind; he flinched at the sharp stick of a needle going into the meat at the base of his neck. He tried to turn his head, but could only move it enough to see one of the soldiers jabbing Dawn as well before the darkness overwhelmed him and the lights went out.
With the captives secured, Teddy Clarion surveyed the battlefield. Dead rebels were strewn here and there, and small fires burned among the ashes. As he took a step forward, he saw a small object near the toe of his boot. He picked it up and examined it. An odd item—a cigarette lighter, but strange in its manufacture. Some kind of rebel technology, he thought to himself. I know someone who will want to take a look at this.
Lost in darkness, Jed felt like he was swimming toward a faint light, but he couldn’t feel his body moving, and only sensed its motion by the cloudy shimmering of iridescence caused by his struggles. He could breathe easily enough, but the occlusion of his vision gave him the impression that he was underwater, and an unspecific panic reflex took hold of his mind.
Floating in the brown-gray darkness he saw images of things that he knew, visions floating in the water, or behind it and through it. He saw Zoe, his milk cow, struggling in the murk; he saw the window with the coffee can that had replaced the missing pane; and he saw the face of his brother leaning over to reach for him from the other side of a gulf that stretched between them. He reached up for his brother’s hand, and as he did so he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head and his vision cleared instantaneously, as if someone had flipped a switch. And as instantly as his sight was made perfect, he now found that he was standing (if it can be called standing—he couldn’t feel his body) on a hillside that was covered in the greenest grass he’d ever seen.
He realized that it may not have been his real self standing on that hillside. Maybe he was a boy; or maybe he was someone else entirely. He couldn’t rightly tell. He looked up. The sky was so blue that it took his breath away, and as he looked around he could see the minutest details, as if his eyesight had improved a thousandfold in a moment.
He glanced back up at the blue sky—a blue like the blue he’d only seen on his mother’s palette when she painted patterns on smoothed boards that she would sell to the tourists. His mother never painted natural things, like people, birds, or trees, because creating images of anything God had made was forbidden. It was against the ordnung: the rules of their community. But she did like to paint patterns and hex signs in bright colors on pieces of plywood, cut round and sanded. The myth that Amish hex signs were always religious or superstitious, or that they were put up on barns to keep evil spirits away, was one that had been trumpeted by secular authorities and governments—and of course by the tourist industry, to add mystery to the Amish story, and thus attract tourist dollars. To the Troyer family, the hex signs were just a way for Jed’s mother to express her artistic side, to display her ethnic identity, and experience the joy of painting. She always picked the most beautiful colors to use in her projects.
Jed was staring up into a sky that was this color of blue when he saw what looked to be meteors—or missiles?—falling from the sky and impacting the ground in brilliant oranges, reds, and browns. The display lasted for only seconds, but to Jed it felt like it went on much longer.
Then from the same blue sky—or, rather, in front of that sky, between him and the blueness—he looked on as numbers appeared, long rows of digits moving quickly from right to left, zeroes and ones and symbols that meant nothing to him. These numbers flashed and disappeared, and then he was in a darkened room and there was a screen of white suspended in the air in front of him. He looked down at his arms and legs and hands, and it was just as if they were his own, from his point of view, but the parts were somehow different, foreign to him. He lifted his hands and saw them rise up in front of his face. He examined them, but they looked artificial; he was moving them, but they didn’t feel like his. It wasn’t that they weren’t right, it was that they were… too right. The tiny hairs on the backs of his hands moved as if molested by a gentle breeze that he could not feel. He could flutter his fingers and touch his nose, but the feelings were still just—not… quite… right.
On the white screen—which brought to mind what he’d heard of Englischers’ televisions or movie screens—he could see his family’s farm, as if from the road, and he found he could reach out and touch the screen and the image would react to his touch. He could zoom in any direction and look around the farm.