I had seen Nathan Hill in pictures and had heard him described in awed detail by the people who had been in his presence, but still I wasn’t prepared for the experience of being less than fifty feet from him. I don’t think anyone was. I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me, and when I turned, a bald man I had entered the theater with was weeping.
Hill had the kind of face that seemed ageless. It was unlined, almost boyish, but wise and deeply troubled at the same time. His eyes were dark blue beneath gently curving brows and waves of red-brown hair. Peaking out from the collar of his uniform I could see the topmost edge of the burn scars he received in Saudi Arabia. Everyone said they covered the whole of his back and arms and chest.
But none of those details really meant anything. He could have been tall or he could have been blond. It would have made no difference. Something radiated off of him — a force, gentle as the wind, but overwhelming. Even I felt calm descend upon me as he looked out over us. It was a feeling of rightness, of certainty, of being one of the few people who had the honor to be standing at the axis of the world.
I held my breath as he began to speak.
“With these words, I consecrate my life to the Glorious Path.”
The congregation repeated his words back with one voice.
“God, lead me to my Path. Let me be a light in the darkness and the rod that falls upon the backs of the defiant. The lives of my brothers and the lives of the Pathless are in my hands. If I allow them to fall into the darkness, then so must I. Their loss is my loss. Their death is my death.”
Hill opened his eyes and looked up at us again, his full lips turned up in a smile.
“A lot of very smart people told me not to come here tonight,” he said. “And since I know they’re smart, I guess it follows that I must be monumentally stupid.”
He smiled again, giving permission for the laugh that rippled through the audience.
“We have been told that this great thing could not be done and now here we are, standing on the edge of it. There was once a great light that shone from this country and illuminated the whole of the world. Every one of us lived through that light’s dimming. We were there as brother reached out to brother, not to help him up but to tear him down. We were there when a million backs turned from God to venerate worldly things. When I think of that time, I think of a pit of dogs driven mad by a hunger that can’t be quenched.”
He stepped back and the silence hung, crystalline.
“But then I stood in the desert of Saudi Arabia with my brothers, Riyadh burning behind us, and I was struck dumb by the beauty of the world. There was sand and there was sky and at night there were stars. Finally, I thought, I can find my way.”
He paused again and the silence was crushing. I wanted to turn, to look for Nat, but I couldn’t move.
“We decided then that we would not make a new world. We would find our way back to the one we were never meant to leave.”
The crowd rose as one, applauding wildly. My paralysis broke and I moved low and fast toward the aisle. The Receiving would come soon, and I had to be ready. Just as I expected, the beacons moved toward the altar to assist Hill. But Hill bypassed it and came to the edge of the stage. He stepped off into the crowd and my stomach sank. What was he doing?
The Path discipline vanished and the crowds rushed toward him. Hard-faced soldiers and novices alike knocked aside their chairs until there was a wall of bodies pressing their hands through a circular perimeter that security quickly came in to establish. I looked to where I had last seen Nat, but she was gone.
Hill moved through the space, and the crowd accommodated him, splitting ahead to re-form behind. They all reached out to touch him, and Hill struggled to meet every hand, beaming as he did so. People’s cheeks shone from tears. Their faces glowed.
Bodies pressed in all around me, pinning my arms to my side and dragging me along. I managed to look behind me and saw a band of gray uniforms, unbroken except for a single dot of white making her way through them toward Hill.
Nat was twenty feet out and closing quickly. I tried to push through the crowd, but there were so many people. Hill appeared and disappeared in the confusion, reaching out to grasp people’s hands, to embrace them, to kiss them, tears in his eyes. But then there was a gasp and the movement of the crowd ceased moving and a hush fell.
I pushed through the final layer of bodies until I saw Hill, barely five feet away from me. A young novice, overcome with emotion, had thrown himself past Hill’s security to fall at the man’s feet. Hill touched the novice’s arm and drew him up. Once he was standing, Hill embraced him and then turned the young man around for all of us to see.
The novice beamed up at Hill, his face rosy, joyous. Hill smiled, lost in the moment, but then his eyes fixed at a point across the circle. Everyone turned to follow his gaze and came to a lone companion who had just stepped out of the crowd.
Nat’s face was bare of her veil, but no one was looking at her face. Every eye in the room was locked on her right hand and the silver cylinder that rested in her palm.
There were screams and then the rush of security as they swarmed through the crowd and raised their weapons. I recoiled, anticipating a roar of fire, but then Nathan’s voice rose over the crowd.
“Stop!”
The soldiers hesitated. Hill lifted his hand, then slowly lowered it until it rested once again on the boy’s shoulder. As one, the guards returned their weapons to their sides. The crowd pulled back, but I stayed where I was, ending up alongside the first line of soldiers, Nat to my left and Hill to my right.
Nat’s eyes were red and swollen, moving from Hill to the novice boy in front of him.
“You’ve been crying.”
As soft as Hill’s voice was, it filled the Lighthouse. Nat didn’t move, didn’t take her eyes off him. Her hand was out before her like a lance. The room felt very small as everyone in it except Nat and Hill and the boy seemed to fall away.
“People you love have been killed in all of this,” Hill said. “Haven’t they?”
I moved behind the front line of the crowd, drifting closer to Nat.
“Let him go,” she said.
“Was it your parents?”
“I said let him go!”
“Were they soldiers?”
The muscles in Nat’s jaw stood out like bands of iron. “My mother was a soldier.”
“And your father?” Hill asked. “A firefighter? No. A police officer.”
Nat said nothing and Hill nodded, sadly.
“My dad was a cop too,” he said. “He was killed in the line of duty after patrolling a neighborhood in Dallas for twenty-five years. I didn’t really know my mom. Your parents were killed trying to protect you. Weren’t they?”
Nat nodded, uncertain. A line of sweat was breaking out on her brow.
“They gave you an amazing gift,” he said. “Why would you reject it now?”
Her hand began to tremble and tears had started to form at the corners of her eyes. Nat gritted her teeth to hold them back, but they came anyway. Hill eased the boy into the crowd and then waved them all back to a safe distance. He took a step closer to Nat.
“Kill me if you want to kill me,” he said. “The Path will go on.”
As if on cue, the canvas walls shook like they were caught in a sudden gust. A jet flew overhead and then another. I slipped closer to Nat, my eyes on her thumb as it hovered over the trigger.
“Would your family want you to die defending a world that was already gone?”
Nat’s fingers went pale around the metal cylinder. Her thumb rose over the trigger.
“I don’t give a damn about the world.”