“Paul!”
The cheering stops. I recognize my own voice in the echoes. Somehow, I have been transported to the center of the aisle. I appear to be walking toward the stage.
“How many years, Paul? Ten? Fifteen? How can you still be the same?”
Paul watches my approach with a cautious blankness, waiting for more information before choosing a reaction. He doesn’t recognize me. I don’t care.
“How have you not moved past this? How have you not realized we were wrong?”
I stop in front of the stage, hands clenched at my sides. Paul leans down and squints at me like I’m a hallucination. “Brother Atvist?” he whispers.
My shoulders hunch at the sound of the name. I look behind me. The whole congregation is watching, but I feel one stare burning hotter than the rest, blue eyes cutting through the crowd like a gas torch. She is sitting in the back row next to Nora, watching this sweet reunion with my childhood friend.
What is she thinking? What dark visions does she see when she looks at me now?
I pull my eyes away from her and narrow them on Paul. I leap onto the stage and grab him by his bristly shirt and shove him back through the curtain. He is still too stunned to resist. We emerge from the thick purple cloth into a typical theater backstage: cables snaking over black plywood floors, lighting rigs climbing up the walls—same as any other big show.
“You can’t do this,” I growl, releasing my grip on his shirt. “There are thousands of people in Post.”
But he doesn’t hear me. His eyes rove across my face, wide and rapt. “You’ve barely aged,” he says, tilting his head. “What happened to you? Did God take you up like Elijah?”
“God didn’t take me anywhere. I found my own way into Hell.”
“What—”
“It doesn’t matter, Paul, I’m alive, and I’m…” I bite back the flood of words. I need to let him process his shock and get over the mystery of my appearance so he can actually hear me. “…I’m here.”
I leave it there and wait.
“You’re here,” he says, nodding. Then without any further analysis, a smile flickers through his confusion. Not smug, not cruel…hopeful. “Are you here to help finish what we started?” The smile broadens, lighting up his eyes. “Will you help me spread the Fire?”
And suddenly I see him. He’s peering out at me through the eyeholes of this leathery suit of armor. The kid I grew up with, played pretend with, went to church with, feared the world with, feared our parents with, feared Hell with, feared our own bodies and minds until we detached ourselves from both. Another kind of Orientation.
My anger collapses.
“Paul,” I mutter, shaking my head. “It’s all wrong.”
“We’re so close now!” He grips my shoulders. “We’ve come so far since they took you from us!”
“They didn’t take me, Paul, I left. I got tired of waiting for permission to die. I decided to try living.”
“Can’t you feel it in the air? God’s finally going to move!”
There’s a strange glaze in his eyes, like he’s looking right through me, muting out my words, and I understand why. The math is simple: I was like him, so if something could change me then something could change him, unmake his world, blow down his fortress of belief and leave him exposed.
Unthinkable. Impossible. There must be some mistake.
“He’s going to set us free!” Paul gushes. “We just have to prove we really want him to!” He’s shaking me now. His eyes glisten. “I know it’s a hard doctrine, it’s hard to think about all those deaths, but who are we to doubt God’s will? Once we pass this final test…he’ll do it! He’ll burn this nightmare away and take us home!”
“Paul…” I firm my face and look up, meeting his feverish gaze. “The world is our home.”
He blinks at me and pulls back, holding me at arm’s length.
“Yes, there are nightmares in it,” I tell him. “Horror and grief. But I’ve found good things, too. Things to live for. People to live for. I’ve found love here…” My voice cracks. “…and it’s beautiful.” My eyes burn but I keep them open. “It’s true, even when it changes. Even when it ends.”
Paul’s face is contracting inward, his body stiffening, recoiling. “There were rumors,” he says in a suddenly lowered rumble. “About your family…connections to Axiom leadership…” His eyes narrow to slits, cutting off my view of what’s inside. “What have you been doing all these years since you left us?”
I hear footsteps. I glance behind me. The young man from the armored circus—Lindh—is standing just inside the curtain, breathing heavily. “Pastor Bark,” he gasps, “we have a problem.”
But Paul ignores Lindh like he ignored me. “Have you been led astray, Brother Atvist? Did you let the world corrupt you?” His face is contorting with anger and perhaps a little relief; the uncertain hope is gone from his voice and the theatrical bombast is back. “Did you come to help spread the Fire, or to sow doubt and dissension? Why are you here, Brother Atvist?”
Lindh rushes to his side and whispers something in his ear. Paul’s eyes widen. His scarred face reddens. “You brought them here?” he asks me, but it’s more a gasp of disbelief than a question.
I frown. “Brought them? What are you—”
He advances toward me. He is half a foot shorter, but his body is a tight coil of rage. I back away from him. I feel the curtain slide around my shoulders and I’m on the stage again, the blinding lights, Paul’s voice booming through the PA. It suddenly occurs to me that our entire conversation was probably picked up by his headset. My eyes dart through the crowd, looking for Julie, but Paul is still advancing toward me.
“Some of you may remember this man,” he bellows to the congregation, “but he is no longer the man we knew. He has left our fellowship and turned his back on the Fire and he has fucking betrayed us!”
He shoves me in the chest. I stumble over the edge of the stage and land hard on my back; the stiff beige carpet knocks the wind out of me. As I struggle to inflate my lungs, two meaty hands clamp onto my shoulders and hoist me to my feet.
“Time to go, preacher boy,” M mutters in my ear.
I glance around, trying to get my bearings and make sense of this whirlwind, but M is dragging me toward the exit. I see Tomsen waiting there in the foyer, hopping from foot to foot.
“Now, now, now,” she hisses at us. “Are they coming with us or not?”
Julie steps into the foyer. Nora is behind her.
Nora looks at M. Rage foams up in her like a chemical reaction and M tenses, but she looks away and swallows hard and seems to contain it. With her head still down, eyes to the side, she jabs a finger at him and mumbles, “Deal with you later.”
But I’m only peripherally aware of their exchange. Julie is staring at me in a way I haven’t seen since we first met, when the question “What are you?” meant so much less. Her eyes roam my face like she’s searching for seams and zippers, and I want to grab her and kiss her and say You know me! with such conviction that she has no choice but to believe. But I say nothing.
“Can you guys do whatever this is later?” Tomsen says, glancing between the four of us. “They’re almost here.”
“Who?” I finally ask, but even as I ask it I hear the answer rising from somewhere outside, a rumbling hum like a bass chord with too many notes. It’s the sound of truck engines. Many, many truck engines.
“Your co-workers,” Tomsen says. “Former, I hope.”