Amira shivered. If this reader could find points of weakness the way she could, the next hour would test her like nothing else.
“Ok, Amira, let’s start,” he said. “In the interest of treating this like a proper therapy session, let’s focus on a moment from your past and dissect what it means together. In your profile, it says you were originally born in one of the religious compounds in the southwest. Correct?”
Amira suppressed a sigh. As she had dreaded, she would have to relive the compound, the epicenter of all her traumas, to pass her final test.
“Yes,” she said. No sooner had the words escaped her lips, the tugging sensation returned.
“What do you think of when you remember life on Children of the New Covenant?” he asked. An open-ended and vague question, a common tactic to start off a holomentic therapy session. Amira closed her eyes and centered her thoughts on the word ‘compound’. Other words darted into her thoughts as well, along with images and sounds – of violence, of terror – that would never leave her, but she resisted, struggling to focus on the word alone and not the memories it evoked.
And there it was, clear and vivid on the nearby hologram – the compound, at night. It gave off an otherworldly light from a distance, its pale, round buildings glowing like craterless moons rising out of the Sonoran valley. It was the only source of light for hundreds of miles on those typical nights marred by ashy clouds or smog from the western cities. Its inhabitants left those cities generations ago to escape the modern world’s liberties and license, but civilization still found ways to reach them.
With the luxury of distance and time between her and her place of birth, Amira let herself see the unsettling beauty of the place, the hushed calm that descended over the desert when the sunlight dissolved over the mountains. The solar power that fueled the compound left the pathways and low buildings glowing with an eerie, bluish light at night. But Amira knew the secret lives that existed within each of those orb-like houses, the hidden violence and despair contained within every wall. The way people disappeared, never to be spoken of again except in quiet whispers. The way women and girls barely ranked above livestock, a means to an end.
Her face grew clammy at the sight of the barbed wires around the compound walls and she pushed the image aside with effort, closing her eyes. Her heart quickened as sound replaced sight, screams and cries from old punishments. The burning of Chimyra, warm and thick in her throat, at the start of the Passage Ceremony. Another tug in her head.
The scene in the hologram shifted to a young girl with long black hair. No older than thirteen, the girl shivered on her knees in a small shed. She lifted her shaking hands to gaze at her palms, which were raw and bleeding in thin trails onto the floor.
“Amira? Are you ok?”
The man’s voice, though distant, cut through her thundering heartbeat. Amira swallowed and nodded. Biting her lip in frustration, she redirected her thoughts back to her first image of the compound at night, but she could feel the man probing deeper into her thought patterns, the sensors warming slightly against her temples.
“Ok, let’s focus on that memory for a minute. I see a lot of fear activated around the prelimbic cortex, very conditioned fear, of course. Why are you in that small space and what brought you there?”
Amira’s mouth went dry. That was the first night she tried to escape, and the punishment was predictably severe. She had spent months building her resolve to leave, knowing the consequences of failure…and then she had failed. Residual pain flashed across her palms, and she balled her fists.
Opening her eyes, Amira could see the images in the hologram shifting again, from the shed to a large crowd in a clearing. Most were children or teenagers, rapt and bright-eyed, flanked by stony-faced adults in long black coats. No trees or clouds shielded them from a fierce sun, though shadows from nearby hills stretched in their direction. The Gathering.
Amira grimaced, trying to redirect her thoughts to the shed, to the smell of blood and fear, but it was too late.
“The Gathering?” the man asked with interest, dragging his fingers along the words that appeared on his monitor. “What does that mean? Is that what I’m looking at right now?”
He’s good, Amira thought. He knew when to prod further and follow an idea, and when to hold back on what he suspected to be true. They were moving closer together toward a defining moment, one that ultimately brought her to this very room. A moment she never wanted the Academy, or anyone, to expose. She dug her fingernails into her palms.
“Let’s focus,” the reader said, not mentioning whether he registered Amira’s mixed feelings of respect and resentment. “Tell me about the Gathering, and how it led to your first escape attempt.”
“The Elders brought all of the children from the three biggest compounds together,” Amira said carefully. “My compound participated in the Gathering, along with the Trinity and the Remnant Faithful compounds. Everyone here thinks they’re all the same, but the compounds don’t trust each other. They hate secular life, but they still have different doctrines, different cultures and methods from each other, which is why they fought separately by the end of the Drought Wars. The Gathering was meant to unify the compounds, make them stronger against outside influences trying to change them. To mobilize fractured communities against a common enemy.”
In the hologram, a line of young girls walked along a rocky trail, Amira among them. She fidgeted with her silver lace veil, a flimsy shield over her hair and eyes that let splinters of sunlight through, and an older woman appeared at her side, swiping, cat-like, at Amira’s hand. Further ahead, a similar team of boys marched in single file, singing one of the Trinity Compound’s spiritual hymns. The Elder at the forefront sang louder than all the boys combined in a surprisingly rich baritone. He bore the same traits as most compound spiritual leaders – older, charismatic and zealous, or able to appear as such. He had multiple wives of various ages, who hovered silently around him like shadows.
“I notice the hike is gender segregated,” the reader said, pulling Amira back into the room.
“It was for the Remnant Faithfuls,” Amira said. “Although I’m sure the other Elders didn’t object. My compound – Children of the New Covenant – was only strict when we became teenagers, but on the Remnant Faithful Compound, they separate boys and girls at the age of five, even within the family home. When they first arrived at the Gathering, the kids watched us like it was Sodom and Gomorrah in action.”
The reader laughed lightly before raising his hand to extract a still image from the hologram, showing a blonde girl lunging at Amira. On the still-moving hologram, the girl shoved Amira to the ground, wiping her hands theatrically on her billowing dress. She kicked sand in Amira’s face for good measure. The old woman leading the hike remained at the front, defiantly oblivious.
“What happened there?” he asked. Amira sighed.