“That girl came from the Trinity Compound,” she said. “They saw those of us with darker skin as ‘polluted’ and unclean.”
“White supremacy, from what I’ve read, is a core tenet of Trinity’s values,” the reader said bluntly.
“Less so than before, but it’s still there,” she said. “They believe that only light-skinned people can access the Nearhaven, the parallel dimension that’s untainted by modern evils, when we die. It’s part of what’s kept the compounds from uniting, despite how small they are alone. Some of the Trinity Elders probably fought against the Gathering in the first place.”
The hologram cut to the last day of the Gathering. Young Amira stood in the heart of the crowd, flanked by rocky hills and sparse patches of juniper trees.
In the absence of other outlets in the compounds, ceremony became a competitive sport. Children learned the rules of the game quickly, waving their arms in a trance the way they watched their parents pray at Passage and Unveiling ceremonies. Though most were too young to consume Chimyra, they knew enough to mimic its effects, swaying and shrieking at imagined sights from hidden worlds. The Elders had other tricks to convince their followers that they were glimpsing into the Otherworlds – tricks Amira only learned after escaping. Holograms, sensory machines and bubble screens embedded in the temples, parlor trickery enhanced by the hallucinogenic powers of Chimyra. But on Gathering day, they deployed no illusions on their youngest congregants. The ceremony relied on faith alone.
Three banners loomed behind the podium, one for each compound. The Trinity leaders stood on the platform, all Elders save for a teenage boy in the corner. The boy scowled into the distance, past the crowd in an impressive display of apathy.
Another young man, handsome and smiling, led the crowd in a hymn. The hymn they collectively swayed to originated from Amira’s compound, no doubt a political concession on the part of the Trinity, the unmistakable leader of the event. Elder Avery Cartwright, hero of the Drought Wars and discoverer of Chimyra, was Trinity, after all.
The singer delivered the simple harmony with such conviction that Amira had hummed along, though by that stage, she no longer believed in the words. The simple melody struck a chord with her, reaching those deep corners of her heart that she kept hidden and buried, even from herself. Music, a binding agent in her loneliest moments.
The men at the podium surveyed the crowd with cold appraisement. Amira barely noticed the small group at the time, but with hindsight, they became sharp and clear in her mind’s eye. Time gave memories power and form – with each revisiting, it illuminated new angles to the same moment. The singer raised his right arm and the children’s voices swelled.
Through the Cataclysm’s embers, I walk without fear
Through faith and submission, Nearhaven is near
A strange buzzing sound cut through the chorus and faces turned upward toward a pentagon-shaped drone, hovering ominously over the crowd. It darted from side to side briefly before it ascended and turned south. The children stopped singing and began chattering excitedly about the machine from the cities. Amira glanced at a widening gap in the crowd. Two compound men ran downhill toward the ceremony, arms aggressively waving. Scouts, alerting the presence of intruders.
Seconds later, loud bangs cut through the hum of voices, followed by colorful plumes of smoke. Panicked screams erupted, and the crowd scattered in every direction.
At the top of the surrounding hills, a pack of imposing armored hovercrafts, bearing the North American Alliance’s insignia, materialized from nowhere. Armed men spilled from the sides of each vehicle, weapons pointed. They moved in formation around the frenzied throng’s perimeter.
Amira’s pulse rose in a sharp crescendo on the nearby monitor. She turned away from the hologram, gripping the sides of her chair to steady herself.
In the hologram, the younger Amira ran up a steep hill, panting as her thick floral dress billowed oppressively around her. She stepped over its hem and stumbled forward into the dirt, her nails digging into the hot sand. The sounds of the raid, cries and bursts of smoke canisters, grew distant as she zigzagged through the rising terrain.
A patch of color caught the corner of her eye and before she could turn, something shoved her forward and she fell on her knees. A boy, the same teenager who stood in silence on the podium, ran past her toward the top of the hill. Spitting out sand, Amira followed.
Running along the ridge behind the boy, Amira realized that she no longer recognized her surroundings. The cacophony of the raid vanished, leaving only wilderness, a harsh landscape of dead junipers and dust whipped by angry winds.
“Stop!” she called out to the boy. “Stop, we need to go back!”
The boy stopped but did not turn. Amira caught up with him, following his gaze.
Across the valley sat a house unlike any she had seen before. Perched atop a cliff, its sharp angles and sloping sides glinted in the sunlight, but its most striking feature was a beam of light rising directly from its center, clear through the high noon’s haze.
The boy suddenly fell to his knees, clutching the sides of his head and rocking back and forth.
“What’s wrong with you?” Amira cried. “What’s happening?”
Amira’s ears rang, faintly at first but louder with each passing second, her head pulsating as the ringing rose in pitch. She sank to her knees near the boy, who thrashed on the ground. The sound drowned out the wind, her own moans and her senses, as she buried her forehead against the hot earth. She twisted in an agony she’d never known, the sound cutting through to every nerve, down to her bones.
Then it stopped.
She lifted her head, leaving a damp patch of sweat on the sand where her forehead had lain. Something shifted within her. Her arms jerked and twitched of their own accord. She held her hand before her eyes and did not recognize it as her own. She willed her fist to close and it did, but the movement felt foreign and unnatural.
“This is the end,” a thick voice said, and Amira realized she was speaking back in the Academy’s reading room, where the man stared, transfixed, at the hologram. She tried to stand but her legs rebelled, sinking further into the ground. “We can stop now, it—”
“You’re doing great, Amira, we just need to submerge a little further.”
The sensors heated up again and Amira returned to the desert. Her heart fluttered in rising panic.
Don’t let him see, Amira thought desperately. Fight back. For a moment, the hologram flickered, but she couldn’t push aside the girl in the desert.
The boy went limp next to her.
The young Amira screamed and without warning, the ground beneath her disappeared. She floated high over the ridge, like a marionette bound to invisible strings, swaying in the air. She hovered over the body, her own, now motionless under a voluminous dress. Her long black hair whipped in every direction under gusts of wind and she instinctively tried to brush it aside, but her hands remained with the rest of her below. Mind and body, detached. A wave of peace washed over her, dissolving her initial sense of panic. The taste of rust filled her mouth, though she had no mouth or tongue to speak of in her detached state. It didn’t bother her. For the first time that day, since the start of the Gathering, nothing aggravated or frightened her.