Prophet of the Badlands (The Awakened Book 1) (30 page)

Althea smirked at him. “I know that, and I’m not a doctor.”

“Have they always been like this?” He shone the little light right in her eyes.

She squinted, trying to blink away the dancing firefly that lingered in her vision. “Yes.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this. Do you have any problems seeing?”

“When it’s dark, there is no color.” She kicked her feet back and forth, staring at him.

He drew the blinds, making the room dim. “Can you still see color?”

“Yes. Not dark like this. Dark like dark.”

“Darker than this?”

“Yes.” She slid off the exam table and walked into a small closet, pulling the door closed behind her. “Dark like this.”

“You can see in there?” Dr. Ruiz sounded amazed.

“Yes. No color.”

He opened the door long enough to hand her a dingy piece of laminated paper with funny marks on it, and pushed it closed. “Read the first line please. I’d like a little proof.”

There was a long pause. “I can’t.”

He smiled. “Okay, Althea. It’s fine. You don’t need to make up stories. We will welcome you anyway.”

“I don’t know how to read. I can see a picture of a baby in a circle on this bucket, with a line through it.” Althea was quiet for a few seconds. “Why would someone put a baby in a bucket?”

Karina, her father, and the doctor exchanged glances as she peeked around the opening door at them. The doctor almost fainted when she spoke to him telepathically.

Someone told me I’m sighmonic.

“Uhhm.” He struggled to regain his composure. “Aside from malnutrition, she’s perfectly healthy. I will not object to letting her stay. I’d love to do a blood analysis, but the machines we have here are too old.”

Althea stood in silence, her head going back and forth as the adults talked. They had gone to Spanish and words came too fast for her to bother trying to listen. She paced about the room, touching the strange drawings of people with no skin and all those things called words, wondering if this was how doctors saw the life-shapes.

A loud, wet cough drew her attention to a door and she wandered out into a stagnant hallway, away from the meaningless din between the grown-ups. Tracing her fingers along the wall as she walked, she passed a woman in white who smiled at her and almost dropped a tray full of small paper cups when she noticed the blue light.

The sound of the coughing pulled her along a corridor the color of sand, the floor shiny, smooth, and cold. Windows on her left flooded the area with daylight, creating large squares of warmth through which she walked. The woman in white had abandoned whatever she had been doing to follow her, but remained back a short distance. Althea peeked around the wall, staring at a silver-haired man lying in a bed. The tiny room reeked of sick, despite the billowing curtains waving in the breeze from the open window.

“Don’t go in there, child. He has TB.” The woman reached for her.

Althea ducked the grasping hand, and darted over to him.

“Doctor Ruiz!” the nurse yelled.

The man wheezed and lifted his sweat-covered face to smile at her. “I suppose that’s it, then. Sure as hell took you long enough. Let’s get it over wi―” He struggled to speak but succumbed to a coughing fit.

Althea clasped his hairy arm with both hands, pulling it against her body with his fingers brushing her cheek. The nurse’s shouts grew blurry in her consciousness as the indistinct shapes of the man’s essence filled her thoughts. Something black and evil shifted in the center, orbiting his heart like a buzzard waiting for its meal to die. Her fingers dug into his arm as she focused, screaming in her mind at the blackness to get out. It recoiled from her, flying up and away from the beating life-shape. When it tore loose from where it lurked, she felt a hurt inside him; it was not leaving easy. Blood pooled in his air-bags, and she commanded his body to repair itself.

When she opened her eyes, the man rolled to his side and vomited a vile mass of glistening grey slime, tinged with venous streaks of indigo and blood. The Doctor ran in and seized her by the forearms, ready to drag her out of the room. He froze at the sight of the slime on the floor and the man’s color returning.

Althea looked up at Dr. Ruiz. “Put that in fire. It will make others sick.” She pointed at the pulsating, gooey thing. “He will need food now.”

The nurse made the sign of the cross and backed into the corridor, muttering. Karina’s jaw hung open; Father, stoic as ever, took it all in stride. Althea stood in place, moving her head around to watch the doctor scramble to destroy the sick. The nurse returned with food, and the man looked markedly better in minutes. The now-healthy elder muttered something in Spanish and smiled at Althea.

Doctor Eduardo Ruiz had seen many things in his life, but this had left him speechless. Althea tried to answer his questions about what she did. The look on his face said her descriptions of red and black shadows and a “sick” living in his air-bags would have left him patting her on the head with a patronizing smile if what she did had not actually worked.

Karina took her hand, guiding her out of the room, leaving the stunned doctor to tend to the man.

“Karina?” Althea looked up as they went outside.

“Yes?”

“What did that man say right before we left?”

The older girl shrugged. “He apologized for thinking you were someone else.”

By that time, word had spread and a crowd waited outside the clinic. More than a hundred formed a line, which included numerous children. Most of the men had rifles, but none at the ready. Althea clung to Karina’s side at the sight of so many faces. A protective arm went around her, and she smiled up at her new sister.

The gathering fell in around them as they took her into the center of town where more armed men walked patrols. Althea glanced at two trucks that looked as if they could still drive, parked in front of an imposing building at the center of a square. Huge guns sat upon posts in the back, the men behind them waved at her and smiled. Beyond the trucks, a stone pedestal crumbled into a heap of ivory bits. A statue had been there long ago, but all that remained of it aside from rubble was one stony leg from boot to knee.

Past stairs and down a hallway, they took her to a large chamber with a vault ceiling covered in flaking plaster. Small sculptured babies posed around the edge of where the ceiling met the wall, most with broken wings, and some headless. Althea walked through rows of old, red-cushioned chairs, down a narrow path to a hollow space of bare floor in front of a tall counter.

Five people sat above the level of the crowd, two women and three men. Their figures obscured by billowy black robes, they cast shadows upon the wall behind them like gargantuan crows perched along a fence. Little blocks of dented wood in front of each one had scrawled words, and every noise made in here echoed.

They looked down at her, and she shrank into Karina, feeling small; a tiny savage among an army of civilized men. She managed a weak smile, sensing they were curious, not angry. The crowd flowed liquid through the aisle-veins, soaked up by the waiting chairs.

“We are here in the matter of Fernando Guererro’s petition to accept a foundling Scrag into the community.” The man in the center appraised her. “Is this said foundling?”

Father nodded. “Yes, your honors.”

“Hello, child. What is your name?” The man smiled with grandfatherly charm.

“Althea.” She looked down, shying away from the blackbirds. “Some call me the Prophet, but I don’t like it.”

A murmur spread through the crowd behind her.

When asked where she came from and where her parents were, she recounted her tale of being stolen at the age of six from a village long forgotten, and how she had been abducted over and over again ever since. The traveling salesman who spent years dragging her around in a cage had made sure all of the Badlands knew her and what she could do, and now she paid for it. She was not sure exactly her age; twelve was her best guess.

Raiders did not care about things like birthdays.

The council made faces at each other; she sensed pity and anger, as well as the predictable anticipatory glee. Althea felt grateful Karina had remained at her back with a hand on each shoulder, and leaned into her as she stared at the globs of reflected light that swam across the shiny floor. Glittering specks fanned out in a radial pattern under the gloss, frozen in material the color of rust. Stone, she assumed, from how cold it was.

“Karina is nice. I don’t want your people to get hurt because of me.”

A judge with a nose like a bird’s beak smiled, thin lips curling back in an attempt to be friendly. “Raiders are not much of a threat to us, child. Our army is four hundred strong and growing with each generation.” The man rambled on about things like tactics, strategy, and technology, but most of it was lost on her.

“What do you want to be when you grow up? What can you contribute to our town?” The woman on the far left cleared her throat before and after she spoke.

“I can help people.” She smiled, to chuckles.

“That’s very admirable.” The grey-topped raven forced a smile though her tone was condescending. “How do you help people?”

“I make the hurts stop, and the sicks go away.” Her plain tone set the council abuzz.

Doctor Ruiz stood in the crowd, testifying about what she had done moments before. Althea had never heard such big words before; “
tuberculosis
” sounded funny, as did “expunged”, and she stifled a giggle.

Some voices called out, offering legend about the Prophet. A lot of it made Althea want to laugh at how overstated it was. One doubted the Prophet was a mere child, another thought the Prophet was a man wearing a crown of thorns―he claimed to have seen a picture once.

“I can’t see the future, I can’t touch a cow and make it calf, and I can’t make people live forever… but I can heal.”

The laughter made her grin. She smiled at everyone, savoring Karina’s embrace as the council pronounced their approval of her request to join the community. The ravens seemed to take strange note of the fact she had no blood relation to anyone here.

The raider buggy had raced along for almost an entire day; the land here was dry and mostly barren, nothing like where Den’s tribe lived. Althea’s heart fell at the thought she would never see him again, but smiled as she squeezed Karina’s fingers.

This would be an excellent home.

lickering candles lit the table and sent wobbly shadows cavorting around the walls. Father had made a thing he called an enchilada, and set it on a plate in front of her. She sniffed at the food as if studying found treasure. When Karina arrived and everyone had a plate, Althea snatched up the hot, gooey thing with both hands and bit down on the most amazing taste she had ever known.

Her eyes lifted, sensing the silence. Father and Karina stared. She looked shocked and he seemed amused. Althea pulled the soggy food log away from her face, chewing with hesitant bites as her glance shifted back and forth between them. When she tore another piece away from it, Karina blurted.

“What are you doing?”

“Eating.” Althea spoke around a mouthful of food.

“Enchiladas aren’t finger food. You’re making a mess!”