When we reach Bethany House, Amelia doesn’t wait for us to put away our packs and come to the command center. She meets us in the tunnels.
“I’m glad you’re back. Ouch! That’s a nasty bruise.”
“It was a hit worth taking. What’s going on?” Martha asks.
“The elders are screaming for an immediate conference with Cephas. Before you do, let me show you why.”
As we follow Amelia back to the command center, Martha’s hands go up to her hair and begin to form it into a bun. I catch them.
“Old Martha says she likes the ties and old Cephas says he likes the ponytail.”
We walk to Amelia’s usual station.
“I saw a lot of chatter coming out of the F.B.I. and found this.”
Amelia brings up a short video that was hacked into the middle of some popular comedy show, along with a gray number Four in the corner.
It’s a video of me at the knife throwing range. As the knife whizzes through the air and sinks into a crude wooden target, the voiceover says: “Cephas is preparing to fight for his faith. Are you?”
“Stephen,” I call across the room. “Isn’t this the video you took of me last week so we could review my technique?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t add the voice or hack it anywhere.”
“It’s not just the voice,” I say. “The whole thing is spliced. I rarely make a knife stick into a target and I’ve certainly never sunk one into the bulls-eye like that. Who had access to the footage?”
“All of Four,” Stephen replies. “I sent it out to the other houses so everyone could see you’re alive and well.”
“Zip!” Martha says and stands up.
“Get her on the line and send it to the interrogation room.”
****
I decide it’s best to leave Martha alone; so I wait in the command center.
“That was a nasty trick,” I say to Amelia. “Did it win Zip any votes?”
“Three. But don’t worry, Even if Zip takes command, Martha won’t give up you or Bethany House without a fight. Besides, we’re not that easy to find.”
A message comes up on her screen.
“You’d better get downstairs. The Elders just signaled again.”
As I enter the same interrogation room, I can again hear Martha talking with Zip through the thin door.
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about, Martha,” Zip says. “I’ve heard the rumors about his shooting and fighting skills, and based on the bruise on your face, it looks like Cephas still has his killer instincts. Shall I put Bethany House down as with us? I’ll attach you to Cameron’s command so he can keep an eye on you, but you can stay team leader.”
I’m ready to burst through the door, but I wait to hear Martha’s answer.
“Since when do you respect team leadership? I know you’re already contacting my team individually and pressuring them to leave so you can get one of them to guide you back here.”
“You’ve left me no choice. Your loyalty to Four was compromised when you got involved with a cult hunter. What a waste. I could have put him to such good use.”
“I’m not compromised and I’m not involved. I just need more time with him.”
I don’t believe it. I’m still just a tool in some agenda.
I leave the room and slam the door. Martha will know what I heard. I make it to the end of the escape tunnel before Martha catches me.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“I’m leaving. What’s it matter to you? You’re the loyal team leader. Just go back and play your assigned role.”
“My role includes keeping you safe. If you leave this house, you’re as good as dead.”
“Life. Death. You’re the one who said ‘it’s a choice,’ but apparently you misspoke. Apparently you meant to say ‘it’s a role.’ Well, I’m not playing the role that Aislin or Garai or Zip or even you have planned for me.”
I make my way to the sparring area and keep on going. I can hear Martha stalking me through the trees, but I don’t look back. I put my head against a tree and pretend to be lost in thought. I let her creep closer and closer without letting on that I can now hear every tiny twig and needle as they crack under her weight. I hear her weight shift and know that an attack is coming. I assume it’s to subdue me and take me back to Bethany House, but I don’t know that she grabbed one of the fighting sticks in the sparring area until it’s too late. I hear the soft whoosh just before it hits me painfully on the thigh. I manage to turn, just as she uses it to sweep my feet out from under me and send me to the ground where my head lands on a rock.
“What’s the matter? No soft lap to put your head on today?” she asks.
I reach to the back of my head and my hand comes away red with blood.
“Quite the opposite.”
Her face softens.
“Let me look at it.”
She drops the stick and reaches to give me a hand up. I take her hand, but rather than sitting up I use my entire body to throw her through the air; then grab for the stick. She rolls out of it, but I’m too fast and have the stick up before she can make sense of what’s happening.
“You’re going to love this,” I say. “You’re going to get the fight you’ve wanted all along. No cameras, padding or gallery. Just the team leader against The Cult Hunter.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want answers and I’m going to get them - even if I have to beat them out of you.”
I swing the stick hard to prove I’m serious and she barely jumps back in time. She begins to circle and waits for me to attack.
“I never got the answers I needed that day in the command center. It turns out that I wasn’t even asking the right question. You admitted Four sent you on a suicide mission, but you told William to watch my com and come up with a rescue plan. Suicide missions don’t need rescue plans. You went rogue and planned to disobey their orders from the very beginning.”
Her eyebrows went up by a couple of millimeters. So far, so good.
“Four wanted me dead, but you wanted me alive. You’ve made it pretty plain that you didn’t do it for love; so now you’re going to tell me why you did it.”
Her pupils dilated slightly. I’m onto something.
I swing hard, but she ducks and almost lands a kick to my side.
“You’re going to have to do better than that, Cult Hunter.”
I swing again and this time when she ducks, her hand comes up with a rock. She throws it at my head, but instead of attacking as I duck, she runs back the way we came. She’s fast, but we both know I’ll catch her before we reach the Bethany House tunnels. She veers instead for the sparring area and manages to get a fighting stick.
“You don’t like fair fights, do you, Cult Hunter? You always want to have the advantage. We’ll see who ends up answering questions.”
She spins her stick just to taunt me, but I don’t take the bait.
“New rules,” I say. “For every hit that lands, we answer a question.”
She nods and comes at me. I can still read her attacks and block them all, then sneak in a soft hit to her arm.
“I’ll start off easy,” I say. “Why are you still mad at me all the time?”
“That’s it? This is all so we can talk about us?”
“It wasn’t my original plan, but I guess the hard hit to my head on that rock made me admit a few things to myself. So, why are you still mad all the time?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re treating me better, but it doesn’t take great observational skills to read your body language. It’s like you can’t stand looking at me. What are you so mad about?”
“I’m mad that Amelia got a tickle fight and I got a three-day headache.”
I take a hard jab. She blocks it, but I follow with a kick that glances off her leg. If she wasn’t mad before, she is now.
“It looks like it’s your turn to answer again,” I say. “Why did you try to kiss me in the woods? What information could you possibly be trying to get from me? Do you need me to break a code, or make a new one for Four?”
“You only hit me once; so I’m choosing to answer the last question. We don’t need a new code. When you broke Zack’s last code, we realized we couldn’t win that battle with you; so we found a different way to communicate. A hundred years ago, when ground based communications and satellites were made obsolete, they abandoned millions of kilometers of fiber optic lines in the ground. We repaired what we needed to make a private network. It’s so low tech the government has no clue.”
“I guess I’ll need to hit you again to find out about the kiss,” I say.
“You’re welcome to try.”
She comes at me again and doesn’t let up. I try to get under her skin by calling out her attacks before she makes them.
“Left front kick; left punch; stick jab with parry.”
Calling her moves makes her angrier than when I connect hits.
“Give it everything you’ve got, Martha, and let out all of that anger. I need you free of it.”
I manage a hard hit to her lower leg, but when I try to follow up with another shot to her arm, she somehow catches my stick. She can’t win the tug-of-war one-handed, so she drops her stick.
She took the hit to her leg on purpose.
Usually when I solve a puzzle, the pieces come together step-by-step; but once in a while it all comes together in a sudden flash of understanding.
“Of course,” I say. “Here I was lecturing you on taking a hit for the benefit of others - but you’ve been taking hits for me all along.”
I’m so dumbfounded by my thoughts, I barely feel the stick leave my hands as she takes it, and just stand there as it hits me in each arm.
“You didn’t bring me here to hide me from Henry. You did it to protect me from Four and the elders. That’s what you were talking about when you said you were hiding your true feelings for the sake of the mission. Saving me was your true mission all along - and you betrayed the Four council to do it.”
A hit to the chest and another to each arm. I feel like I’m absorbing all of her pent up anger.
“When you said dark things hide in the shadows, you weren’t trying to scare me. It was a warning to not trust Aislin and Garai.”
I can’t take this punishment forever; so I feint to the left and, when she falls for it, scramble to pick up the stick on the ground.
“You’ve even been manipulating the staff so they’d get to know me just like you did. You needed them to see the man inside the monster they’d built up in their minds. It’s the hit you took for me and for them. You even sacrificed our friendship in the process. That’s why you’re mad.”
Her eyes begin to water up, but she doesn’t stop her attacks. Her moves are getting erratic; so I block them easily.
“I’m mad because you can see when someone changes their grip on a stick by a centimeter, or their eye flickers for a half-second and you know exactly what they’re going to do next. I’m mad because you can see a couple of broken pine needles and know where someone walked an hour before.”
Almost there. I need to make her just a little madder.
“Right side kick.”
“Stop it!”
“Forward thrust. You contemplated a roundhouse, but thought better of it.”
“If you can see all those things, why can’t you-”
She stops for a moment; then winds up for a big attack.
“Why can’t I what?”
“Why can’t your powers of observation pick up on the simple fact that I really did fall in love with you? Why can’t they see that I still am in love with you?”
Her attack is aimed at my head and she knows I can easily block it.
I was wrong. I’ll gladly take that hit again ... but first I have to take this one.
Instead of blocking, I drop the stick and watch as her stick comes into my temple. My knees go weak and I collapse.
“But I still need an answer to my first question, Martha.”
Her face appears above mine, looking horrified by what she’s done.
“Why, Martha? Why?”
****
I feel myself slipping in and out of consciousness, though I’m not sure where I am. I get a sense that someone is kissing me, though I’m not sure if it’s real or just a pleasant dream. A few moments later - or perhaps it takes an hour - I’m lucid enough to smell the fir needles and feel them poking into my skin; so I know I’m still in the woods. Martha is gently parting and smoothing my hair.
“You have to tell me Martha. Why?”
“You really don’t know, do you?” she asks. “How could you, of all people, not know? When you sang the song, I assumed-”
“The song?”
“At the press conference. You sang the original words to ‘He’ll find you.’ Only a handful of people ever knew the real words.”
Martha begins to sing. I’ve never heard her sing before and to me her voice sounds like an angel’s.
“Why are you hiding, you children of the light?
Will you come out and praise the Son now he has heard your cries?
He’ll find you. He’ll find you, if your heart is right.
Come hear His truth and read His word and seek His perfect light.”
To my surprise, she continues into a second stanza.
“Why are you hiding, you children of the light?
Must I cloak the world with night to heal your blinded eyes?
He’ll find you. He’ll find you, if your heart is right.
Come hear His truth and read His word and seek His perfect light.”
“When you went back in time, it used the power from the world’s three fusion reactors. For a few minutes, the whole world was ‘cloaked by night.’ And then you opened everyone’s blind eyes with your testimony. That song was written when we were just children. My mother once told me it was a prophecy.”
“And you thought the Council and the elders might unite behind me if you could convince them I fulfilled a prophecy?”
I start to laugh, even though it makes the front and back of my head hurt.
“What’s so funny?”
“You should have come to Bible study. If you had, you’d know that prophets get killed.”