Sinless Read online

  Dedication

  For my parents, all of you

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Intro Note from Grace

  Prologue

  Book One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Book Two Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Book Three Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Book Four Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Book Five Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Intro Note from Grace

  Many of you hate me. I’d hate me, if I were you.

  I made decisions that hurt a lot of you. That killed people you loved. I could say I was in over my head, that I tried my best, but that would be making excuses, and that’s not what you’re looking for. You want an apology. A big fat apology, an admission that I messed everything up. And I’m sorry, I genuinely am, for all of it.

  So what am I hoping for from you? Forgiveness? No, I can’t imagine I’ll get that. Understanding, that’s really all I want. Because looking back now, I know I should have done better. But I didn’t, and I want you to understand why.

  For that reason, I want to present this narrative as I experienced it. I want to convey my point of view at that time, as naïve as it may seem now. I’ve done my best to re-create moments and dialogue as accurately as possible, despite how long ago they happened. I believe this is a story that needs to be told, and I hope you’re willing to listen. I have great faith in humanity, and in Great Spirit, and in our collective ability to work together to move forward.

  With all the love of Great Spirit,

  Grace Luther

  c/o Arlington Federal Prison

  Prologue

  March 24, 2031

  That day. We were in Jude’s pickup, careening down one of those rural Virginia roads with a dotted yellow line down the middle. Sheer cliffs winding up a mountain, beautiful in a precarious kind of way.

  Who was Jude? You’ve never heard of him, but he’s the reason you’ve heard of me. He’s the reason all of this started.

  Jude was my next-door neighbor, childhood best friend, and frequent Super Soaker victim. When I was five and he was six, his parents gave him this red stuffed bear with a recording device in its stomach. You pressed a button, and it would repeat whatever you said. Since this was pre-Revelation, we giggled to hear it say “poop” and “fart,” the dirtiest words we knew in preschool, and I whined at my parents until they got me a matching blue one. We traded them back and forth, recording secret messages.

  But by the time we got to high school, everything had changed. Sure, Jude was cute—he was nice, and all nice guys were cute—but he was gawky and shy, always wearing some too-formal button-down his mom had laid out for him. He’d come up to me in the hall with long-winded stories, and I’d watch my friends’ eyes glaze over. I never said a mean thing to his face, but when he left, I’d join in their giggling. “Jude loooooves you,” they’d tease. They’d mock how nervous he seemed around me, and I went right along with it, glad for the ego boost. I always wondered why I wasn’t Punished for my disloyalty, my unkindness.

  Despite my sophomoric behavior, our friendship continued, grew. I’d leave that old blue bear on my windowsill, and he’d sneak up and elocute into its belly these long, thought-out dissertations on world events, pop culture, whatever intrigued him that day. And the truth is, away from the judging eyes of my friends, I really did think he was one of the most intelligent, funniest people I’d ever met.

  Had things been different, I think in time I would have come around. He would have asked me to prom, I would have said yes, my palms would have gotten sweaty in his as we swayed on the gym floor, and I would have wondered, what is this feeling? And when he kissed me, I would have known. And in our mutual, not-that-special way, we would have gotten married and had lots of babies and taught them to glorify Great Spirit. But instead, on that chilly almost-spring morning, we took a drive.

  We were on our way to some youth rally in D.C., nauseatingly wholesome stuff. I still remember everything about that day. The way Jude’s hair blew as one funny-looking entity, long overdue for a haircut. How his arms were bigger than I recalled, his jaw squarer, with a hint of a five-o’clock shadow. I remember the moment I realized my best friend had become this handsome man, and I wondered if anyone else had noticed. I remember the way he smiled, the way it lit up the whole car, and I wondered why now, at the age of sixteen, he seemed so different, despite being entirely the same. And how his differentness and his sameness, together, created a feeling I couldn’t quite articulate.

  I was wearing a hat of my mother’s, one she’d crocheted herself. Jude was teasing me about it, maybe to be flirty in his unpracticed way. “It’s too small for you.”

  “It is not! I have a lot of hair,” I insisted.

  “That’s what I mean. Look, it’s coming off.”

  He grabbed for it, and I shrieked. “Stop it!”

  He perched the small hat on top of his big head. “See, much better.”

  “It is not. You look stupid.” I grabbed the hat back, but now I couldn’t get it to sit correctly on my kinky black curls. I stared at myself in the mirror, trying to readjust.

  Jude saw I was unhappy and offered, “I’m kidding! It looks good.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He leaned over and moved the hat just a fraction of an inch, right back into place. I smiled.

  “See? You’re beautiful.” He’d said it without thinking, I think. I looked over at him, and he turned back to the road, a little embarrassed. I was used to people telling me I was beautiful, but there was something about the way he said it . . . and the fact that it was him, it was Jude . . . I desperately wanted him to say it again.

  But he kept his focus on the road, quickly adding, for safety, “Only in that hat. Usually you’re disgusting.” And then a playful smile. But he couldn’t fool me. That word, “beautiful”—it was out there.

  But I was too timid to confront him directly, so I kept it light. “I never knew you thought I was disgusting.”

  Jude chuckled, going along with my joke. “That’s what all the guys say in the locker room. Grace Luther, super disgusting.”

  “But none of those guys are you. I mean, none of those guys are
my best friend.”

  Jude stole a glance over at me. “So I’m special.”

  “Of course you are,” I said. Silence filled the car. I couldn’t read his expression. In that moment, I rethought everything. What if his awkwardness around me was just awkwardness? What if he didn’t have some big crush? Maybe the feelings I’d imagined him having were merely my own invention, because I’d always had a subconscious crush on him. Had I said too much? Had I just ruined our friendship? I quickly added, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “No,” he said, “I mean, at some point, I wanted to ask you . . .” He paused, trying to find the right words, and in a split second I imagined a hundred different possible outcomes. But out of that hundred, not a single one came close to what happened next.

  It took us just that split second to speed around the corner, down a hill—where there was a sedan approaching, straddling both lanes.

  Jude slammed on the brakes.

  “Honk!” I screamed. But that just panicked him more. The sedan swerved, but it all happened so fast and—

  The collision. Metal everywhere. Glass everywhere. Airbags deployed—I couldn’t breathe.

  Jude’s truck skidded for such a long time, I was sure we were headed over the cliff.

  I screamed and I prayed, the only two weapons I had, as the squeal of our tires deafened me. Please, Great Spirit, protect me.

  And He did. We skidded to a stop, inches from the edge of the cliff.

  It took me a moment to realize it was over. I punched at my inflated airbag. I couldn’t see anything. I tried to reach Jude, but he was so far away, and so quiet. “Jude?” Still nothing. The sound of my own panicked breathing overwhelmed me. Oh no . . . My hands felt for him, finally found his chest.

  “Grace? Are you okay?”

  And there he was, reaching for me, holding me. His arms had never surrounded me like that before. I remember taking his hand, feeling the slickness of the blood on it. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’ve got you,” he said.

  I started crying. Held him tight. In that moment, I wanted to take back every time I’d joked with my friends about how geeky he was, I wanted to just pray my thanks forever and ever and ever. And then he looked out through the shattered windshield. He blanched, and he jumped out of the car. I followed.

  We hadn’t gone off the cliff. We were lucky.

  The sedan was ten or twenty feet below the cliff edge, on its side. We heard the sirens coming—our crash had been automatically registered with emergency services—but Jude didn’t wait for them to arrive. He jumped down the craggy rocks, toward the car.

  “Jude, wait. It’s not safe.”

  But he didn’t listen. I scrambled down after him, wondering—had Jude been speeding? Maybe a little. But I saw him do everything he could to avoid that sedan. Whatever we saw in that other car, it couldn’t be his fault.

  Through the passenger window, we saw a woman in her thirties, unconscious. Jude peered in at her. “She’s breathing.” A sigh of relief. And then Jude made that noise. A brief, horrified gasp. I followed his line of sight to the backseat, where a young boy lay in a pool of blood. He couldn’t have been more than five, six. His head rested against the window, and something about it wasn’t shaped right; it conformed too easily to the glass. His skull had been crushed, I realized with horror. He wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing. I stared at that boy, waiting for any sign of movement. Hoping there’d be any chance that when the ambulances arrived, they’d be able to save him. But the longer I looked, the more I was sure that hope was in vain.

  I started crying, grabbed on to Jude. And then Jude couldn’t hold me up. Startled, I pulled away.

  I’m sure you’ve all guessed what’s coming next, but it was the first time I’d seen it in person, so it was a shock to me. I was expecting ugly, but this—it was more than ugly. I remember every detail of how Jude’s face twisted, bloating asymmetrically, the color changes—purplish, greenish, yellowish. How the eyes I’d just been staring into bulged, how his tongue hung out. And when I could barely recognize him, how he grabbed at his throat, wheezing, gasping for breath. I could see his windpipe contorting, the skin on his neck straining around it. He fell to his knees, as his muscles grew weak and his throat closed. Jude was being Punished.

  I dropped to the ground next to him, hands together, begging, “Please spare him, Great Spirit.” I thought if Great Spirit had given me any talent, it was this one—it was bringing faith to someone in a moment of need. This was the one skill a cleric’s daughter like me had spent her life honing. I grabbed his hands, put them between mine. “Pray with me,” I implored him. “Great Spirit will spare you if you pray with me.” He looked at me, doubtful, but I wouldn’t be deterred. “You have to try. Please.”

  I think, though he couldn’t talk, he tried. He listened as I said a Hebrew prayer that began with “baruch atah adonai” that I’d heard his mother say, a Buddhist mantra, anything I thought Great Spirit might listen to. But his skin kept turning that deathly blue color, and soon, no breath emerged from him at all. His eyes closed. I shook him, I screamed at him, but he’d stopped responding.

  I kept praying as the EMTs swarmed around us, putting the woman and her child on stretchers. And as I cried, the EMTs tore me out of Jude’s arms. I begged them to let me keep praying, keep trying, but . . .

  “He’s gone, honey,” a kind-eyed EMT said to me gently as Jude, too, disappeared into an ambulance, and I clung to her as it sped away. Her words echoed in my head: Jude was gone. As gone as the little boy in the back of that car. That was Great Spirit’s justice. An eye for every eye. Whatever mistakes Jude had made on the road, he paid for them with his life.

  No sinner is safe from the wrath of Great Spirit.

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Where were you? That’s the question everyone asks. Where were you when you were Converted? What country were you in, which Revelation did you experience? The early ones—Pakistan, Israel, Egypt—they get the most sympathy; they were the most brutal. I was so young, I barely remember those first few images that appeared on our TVs in late 2024. We’ve all seen those famous pictures so many times now, the Pakistani woman with her eyes bugging out, the heaps of bodies in the center of Islamabad. But at the age of eight, anything more than twenty minutes from my hometown of Tutelo, Virginia, might as well have been Antarctica.

  I remember hovering around my mother as she and my father clicked frantically on their computers for the latest updates. It didn’t seem any different to me than the usual horrors on the news—the wars, the famines—but my parents could tell it was. My mother kept telling me that everything would be okay, that we would be safe. But her words were far from comforting for one simple reason: I had never considered that we wouldn’t be safe.

  My father, a small-town minister (how archaic that term seems now), busied himself with work—writing his sermons, traveling to see other religious leaders. Unlike my friends from more secular homes, I’d lived with God as a reality since birth. When people began to whisper that we were entering a purge akin to the age of Noah’s ark, I had my father to reassure me. He was working to save us all. He even told me that date, July 4, before anyone else knew. My father explained that Great Spirit (yes, there was no more God now, only Great Spirit) was smart. For the American Revelation, He knew to pick a day we’d remember.

  So where was I on July 4, 2025? Where do you think I was? The same place you were, if you lived through that day and survived to read these words. We all knew it was coming—Prophet Joshua had been preaching about it for weeks. Every store was closed in preparation. Religious and political leaders had one common instruction; they’d found one common thread among those who had been spared in previous Revelations. They told us all to get to a worship center of some kind, to hunker down as though it were a shelter from the storm.

  Maybe other families didn’t have faith like mine did, but if you looked around our church that July 4 morning, you’d never have gue
ssed that. It was packed to the brim, standing room only. I still remember the heat, the sweat of that room, the smell of all those anxious bodies packed together as we waited for our lives to change.

  My mother sat next to me in the front row while my dad spoke at the pulpit. She held my hand as I trembled. A little girl next to me was positively shaking with fear. She was a little older than me and wearing a white headscarf. Muslim, she would have called herself. But today, for the first time, the old religions didn’t matter. In a moment, I knew, we would all be the same. It was my first inkling of the world to come.

  We’d been in that room for hours and hours . . . an eternity for a child of nine, and I desperately had to pee. My mother told me to wait, to try to hold it for a break in the hymns, then finally relented and told me to go.

  When I got back, my mom was gone. I looked all around, I paced up and down every row. A middle-aged blond woman told me my mother had gone to find me, that I should sit and wait, she’d be right back. I waited next to this stranger, growing more anxious as the clock ticked on. And then, while I was waiting—it happened. The Revelation.

  Most of you experienced the Moment, but I know it was a little different for everyone. I’ve heard some compare it to the calm of deep meditation, to the catharsis of a spiritual release, but to me it felt like being lifted. I was sure I’d been physically lifted off the floor, though I was told my feet remained firmly planted on planet Earth. Everything around me shimmered, and the people around me shone. I’d never seen anything like it. All I knew was I was at peace, the world was at peace, and everything from then on would be okay. Still thinking in my old Christian vernacular, I was sure this was a glimpse of heaven, the beginning of paradise on earth. That experience is still more real to me, more visceral, than any that’s come between to try to replace it.

  “You are protected,” my father intoned to all assembled. Each, I realized later, was on a spiritual journey similar to my own, lost in hazes of personal heaven. As every world religious leader had told us—at this moment, we would become something new. Adherents of the Universal Theology. Followers of a new, all-encompassing, all-powerful deity: Great Spirit.