Ruthless Read online

  “We don’t have any medication to stop a potential guilt spiral, so we can’t tell her the truth yet,” Zack explained. “We didn’t think you’d want to have to lie to her.” I’d certainly felt plenty guilty watching Macy preaching in those videos . . . I had to admit, Dawn and Zack had correctly predicted my apprehension.

  But now that I knew she was here, I couldn’t keep hiding. I hopped out of bed, pushing past him. “Where is she now?”

  He showed me to a nearby bungalow, where Macy ran out to greet me with a hug. “Grace! I missed you so much!” She paused. “Sorry, can I hug you? You’re a prophet now, maybe you aren’t supposed to hug a prophet.”

  I hugged her back just as tightly. “Of course you can hug me!”

  “Okay, good. I knew you’d be, like, a cool prophet. I can’t believe you’re a prophet! How did it happen, how did you know? What does Great Spirit sound like? I want to know everything!”

  Her effusive excitement gave me pause—facing my best friend was as difficult as Dawn and Zack had expected it would be. “I’ll tell you everything soon. I’m just glad you’re safe.”

  As Macy and I found a quiet patch of not-flooded forest to walk through, she excitedly peppered me with questions. “What happens when we die? Why did Great Spirit tell the other prophets the wrong things? Or did they just misinterpret His message? Wait, is Great Spirit a He, or like an It? Or like a He/She/It all-knowing combo? Also are you and Zack like . . . a thing? He wouldn’t tell me.”

  I wanted so badly to come out with all of it—that this whole religion had been a sham, that it wasn’t Great Spirit changing our appearances, but nanotech inside our heads. I wondered if hearing those words from a “prophet” might make them go down easier, might protect her from getting a fatal Punishment for doubting. But I stopped short. Macy’s life was too precious to gamble like that.

  “I only know what Great Spirit tells me, so I don’t have all the answers. But the other prophets have been lying, for their own gain, and we’re trying to stop them,” I explained.

  She seemed excited to be at the center of some kind of cosmological battle. “How amazing is it to be, like, the embodiment of divine perfection?” I wished she would stop saying things like that.

  “We’re all the embodiment of divine perfection, aren’t we?” I joked, playing her off.

  Macy nodded. “Even Outcasts, right?”

  I smiled. “Even Outcasts.”

  “Okay, now tell me about you and my brother. Not the gross stuff. But, like, you’re dating or whatever, right?”

  I remembered the way he’d questioned my tactics earlier, and I wondered if a distance was growing between us. There was something about Zack’s stoic confidence that left me constantly terrified I was going to lose him. “I don’t know.”

  “He wouldn’t stop talking about you earlier. He’s really such a dork sometimes.” A grin overtook my face, and I allowed my insecurities to slip away.

  I put a lid on our girl talk as I heard branches snapping, someone approaching—Zack emerging into our clearing. “Dawn wants to see you.”

  “Seriously?” Macy said to her brother, annoyed. “I haven’t seen Grace in a thousand years, give us five more minutes.”

  I nodded to Zack, knowing what he really meant—it was time to call Paulina. “I’ll be back soon,” I promised Macy. As we left, Zack touched the small of my back in a way that felt reassuring, and I hoped more than ever that he was mine to keep.

  Zack and I returned to my room, meeting up with Dawn and Dr. Marko, and the importance of this mission sobered me. “You’re sure you can convince this lady to steal from her employer?” Zack asked one final time, as Dawn typed away on the laptop, extracting Paulina’s number from her hacked employee file.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly, growing nervous at his skepticism. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Neither have any of us. You’ll be great,” Marko reassured me, as he dialed the satphone.

  Dawn continued with her warnings. “If this woman tells anyone, if she’s Punished before she can get there . . . we’ll lose the element of surprise. Don’t give any clues about our location. If you get the sense that she’s wavering, hang up.”

  “Got it,” I said. As she pointed out all the potential pitfalls of this plan, my brash confidence dimmed. I hadn’t had much time to build a successful track record as a prophet. Paulina might love me from afar . . . but when she actually spoke to me directly, I worried she’d be disappointed.

  My stomach churned as the dial tone clicked, connecting us. “Hola?” an airy voice answered on the other end.

  “Is this Paulina?” I asked in Portuguese, grateful for all of Sousa’s language lessons.

  “Yes . . .” she said warily.

  “This is Grace,” I said, not quite sure how to introduce myself.

  “Grace . . . ?”

  “Prophet Grace.”

  There was silence on the other end. “Is this a joke?”

  “That’s a fair question,” I admitted. “But no, it’s really me.”

  “Why are you calling me?” she asked, confused, still not quite believing me.

  “Great Spirit said you could help me. That because of your sister, you’d be sympathetic to our cause.”

  Silence answered on the other end. She still didn’t believe me. Dawn gave me a knowing look—she’d expected this from the beginning.

  “You need me to prove myself. I hear you. I will at midnight tonight, and I need you to listen, and follow my word to the letter. But please, between then and now, keep this conversation between you and me.”

  I quickly hung up the phone, trying to seem mysterious, as Dawn and Zack regarded me skeptically. “Well, that went well,” Dawn said.

  “No, I have a plan.”

  “A plan?”

  I hesitated. “You’re not going to like it.”

  10

  My plan: to send a video message to my followers. “You’re right, I don’t like this,” Dawn confirmed.

  I stood firm. “It’s the only way.”

  “You can’t just send Paulina a little private note or something?” Zack suggested.

  “Then she’ll show it to people, to check and see if it’s really me. If we do it this way, we distract the prophets. We convince them that the video itself is the point, and they won’t even be thinking about the facility.”

  Dawn took that in, considering. “You know what this means. You’re putting yourself out there again. You saw what everyone did with that one speech. You really want to give them new words to misinterpret?”

  In truth, I had to admit, that was the secret, real reason I wanted to do this—to give myself a chance to set the record straight, to reclaim my own narrative from those twisting it. Paulina was a good excuse to steer the ship of this religion I’d accidentally created. To clean up a tiny bit of my own mess. But even if I had an ulterior motive, I still thought it was the right call. “If it doesn’t work, we try something else.”

  As the clock ticked down to midnight, Marko pulled up the video function on the satphone to use as a camera. “Let’s hope this works,” Dawn muttered as she uploaded the file to an anonymous YouTube account, encrypting our location.

  Prophet Grace’s second sermon was live.

  At first, we got only a few scattered hits. But soon, news outlets in Europe and Asia took notice. “Has Prophet Grace reemerged?” they asked with bated breath. And then, our views began to skyrocket.

  “My beloved followers,” the video began. “I’m so sorry for my absence. As you may have noticed, the other prophets have not welcomed me with open arms. I knew I would encounter resistance to my message, and so I’ve needed to stay hidden, for my own safety. But I know that isn’t fair to you, to declare myself and then disappear. And if there’s one message I want to convey to you, it’s that it’s okay to be wrong sometimes. It’s okay to make mistakes, and then work to make them right. Even when you’re a prophet.

  “So th
is is me trying to right my wrongs. I owe you all something. Proof that I haven’t forgotten you. And I will offer that proof as often as I can. But in return I ask for one thing: stay faithful to Great Spirit in my absence. He will ask much of you, especially in the face of those who don’t share your faith. But when He calls on you, answer. Listen. And follow his word to the letter.” Those final words, I intoned exactly the way I’d spoken them to Paulina on the phone.

  The next morning, I called Paulina again, and she burst into tears. “It really is you.”

  “I don’t blame you for being skeptical,” I assured her.

  “I always knew, even if I was afraid to admit it. I didn’t tell anyone, I swear,” she blubbered.

  “Thank you,” I said, relief washing over me.

  She was beside herself. “Why me? Why have you chosen me, out of everyone?”

  “Like I said, I need your help. And your confidence. Can I trust you?”

  “You can trust me with anything,” she said breathlessly.

  I inhaled deeply, hoping this would work. “I need you to borrow something for me.”

  I was sure I’d encounter more resistance. After years of being inundated by a culture of black-and-white morality, the idea of stealing wasn’t glamorous, it was horrifying. I remembered how shocked I’d been, before I knew the truth, the first time I saw Ciaran rob a store. On our first date, he’d claimed he was protected by Great Spirit, that his transgressions were sanctioned somehow. But I’d still felt in my bones that what he was doing must be wrong; that even though he wasn’t being Punished, he should have been. And I was right after all—it turned out that his “protection” came from being a sociopath, someone whose brain was incapable of feeling guilt in the same way mine was.

  But surprisingly, Paulina had no such suspicions about me. By projecting a message to her for the world to see, I’d earned her trust completely. Within hours of our call, she sent a secure message with diagrams of her building and pictures of the device itself, which was in storage deep within the facility’s vault.

  “That’s it!” Dr. Marko exclaimed when he saw the photos.

  “So she’s found it . . . she goes and grabs it, easy,” I said, feeling quite proud that my plan had worked so well.

  “She still has to get it to us without being detected,” Zack pointed out.

  “I’ll meet her myself,” Dawn said immediately. “I’ll wait as close as I can to the building, make sure everything goes according to plan.”

  “But if you’re recognized . . .” I said nervously.

  “There aren’t many of us left,” Dawn reminded us. “Like you said, this mission is too important. We have to make sure it’s a success.”

  I felt a pang of worry as Dawn packed up to depart. She was my friend, my mentor, and I hated watching her march into danger.

  She left at midday, with Sousa as her guide to ferry her south. As she sailed off, my nerves set in. I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much I’d been leaning on Dawn. She was the one who always had a plan, who always knew the best thing to do . . . or at least acted like she did. As much as I’d been chafing at her controlling attitude, deep down a part of me liked that someone else was steering our ship. Without her, I felt rudderless.

  And realizing that made me nervous . . . I’d put myself in a leadership position, as a prophet. Whether or not anyone in the resistance took me seriously, millions of other people did. And the truth was, I wasn’t a leader; it wasn’t how I’d been raised. I’d always been told my job was to defer to my spiritual elders . . . I’d never trained to be one.

  But now that Dawn was gone, I was the one calling the shots. I was going to have to figure out how to lead, whether I wanted to or not.

  11

  The next night, I burrowed into Zack’s arms, finding comfort nestling my head beneath his chin. “How am I supposed to act all-knowing when I know nothing? I’m just making things up as I go along.”

  He nodded, understanding. “Don’t feel like you have to be ‘Prophet Grace’ all the time. Be you. You get to decide what a prophet’s like. Who says you have to know anything? That’s when people seem to really respond to you. When you’re honest, when you show your faults. People aren’t used to that.”

  “But I can’t show all of them,” I pointed out. “If people start thinking I’m a bad person, they won’t think I’m worth listening to.”

  “Luckily you aren’t a bad person,” Zack said, kissing me. “And you’ve got friends to help you.”

  “What if I fail?” I asked, feeling vulnerable.

  Zack didn’t miss a beat. “At least you’ll look hot as hell doing it.”

  Lost in an ocean of self-doubt, I grabbed on to Zack like a lifeline, pulling him toward me. His kisses weren’t enough—my hands were drawn to him, magnetically taking on a life of their own. They found his body, as his found mine, and still nothing was enough.

  Soon, the only thing separating us from the sticky, sweaty Amazon was that mosquito netting around my bed. The humid air hung around us, as Zack’s whispers filled it with the words that warmed me up: “I love you, Grace.”

  “I love you, too,” I whispered back. More than love, I needed him. In that moment I needed him more than I’d ever needed anything. Needed the security, surety, of his embrace.

  As I pulled him closer to me, he whispered, “Are you sure?”

  “So sure.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a condom, and I had to stifle a laugh. “Really, of all the things to bring with you from civilization, that’s what you picked?”

  “It’s coming in handy, isn’t it?” As he tore it open, a surge of nervousness went through me. But one look at his grin, crinkling up a face covered in two weeks of Amazon scruff, made my body feel electric.

  This will end in heartbreak, my brain whispered, but I pushed that stupid voice aside. It had been put there to hurt me, and this time I wasn’t going to let it. I wasn’t going to let any of the stupid anxieties in my head stop me from following my heart. No matter what happened next, I needed this now. And nothing would ever make me regret it.

  12

  The heat inside that room was sweltering all through the night, but I didn’t care: I wanted to stay entwined in Zack’s arms forever. When he finally awoke the next morning, he smiled when he caught sight of my face. “Good morning, Amazing.”

  “Me, amazing?” I asked.

  “Yes, you. Also that ceiling fan, but definitely you.”

  “Why?” I whispered back, feeling insatiably needy all of a sudden.

  “You have to ask why?” he asked, laughing. “Seriously, you don’t know that you’re charming and insightful and kind . . .”

  “Go on,” I teased.

  He sobered up a moment. “You think one day I just decided, I’m going to put my life at risk, give up my career, everything I’ve ever worked for, ’cause I guess this girl’s all right or whatever . . .”

  “Also it was the right thing to do,” I reminded him.

  “You’re the one who showed me it was the right thing to do,” he admitted. “Watching you, I realized I couldn’t be a coward anymore. I couldn’t keep doing all the things I knew were wrong. I saw you being brave, and I thought, that’s who I want to be, too.”

  His vulnerability touched me—he loved me for something other than my looks, after all. “And here I thought you were the brave one,” I said quietly.

  “I thought I was, too. Until I met you.”

  We lay there, fingers interlaced, and in that moment, I forgot that there was anything outside that room. That is, until the satphone by my bed rang. Zack and I both bolted upright, staring at it.

  “You want me to answer?” Zack offered.

  I shook my head and picked up. “Hello?” Zack wrapped an arm around me, comforting.

  “Prophet Grace?” Paulina’s voice shook on the other end.

  “Paulina,” I said, to clue Zack in to who was calling. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m
sorry. I’m scared.” I could hear her resignation.

  “Where are you, Paulina?” I asked nervously.

  “In the vault.” I breathed a sigh of relief that she wasn’t already at a prophet’s office or police station reporting us.

  “Why are you scared?” I asked, keeping my voice calm and comforting.

  “I know you said I could steal and it would be okay. But normally stealing is wrong, right?”

  “Normally, yes. But this is life or death. Great Spirit understands.”

  “Then why am I being Punished?” she asked, voice shaking. “I saw my reflection in a mirror just now, and it scared me.”

  This was what I’d been most afraid of. I took a moment to think—how could I save her life and still get the device? “You’re in a facility run by the other prophets,” I explained hastily, trying to concoct a lie that would convince her. “They’ve made a pact with the devil, to Punish anyone who threatens their power. And right now, because you’re helping me, they must be targeting you. I’m so sorry, for putting you in danger like this. But I will die, your prophet will die, if you don’t go through with this.” The look on Zack’s face as I spoke gave me pause. I knew I was guilt-tripping her, and making anyone guilty was dangerous. But I pressed on. “You have to steal that device, and then I promise, once you’re out of there, once you pass it on, you’ll be Forgiven. All the guilt, all the pain, it will all go away, I promise. You’ll be a hero, and Great Spirit will reward you.”

  There was silence on the other end for so long, I wondered if she’d hung up, but finally she squeaked out, “Okay,” and the line clicked dead.

  “What happened? Is she doing it?” Zack asked.

  I shook, racked with anxiety. “I hope so.”

  Our postcoital high had faded into a nervous waiting game. I could tell Zack was working through something in his mind, trying to find a solution.

  “You might as well have told her the truth,” Zack said as he reached outside the mosquito netting to grab his pants. “You’ve taken enough of a risk by telling her in the first place. Better she knows the real reason she’s doing this.”