Oh, she was outside playing. Normal as pie and free as dandelions. What a dream.
And so she’d kept the name, and lived it as best she could: pie and dandelions. Normal and free, though in truth it had always felt like an act. Still, from the age of seventeen on, it was Elazael who was the secret self locked inside, and Eliza who lived in the open—like the prince and the pauper who switched places: the one elevated, the other dispossessed. Of course, the prince and the pauper, she was reminded now, had eventually changed back. But that wasn’t going to happen to her. She would never be Elazael again. But she knew that wasn’t what Dr. Chaudhary meant, and so, reluctantly, she nodded.
“I was her,” she corrected. “I left. I ran away. I hated it. I hated them.” She took a deep breath. Hate wasn’t the right word. There wasn’t a right word; there wasn’t a big enough word for the betrayal Eliza felt, looking back at her childhood with an adult understanding of just how seriously she’d been abused and exploited.
From the age of seven. Home from the hospital with a pacemaker and a new terror so big it blotted out even her fear of her mother. From the first moment her “gift” made itself known, she had become the focus of all the cult’s energies and hopes.
The constant touching. So many hands. No sovereignty over her own self, ever. And they’d confessed their sins to her, begging forgiveness, telling her things no seven-year-old should ever have to hear, let alone punish. Her tears were collected in vials, her fingernail clippings ground into a powder and mixed into the communion bread. And her first menstrual blood? She had to avert her thoughts from that. It was still too sharp a shame, though it was half her life ago. And then there was sleep.
At twenty-four years old, Eliza had still never spent the night with a lover. She couldn’t bear to have anyone in the room with her. For ten years she’d been made to sleep on a dais in the center of the temple, the congregation clustered around its base. Dear god. The wheezing and weeping, snoring, coughing. Whispering. Even, sometimes, in the dead of night: rhythmic, tandem panting that she hadn’t understood until much later.
She would never be able to scrape away the memory of the collective, unwelcome breathing of dozens of people surrounding her in the night.
They’d been waiting for the dream to visit her. Hoping for it. Praying. Vultures, hungry for scraps of her terror. If they couldn’t have the dream for themselves, they wanted to be near it. As though her screams might impart salvation, or better yet, as though maybe, just maybe, it might burst free of her—the dream, the monsters, terrible and terrible and terrible forever, amen—and pour forth its annihilation, to the woe of sinners everywhere, and the glorification of the chosen: themselves.
As though Eliza might be the actual fount of the apocalypse.
Gabriel Edinger had gotten nightmare ice cream, and she had gotten that.
“I still do. I still hate them,” she said now, maybe a little too fervently. Dr. Chaudhary had put his glasses back on, and his eyes were wary behind them. When he spoke, his voice had the stilted delicacy reserved for talking to those of unsound mind.
“You should have told me,” he said, with a glance at Dr. Amhali. He cleared his throat, evidently uncomfortable. “This could be considered a… a conflict of interest, Eliza.”
“What? There’s no conflict. I’m a scientist.”
“And an angel,” said the Moroccan doctor with a sneer.
Who sneers? wondered Eliza, fadingly. She’d thought it was something only book characters did. “We aren’t… I mean they aren’t. They don’t claim to be angels,” she said, unsure why she was making any explanations on their behalf.
“Pardon me, of course not.” Dr. Amhali was all chill sarcasm. “Descendants of. Oh, and incarnations of, let’s not forget that.” He stabbed her with a pointed look. “Apocalyptic visions, my dear? Tell me, do you still have them?” He asked it as though it were worse than absurd, as though the very notion profaned decent religion and must be punished.
She felt herself diminishing, shrinking in the face of double accusation and scorn. Disappearing. She wasn’t Eliza, right now, in this tent, in the eyes of these men. She was Elazael. I’m not her, I’m me. How desperately she wanted to believe it. “I left all that behind,” she said. “I left.” The last part was emphatic, because it still seemed simple to her. I left. Doesn’t that mean something?
“It must have been very difficult for you,” said Dr. Chaudhary.
It wasn’t that it was the wrong thing to say. Under other circumstances, this conversation might have led there: to his legitimate pity in the face of her tale of hardship. Damn straight it had been difficult for her. She’d had nothing, no money or friends, no worldliness at all. Nothing but her brain and her will, the first woefully neglected—she hadn’t been given an education—and the second so often punished that it had become stunted. Not stunted enough. Kiss my will, she might have said to her mother. You will never break me.
But under these circumstances, and in the tone in which he said it—that stilted delicacy, that patronizing indulgence—it wasn’t the right thing to say, either. “Difficult?” she returned. “And the Big Bang was just an explosion.”
She’d said that to him last night, in jest. She’d smiled ironically and he’d chuckled. She meant it in the same spirit now… well, sort of… but Dr. Chaudhary raised his hands in a calming gesture.
“There’s no need to get upset,” he said.
No need to get upset? No need. What did that even mean? No reason? Because it seemed to Eliza that she had plenty of reasons. She’d been framed and she’d been outed. Her hard-earned anonymity had been snatched from her, her professional credibility from this moment forward would be entangled with the history that she’d fought so hard to hide, not even to mention this vicious allegation and the damage it could do to her, the legal ramifications of breaking her nondisclosure agreements, and… hell, the violent fallout on the world. But the most immediate reason was taking shape in this hazmat tent, in the company of two presumptuous men bent on treating her like their cardboard cutout of a long-lost victim.
Reflexively she glanced at the laptop screen that had shown her her undoing. It was frozen on that old photo of her, with its same old caption. CHILD PROPHET MISSING, BELIEVED MURDERED BY CULT.
“I’m not upset,” she said, taking a series of measured breaths.