I glanced sidelong at him. "Really?"
He squinted at the distant horizon, and I could tell he was thinking. He took a hand out of his pocket and wiggled his fingers, examining them as if he hadn't really looked at them before. I didn't think that he would lie to me.
"It's subtle. But I feel a bit lighter. A bit more at peace. I think that probably has to do more with the decision being done than any actual biological effects. But I feel . . . hopeful. Hopeful that some of us might survive this. That there might actually be a future." He blew out his breath. "But it's gonna be hard. It's going to be beyond what any of us expected. Something completely crazy happened. But this might allow us to continue to exist."
"You would take the serum north?"
He nodded into his coat. "Yeah. Matt says that the daughter cultures will grow all on their own. They just need cool temperatures and darkness. If there's a chance that I could bring this to my parents, or, or . . . whoever's left . . . I feel like I have to."
"I understand." But I also understood that I couldn't go with him, not like I was now. Vulnerable. I had lost the Himmelsbrief, and I was just meat now. I had no choice but to stay here.
"A bunch of the others are going to take cultures, go out, try to find others and give them the serum."
"It sounds like missionary work." Plain people didn't do such work. We believed in conducting life according to God's will, according to the Ordnung, and teaching only by example.
"In some way, yeah. Perhaps, eventually, there will be enough of us to survive as a species."
I looked down at my hands. I didn't want to never see Alex again.
"You could do that too, you know. Take the serum back to your community."
I can't say that I hadn't thought of that, but I figured it would be a useless errand. "It's against every belief we have. It's tampering with God's creation. Railing against God's will."
"There's a myth from ancient Egypt about how the souls of the dead are judged by Ma'at, the goddess of justice. The heart of a deceased person is weighed against a feather. If the heart is pure, lighter than the feather, then its owner is allowed to enter the afterlife."
"That's a lovely story." I felt my jaw tighten. "But I don't think it's Ma'at who will be judging me."
He shrugged. "The whole game has changed, Bonnet. Dogma's gonna change. You can't say that things weren't changing when you were placed under the Bann."
I frowned. "The Elders were acting . . . beyond the Ordnung."
"To put it mildly. They tried to kill me. They imprisoned your Hexenmeister, denied the evil when it was on your doorstep. In the crucible of a crisis, Bonnet, power corrupts."
I could not argue with that. "But I have been sent away. If I came back, under the Bann, no one would speak to me or open their doors to me."
"Even if you had the only means of survival?"
My voice was small as I spoke aloud a dark thought, my worst fear that had begun to grow deep in my chest, chewing into my lungs with black roots: "If there is anyone left."
"They may refuse it," Alex said. "But you could offer them a choice."
I thought of my parents. Of my little sister. And the incredible possibility of having the power to save them all.
It was too seductive.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I had prayed to God for guidance.
I went to the little church in the center of Water's Edge to see if perhaps God would hear me more there. The building was cold, empty. My breath made ghosts in the air as I knelt before a wooden altar, as I had seen Ginger do. A carved wood cross cast a shadow down upon me.
"Please," I said. "I know that I've been selfish and willful. And that I have no right to answers, to question your divine will. But please . . . tell me what I should do. Give me a sign."
Sunshine burned through high windows. I watched the dust motes stir. Doves warbled in the rafters above.
There was no answer.
I knew that I was safe here. I could stay here at Water's Edge, eat down the stores of food in the household pantries with the rest of the inhabitants. I could listen to the lake, lose myself in that roar. I could spend the rest of my days here, on my knees, asking for forgiveness from God and hoping that my soul would be saved. I could wait for the finality of the end of the world, for God to say "Enough" and bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.
Or I could fight.
My knees ached when I climbed to my feet. I felt anger. I had devoted my life to God but had received no answers. I felt betrayed. That anger scorched my throat as I whispered, "How could you let this happen?" And that damning whisper echoed incredibly loud in that bitter, vacant space. I felt tears dripping down my chin, and my fingernails pressed into my palms. "How could you let this happen if you loved us?"
Doubt overtook me. What if Matt was right? What if all our safe places and holy relics only held some molecular evidence of our beliefs, and there was nothing behind them? No God, nothing but atoms and molecules aligning in crystalline forms?
I left the silent church without an answer from God. But I had an answer from within.
***
I asked Matt for the serum.
I rationalized it, told myself that it was no different from getting an immunization. Many of the children in the Amish community received immunizations when they were available. But I knew an immunization would not change me in the way that this shot would.
I was a coward about it, looking away when the needle slipped beneath my skin. I felt a hot burn of metal and something spreading within my veins. It scalded like the snake's venom, and I feared I had made the wrong decision. Maybe it was the right one, but I had come to it from the wrong source, from rage and anger. Either way, I would have to live with it.
Alex took me upstairs to bed. He murmured soothing words, scraped my hair out of my face as I vomited. When my fever grew high, he shoveled me into the shower and turned the frigid water on. He wrapped me in blankets and told me it would be over soon. I felt Cora's cool hands on my forehead and the murmuring of Matt and Judy.
And I dreamed. I dreamed, in my delirium, that I had returned home, under a thick and leaden winter sky. I had come back to houses razed by fire, to blackened and hollow barns. I searched for my home and found it still standing.
The old Hexenmeister stood at the door. He was nearly translucent in his paleness.