Ribbons (22 page)

There was a clicking sound, and Foster’s arm shot out in a wide arc.

Erica’s thigh burned as she stepped forward. Her foot twisted, and she slipped on something wet. She looked down and saw a pulse of crimson blood gush down her leg, then another. The slice in her thigh didn’t seem like it should be bleeding that much. She immediately felt like somebody had plunged her into a bath of ice water.

She stood there for a second trying to regain her balance. It didn’t come. Instead, everything started to feel numb. She heard the stun gun hit the ground but didn’t remember letting go of it. The floor almost felt comfortable as she crumbled down to meet it.

Foster looked over at her. He looked sad. “I’m . . . I’m sorry. It’s ruined. It won’t work now.”

When he stood, she saw the box cutter in his hand. It didn’t even look like it had any blood on it.

From somewhere up above he said, “You won’t be able to go home.”

Erica didn’t know what he was talking about, but she could see her clothes beside her on the floo
r
—
a
nd the smooth white and sliver curves of her phone poking out of one pants pocket. It felt like she was using somebody else’s hand to reach for it. She just wanted to hear her voice one last time.

“Dani . . .”

Her hand almost made it before Foster picked up the phone.

“Oh. I’m gonna need that,” he said.

31

Matt was thinking hard about spoons. His coffee steamed in its mug as he sat at his desk, and he gave the spoon a swirl, watching the coffee mix with creamer as they spun together in a tiny whirlpool. He was supposed to be doing paperwork. Using
real
paper. He still didn’t have a laptop so he’d borrowed some graph paper from Adam. It was actually a lot easier than the financial software he had been using. He didn’t have to scan receipts or print out reports. Instead, he just shoved the receipts into a folder and added up the numbers with the calculator on his phone. It’s not like they were ever going to get audited. He’d never really liked paperwork, though, and his mind was constantly wandering off. Right now it was wandering around in his past, remembering the theory he had learned about spoons.

A spoon was basically a handle with a scoopy-thing at the end. Of course, that description fit lots of objects—spoons, ice cream scoops, shovels, oars. The idea of a “scoopy-thing” with a handle was pretty useful. And that idea was just two other ideas stuck together. His father had called that concept a
monad
, a pattern of ideas. That was the crazy shit he’d started learning when he was Adam’s age. That and Latin.

Actually, he had learned snippets of Latin when he was even younger. He just hadn’t known what they meant. One day, Aunt Rose took all the kids out to the garden. Matt had probably been about three, one of the youngest kids on the estate. She showed them a snail and told them how snails were bad for a garden. They ate the plants before they had a chance to grow into fruits and vegetables. If a snail ate just a couple of leaves off a new plant, that plant might die. Then it would never be able to produce ripe, yummy strawberries. She used strawberries to really drive the point home. Then she said a little rhyme in Latin after that and crunched the snail under her foot:
Contra vim mortis. Non crescit in hortis.

Matt had thought it was funny. So had all the other kids. That was before he knew what killing was. Tiny feet pounded legions of snails into paste. And from that point on, there had always been strawberries growing in the garden.

That was the beginning of another pattern of ideas: sacrifice a thing to gain a thing. As more lessons were taught, that pattern became known as the Primary Monad. It was taught over and over again. Each time, there was a little more blood involved.

It started off slow. Lessons any kid would learn growing up on a farm.

Chicks were cute. You might even name one. But eventually you were going to have to kill it if you wanted to eat. Even if its name was Big Bird.

Goats would eat right out of your hand. That made it easier to slit their throats. They sounded like scared children as they sank down onto their knees to die.

Even a faithful companion would have to be put down if it cost too much to keep it alive.

Matt had always been presented with a choice, and his father had always been very careful to explain the consequences for each decision. Death was a necessary part of life. It was necessary to achieve your goals.

Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.

He had learned what that one meant:
This is the place where death delights in helping life.
It was actually a pretty common motto . . . in morgues.

Matt had learned these lessons with seven other children. Technically, they were his brothers and sisters; however, each of them had been adopted, including Matt. It was the same for his father, Uncle Quent, and Aunt Rose. They were related on paper and bound together by purpose. That was how the Scholars recruited. It didn’t always work out, though. Matt’s father used to have three other brothers and sisters. Two of them were dead, and the other was quietly locked away.

They weren’t the only family like this. The Scholars had estates scattered across the globe. Each was structured the same way and was run according to “the Traditions.” Matt didn’t know where the other estates were. You had to graduate before you learned that. Graduation was the one Tradition that Matt hadn’t been able to go through with. The sacrifice that cost too much. He was the only one, though; everyone else paid the price. Some more than others.

While he was a kid, Matt hadn’t gotten off the estate much. All the children there were homeschooled, and the property was isolated enough so that visiting town required a car, unless you wanted to walk all day. They didn’t live like the Amish, though. Matt hadn’t known it at the time, but the estate always had cutting-edge technology when it came to research and communication. Matt had an e-mail account before spam existed.

They also had satellite TV. Matt watched a lot of movies, though that wasn’t encouraged on the estate. As part of their studies, the children were given freedom to pursue almost any topic they liked in their spare time. The estate was better equipped than most colleges so a motivated student could dig into any subject as deeply as they wanted. If they were limited by the facilities on hand, new equipment would show up within days. And it wasn’t just limited to the sciences. Art and music were fully supported, as well.

Sarah was one of Matt’s sisters. She had spent most of her time analyzing the patterns of petal growth on different species of flowers. She started them from seeds and played music to them as they grew. She measured them, took pictures as their petals bloomed, and documented their rate of decay. For each pattern she found, she scratched mathematical formulas on chalkboards and fed them into a computer. Her printer would then spit out pages of musical notation. Matt had attended a recital once where her cello seemed to recreate the life and death of each of her flowers.

Aunt Rose had tried to help Matt find a similar passion.

“You seem to like your science fiction films,” she said. “Have you thought about building your own rocket? Or a laser? Boys seem to like lasers.”

Matt shrugged. “Well . . . I really like the
stories
.”

She had found him in the rec room. He was sprawled out on the couch like only a tween could be, remote in one hand, corn chips in the other. He didn’t pause the movie.

She moved to stand in front of the TV. “Perhaps you could create your own film? That’s all done on computers now isn’t it?”

“I suppose,” he said. “But I don’t really have a story to tell.”

“Take somebody else’s story, then. Make it your own.”

“That seems like cheating.”

Aunt Rose crossed her arms. “Cheating is better than failing. There’s no reason for failure
here
. The opportunities you have are unique. They shouldn’t be wasted.”

Matt scooted himself up on the couch. “Maybe somebody else could take my spot. I’m not sure I belong here.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “Every one of you has a place here.”

“What about Uncle Quent?” asked Matt. “I’ve heard you talk to Father about him.”

“His place is here, too.”

“He’s never around. And I’ve seen the way you and Father look at each other whenever somebody says his name.”

Aunt Rose had looked that way right then, actually. “Yes, well, he’s on sabbatical. He’ll come back. He just needs time to refocus.”

“I guess I haven’t found my focus yet.”

“This is a time to explore,” she told him. “Learn all that you can. Find out what’s important to you. You’ll naturally focus on that.”

So Matt had explored. The regular curriculum included most of the subjects that any private school taught, with a couple of additions. Theoretical History was kind of like a critical-thinking class. The students learned about key points during history that caused humanity to swerve one way or the other. They investigated all the paths the world hadn’t taken and argued about how it might be better off or worse for it. It sounded more fun than it actually was.

Inductive Symbology taught the students how to identify patterns and symbols in everything around them. They learned how to measure the effectiveness of those symbols and postulate how they might be optimized for greater impact. Matt based his final paper for the class on the symbols in
The Da Vinci Code
. He didn’t even read the book; he just watched the movie. He got a D. His instructor informed him that he would have received an F, except that the movie itself was an excellent example of a symbolic idea optimized for the greatest impact. Matt didn’t really know what that meant.

The course called Applied Monas Hieroglyphica was straight-up spell casting. Sure, it was all taught as if it were science, but it didn’t feel like science when you were chanting in Latin while standing around a circle inscribed with ancient glyphs. The first theorem they learned to prove was that belief equaled reality. By the end of the first semester they were able to call upon the Divine Servants to place certain elements into their own dreams, like an ice-cream cone or a naked woman. That was crazy. Matt barely believed that it worked. There was no real physical evidence. They never heard voices, and nothing ever levitated or anything like that. But by the time they graduated, they were able to swap entire dreams with each other like trading cards. At least, some of the students claimed to.

Certain parts of the Scholars’ training seemed very religious, but there was no priest on the estate and they never went to church. They learned about all kinds of religions. To Matt, most of them seemed to worship different flavors of the same god. They weren’t taught that any one way to worship was the right way, but they weren’t taught to be atheists, either. Instead, they were taught to believe in all of them, because they were all real and they all held power.

Angels and demons were just Divine Servants. If you asked the right way and paid the right price, they did pretty much the same thing. Both were vain, both were righteous, and both were willing to get their hands dirty. You just needed to negotiate. And that’s were Matt had finally found some focus. Apparently, he exceled at getting others to do his work for him. As it turned out, that talent was highly valued by the Scholars.

Divine Servants could also become
familiars
. From what Matt understood, it was like entering into a contract. The angel or demon—or gremlin, or whatever—would give you a backstage pass to its specific sphere of influence. In exchange, it could ride you around like a pony if it wanted to. You had to be strong or you would be its plaything. All the Scholars had familiars. It was their last test before graduating.

Matt had thought he was ready. Sarah had thought she was, too.

She wasn’t, though.

The last time Matt spoke with her, she had been lying restrained in her bed. He remembered it being cold even though there had been a log burning in the fireplace. The smell of burning oak mixed with the scent of dying hibiscus. One side of her face was swollen from when she had to be tackled to the ground. If they hadn’t, she would have used her gardening shears to snip off more than just the tips of her fingers.

At first, she couldn’t speak. Her familiar wouldn’t let her. She shook and strained as spit bubbled out of her mouth. Matt didn’t know what had gone wrong. The ceremony was always closed to the other students, and his father wouldn’t give him any details. Matt wasn’t even supposed to visit her until things had “settled.”

He had visited anyway. He remembered taking out his iPod as he sat with her and pulling up a track. A cello drew a long, sad chord, and Sarah stopped shaking. He let the music just play for a bit as her whole body finally relaxed. He used his sleeve to clean up her face and waited.

One eyelid lifted halfway open on the undamaged side of her face. “‘Oncidium Orchid,’” she said.

Matt looked at the iPod. It was the name of the track. “I didn’t know which one to play.”

“That’s a good one. Not quite as flashy as some of the other orchids, but simple and beautiful.”

Matt leaned in close to her. “What happened?”

At first, she didn’t speak. She closed her eye and just hummed along with the music. Then she looked at him again. “I was nervous. And eager. I agreed to too much.”

“Couldn’t Father help?”

“Yes. I think he could have,” she said. “He didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“He said the choice had to be mine. The familiar needed my oath, not his. I guess I didn’t know what I was asking for. She seemed so nice before I made the offering.”

“Maybe I can bargain with it . . . or her,” Matt said. “I’m not too bad at that.”

She tried to turn toward him but didn’t get very far. “You have your own pact to make. You’ll need your strength.”

“I’m not gonna leave you like this,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s much you can do . . . The sacrifice has been made. That’s what we are to them—the Scholars. Just another sacrifice. We don’t know what we’re buying with our own blood.”

The music faded out, and Sarah started to shake again.

Matt left that same night. He packed one bag—the same one that he had now—and left quickly and quietly. But Aunt Rose still met him at the door. She didn’t say anything; she just gave him an envelope. Inside was some money and a Post-it note with a phone number written on it. Above the phone number was the word
home
. Maybe she figured he’d be back. Maybe he just needed some time to accept his fate.