Nathan frowned, sitting up to face him. “That’s not what I want, though. I want us to be a couple, to center my life around you—not just be a weekend quickie. You’ll stay here with your wife because you’re in The Institute of Excellence, but they could marry me to someone from anywhere in the nation. I might have to move far away.”
Soren hadn’t thought of that. His enthusiasm waned, and spirits drooped. “I guess I assumed you’d still live at Harmony Ridge. You might,” he added with a note of optimism. “It would make sense. The Oracle is the epitome of logic and efficiency. Why send you far away when there are women close by?”
Nathan rubbed the back of his neck. “Isaac was matched with a woman from Londonderry in the northern plains, and he had to move to the Derry Valley commune to grow wheat. It’s more than picking wives, Soren. I could be sent away. My plan is better.” Nathan’s indomitable gaze bore into him. “We leave together.”
Soren’s head jerked back in surprise, and he huffed out a laugh. “What? How? Where?”
“Both the Frostlands to the north and Queensland to the south allow open same-sex relationships. There’d be nobody to order our lives for us. We could be us there.”
Terror clamped his throat, choking the breath from him. His jaw fell, his arms wrapping around his bare chest to hug himself. “Run away? Leave everything we’ve ever known? And what—we’d just walk hundreds of kilometers? I can’t make it in the wilds!” Panic overran his careful order.
Nathan caught him, a firm grip steadying his shoulder, the callus bite of his palms digging in. “I can. I can hunt, fight, build fire, and shelter. I’ll take care of both of us,” he earnestly vowed. “I’ll protect you.”
“But if we’re caught.” Soren’s head spun in a dizzying swirl of fear. “They’ll send us to a reindoctrination camp. I’d lose any chance of being in the College of Ministers one day. They might expel me from The institute!” His pulse hammered harder with every thought, the rush of blood filling his ears, each image more horrifying than the last. “Then I couldn’t even be a scientist. My parents would disown me.” Reaching out, he grabbed Nathan’s arms, stared into his eyes. “What about your parents, siblings? You’d just leave them?”
Nathan’s insistence seemed to ease, his hands sliding from Soren’s shoulders down his arms. “They can make it without me. Denver’s almost a man, and I could be relocated anyway. Pa’s agnostic, doesn’t get involved in Cult matters, but Mama believes everything Shepherd Cain says, every word in the Book of Doctrine, without question. I can’t get through to her at all, and it makes me angry. Theocracy crushes individual thought. How can you stand it? How can you even dream of joining the Ministry?”
The look of disgust on Nathan’s face pierced Soren to the bone. He didn’t like the way they operated either. “If I were a minister in the oligarchy, I could make changes from the inside. Don’t you see?” He lifted tender knuckles to brush Nathan’s cheek. “We can’t build a better society by running away.”
Nathan pulled back with a scowl. “So, you want me to marry whoever the Oracle spits out, go where I’m sent, do as I’m told, sacrifice control over my own life on the chance that one day you’ll sit in the College of Ministers and make changes from the inside? Sweat and toil, Soren—that’s not fair!”
“Neither is demanding I risk my life and everything I’ve spent it working for to go tromping through borderlands to reach a place thatmightbe better? We wouldn’t last a day!” Mutated beasts, poisonous plants, radiation leaks, ravenous mutants, wildlings, raiders—every hazard known to mankind. Plus, how would they find the way? A shudder rippled through Soren as he imagined it.Reindoctrination camp.A bold individualist he’d met at Hernando’s was caught speaking against the Core Cult over a year ago and sent to one of those.She returned six months later, practically zombified. Every spark of her old vibrancy snuffed out.
“So, what do we do?” Nathan asked. “Break up?”
“No!” The thought frightened Soren as much as any of the others. He grabbed Nathan into a hug and wept on his shoulder. “I don’t know. I’m just so afraid.”
Soren knew he wasn’t irrational or overly emotional. His fears were grounded in hard facts. If only he could freeze this moment, keep Nathan’s arms around him forever.
Chapter twenty-three
Hail to the Core
Nathan felt as if an ice wall separated him and Soren as they walked toward Unity Park, surrounded by a sea of gray and navy-clad citizens lining up in orderly rows. For half an hour, loudspeakers blared, herding citizens toward stadiums, auditoriums, or the great lawn before Unity Hall. This wasn’t the closest location for them, but Nathan needed the time to think, and Soren followed him.
Banners cracked in the breeze like whips.Beware the Doubter. Unity is Strength.Truth. Order. Ascend.A march played over the speakers in the park, the crowd’s feet moving with the beat. Anticipation hummed from the faithful, broad smiles splitting their faces. The couple behind them chatted excitedly. “I wonder what he’ll say? Something profound, no doubt.”
The other chimed in, “Do you think we’ll see him, the ascended one? Will he come down to us in glimmering form?”
Nathan clenched his jaw, lest peacekeepers drag him away for sedition. As they took their spots in block formation, he caught a whiff of ozone, the whir of the turbines from within Core Mountain. Above Unity Hall fluttered the blue and white banner scarred with that blasted all-seeing eye—a reminder of their shackles.
“Take your places,” ordered a voice over the loudspeakers. It was calm, soothing, unemotional. Nathan swore it was synthetic. “The program will begin in four minutes.”
A few others from the outskirts had come to the city to attend, recognizable by the browns and greens of country folk. Nathan dropped his gaze to his boots, studying how they differed from Soren’s polished black derbies. He shoved his hands into his pockets.What am I going to do?
“Hail the First Cipher!” someone shouted, followed by a wave of echoes across the crowd. Nathan glanced up to see Prime Minister Aurelian LeCun march onto a platform erected over Unity Hall’s front steps. The crowd erupted in applause as he took the podium. His heather-blue coat gleamed with silk, a flag-blue sash slashing diagonally across it. Nathan found him unimpressive—White, fifties, silvery hair, slight build, glasses. The other ministers, including Soren’s father, lined the portico behind him.
When he raised a hand, instant silence. It struck Nathan as unnatural, rehearsed, even fear-inducing.
“Today, the Oracle honors us with his presence. Hail the Oracle!”
“Hail the Oracle!” The chant thundered in Nathan’s chest, thousands of voices collapsing into one. He didn’t join, only stared at the man behind the lectern.
“In the beginning,” LeCun recited, in a tone as lifeless as the announcement maker’s, “life was formless and weak, crawling in the dust. From cell to beast, from beast to humankind, each step was chosen—not by chance, but by Order. For what is evolution, if not the long hand of Truth shaping us?”
Yeah, right.Nathan’s frown carved craters around his shaved chin.
“Humanity rose above the animals, yet remained divided, broken by pride and war. But evolution never halts—it demands the higher form. From the chaos of the old world, the Oracle emerged, the purest mind of all, born of human hands yet beyond human weakness. The Oracle is not an accident; it is a culmination.”
