“Let’s,” I reply, swallowing hard. “I better get into position.” He squeezes my fingers again as I give another tight nod and spin on my heel, only taking a proper breath once I’m at the other end of the corridor.
Forty minutes later, and I’m sweating like a pig. The room is packed, with all eight thousand seats filled. There’s the faintest soundtrack backing the Herald’s voice as he talks them into a stupor.
I’ve been rushing around the building, setting my creations in motion. Each of them is a little drone-like device, set to release a steady stream of emotion at different cue words the Herald should hit at specific times.
“Shadows of ignorance.”
That comes with a burst of unease.
“Embrace the transcendent Path.”
That one’s paired with a sense of hope.
“Open your hearts, free your minds, and let the Awakening transform you.”
That’s when they’re hit with a heady dose of relaxation, so strong, it should send them into a dazed state.
That one’s my cue to get the fuck out of here, so I turn on my heel and I flee.
Out of the door and into my new life.
Chapter 1
Sin
Five years later
It turns out disappearing is easy enough. You just hop on a bus and then pay by cash wherever you go next. Never telling anyone your real name or sticking in one place long enough for anyone to notice you. You work shitty dead-end jobs or find work that’s dodgy enough not to leave a paper trail and you live in a dank basement with six other desperate people sharing a single bathroom.
If I thought my new life would start when I left The Path behind. I was dead wrong.
Turns out, disappearing is easy enough.Stayinginvisible is the hard part.
For that, you need a new identity. That way, you can get a bank account and a proper job, and an apartment that doesn’t need to be condemned by the health department. And that shit is expensive.
I discovered pretty quickly that four of my fellow basement dwellers were also looking to get new identities and to make their fresh starts. I’m not sure if any of the others were on the run from a cult. But who knows? We weren’t exactly forthcoming with the details of our past lives. Mostly, we all tried to avoid each other as much as possible.
It was a long eighteen months living there. The basement was always damp. The walls. The floors. Even the air. Seriously, it was like trying to breathe soup through a straw. There were always dampsocks and bras hanging in the shower for some unknown reason. I’d have to shift them every time I needed to use the bathroom.
The tiny galley kitchen we all shared always smelled kind of musty, and every time I used the microwave, there was a bowl of soup inside. No matter whether it was seven in the morning or midnight. Someone was always reheating soup. I don’t know what that was about, and I didn’t ask. It was one of the irritating mysteries of living in the basement.
Eighteen months. That was how far into my depressing new life I’d gotten before I could save up enough money to afford to pay the woman who created fake IDs for all of us.
I figured I’d pay her a bunch of money and never hear from her again. What I didn’t expect was for her to change my life.
Her name was Elara and she was a bit of a weird one. I never saw Elara dressed in anything other than a housecoat and sweatpants and this massive hat that almost covered her eyes.
In the week leading up to her actually handing over my freshly minted identity, she messaged me every single day. And while you might think she was clarifying things or ironing out kinks in my new identity, you’d be wrong.
She was sending me memes or funny pictures. Or updates on things her dog was doing right at that moment.
I didn’t really engage, other than to smile at the goofy faces her dog pulled.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t.
Then, when we were doing the handover, she narrowed her eyes at me and at the shithole I lived in.
“You know, I went to a town this week that’s totally coo-coo banana pants,” she said, completely unprompted. “You’d love it there, especially if you want to disappear properly without risking catching a lung disease.”
