Exile (The Oneness Cycle) by Rachel Starr Thomson

difference. He was not what Richard was. A thousand “Now I lay me down to sleeps” would never call down the kind of power that was swirling around Richard like dust motes in light. And he could feel other things too. He and Chris were close, like brothers, but they weren’t like Mary and Richard. In some invisible way Tyler could not see but only feel, he knew they were truly One. He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that their hearts were beating in sync.
    “How do you change?” Chris asked. “What makes somebody Oneness? Or were you just all born like this?”
    “Not at first,” Mary said. “You become Oneness when you are born a second time—born of the Spirit.”
    “So how do you do that?”
    Richard smiled gently. “That is a mystery. No one really knows.”
    Tyler eyed Chris nervously. His friend was more pent up than Tyler had ever seen him. For some reason these people mattered to Chris in a way that they didn’t to Tyler, even though he was the one who had seen demons and ghosts and talked to Reese at length. These people with their non-answers might make Chris explode.
    To Tyler’s surprise, Chris was silent. He swerved into the passing lane again, speeding past a convoy of dump trucks, and then pulled back into the right. A sign declared it was only twenty miles to Lincoln.
    “How did it happen to my mother?” he asked, finally.
    Tyler bit his tongue in shock. Diane was Oneness?
    It made … sense. But she wasn’t quite like these other two. His mind raced. She had never claimed to be Oneness. She was intuitive and spiritual in a way others weren’t, but she wasn’t eager to claim it and never seemed happy when she shared things she knew. Was that why she was so different from these two? Because she didn’t want to be what they had embraced?
    “The same way it happens to any of us,” Mary said. “She looked into the truth and was born of it.”
    Tyler sighed heavily. “You people aren’t real helpful.”
    Richard shrugged apologetically. “There isn’t a good way to explain it. You will know when the Spirit is seeking you. At some point you yield—or you don’t. The moment of yielding is the moment of birth.”
    “And then what?”
    “And then you are alive. Forever.”
    The words brought Patrick to mind. What had he said? We are risen.
    “What is it like to be one of you?” Tyler asked.
    Mary answered, “It’s hard. But we would never trade it.”
    “My mother would,” Chris said. His voice was hard again.
    “We don’t know why your mother is the way she is,” Richard started, but Mary gave him a look, and he stopped. “To be honest, I didn’t know about your mother,” Richard finished. “Not until we went to her to ask for help finding April.”
    “Help that she wouldn’t give you.”
    “I don’t think she had anything to offer us, or she would have,” Mary said. “Your mother tries to stay out of conscious participation in the plans as much as she can. But she doesn’t work against us.”
    Tyler raised an eyebrow and waited for more explanation, but none came. He sensed that Mary and Chris both understood this dynamic better than he or even Richard. At least this explained why Chris seemed so tense. It wasn’t just that he was worried about Reese. This was personal.
    The exit loomed up under an overhang on the right, and Chris pulled off the freeway, following Mary’s hastily given directions. The truck bounced through a pothole as it pulled onto a city street in a dingy, grass-through-the-sidewalks neighbourhood. “Are you sure this is the right place?” Tyler asked. For some reason he’d expected the Oneness to be headquartered somewhere more impressive.
    “This is it,” Mary said. She smiled at him like she knew what he was thinking. “Never judge a book by its cover.”
    Tyler shrugged, uncomfortable, and Mary told Chris to take a left at the light. They drove past a corner grocery store with its windows plastered with flyers and took a few