When We Wake by Karen Healey Page A

station, but stronger and louder was the whistling sound of my rage. “I want to talk to him,” I said.
    “No,” Zaneisha said flatly. She had her sonic pistol in her hand. “Let me do my job.”
    Since her job was keeping me alive, maybe even to the point of taking a bullet for me, it was hard to argue with that.
    “He’s coming in,” she said after a moment. “Can’t stop him. He’s citing freedom of worship.”
    “I—”
    “No.” She hustled me backward until we were behind one of the columns holding up the vaulted roof. “Stay,” she said, pressing herself against me from the other side so I couldn’t go anywhere if I wanted to. All that muscle against my back was reassuring. I wriggled my face out a little bit so that I could see. The memory fabric of Zaneisha’s dress had gone hard around us, ready to redistribute any kinetic force.
    Like a bullet.
    Gregor came in at a fast walk, stepping sideways. His pistol wasn’t out, but his hand was hovering right by it, and his eyes were fixed on the door. He edged toward us without ever seeming to look in our direction, taking a position where he could watch both us and the door.
    The entrance of the Inheritor was something of an anticlimax. He was an elderly man with olive skin, long reddish hair, and a beard that was fading to white. He wore loose, undyed linen trousers and a long top made out of some kind of light cotton. He walked slowly into the foyer without touching the holy water. He was favoring his left side, and I wondered if he was hurt. But his eyes were sharp as he peered around the nave.
    I recognized him by the way he stood; he had been the man holding back while the reporters swarmed toward me. Not a journalist after all, but an Inheritor.
    “He followed us here,” I said. My fear was getting stronger, blood thrumming in my ears.
    “I know,” Zaneisha said. “And we didn’t see him, which means he might be a professional, which means stay put.”
    “That’s far enough, sir,” Gregor said, his deep voice burring. “Any farther and I’ll consider it a threat to my charge’s safety and act accordingly.”
    The man ignored him, staring at me instead. “I don’t want to hurt you, child.”
    “Then leave,” I suggested. Zaneisha pressed me a little harder against the stone. I’m sure that if she could have spared a hand, she would have shoved my face back behind the column.
    The man wasn’t moving. “Don’t you see what’s happening here?” he asked me. “You yearn for a place of holiness. You wish this false consciousness to reconnect with God. You want to rejoin your soul.”
    “My soul is right here,” I said over Zaneisha’s warning hiss.
    “You should understand that you must shape yourself according to God’s plans. To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to live, and a time to die. Your time came. What persists is an affront to God, and you must put it to rest.”
    “You want me to kill myself.”
    “You’re already dead,” he said, infinitely gentle. “Child, ask yourself why these godless men of science brought you back. Have you not wondered?”
    “It was a godless woman of science, thank you very much,and they’re doing it to save the soldiers,” I said, but my heart stuttered. I had wondered, in the nights that dragged on forever, when not even Paul McCartney’s most soothing melodies were able to drive the questions from my head. The argument that I was a good candidate sounded all right until you considered all the many people in the century in between who must have gotten themselves frozen the right way, with the right injuries.
    Many of whom would know how to handle themselves in this time a lot better than I did. Many of whom were actually the soldiers they were trying to save.
    He shook his head sadly. “They mean to use you, child, to further their ungodly ways. God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female