Chapter 2
Byrdie
Ididn’t see him coming.
A punch drives me to my knees.
My head is ringing as hands grip me and toss me over a hard shoulder. The rain is cold and relentless, soaking my hair and freezing the skin beneath my clothes. I don’t have to look to know who has a hold of me: one of Jeremiah’s acolytes.
Every step he takes makes my stomach twist. I gag, and my throat burns with bitter bile, but nothing comes out.
The Gabriel Mansion, the place I’ve spent the last few weeks working as a maid and hiding from the obsessed cult leader who wanted me as his wife, is quiet. The front gate is wide open.
God punishes you in the afterlife. But on earth, while you still live and breathe and have a body that can be hurt, his vessels act for him. That’s what Jeremiah likes to say in his sermons.
And there is no punishment greater than the sweatbox.
The windowless cage, a wooden box in the wicked heat of the New Mexico desert, is a stifling space with no room to stand. No person to talk to. Nothing but an eerie silence, a deep pitch-black blackness, and the sting of your sweat dripping from your brow and into your eye.
After I lost Jeremiah’s baby, and he wanted to punish me, I spent one night in the sweatbox. I was in too much shock back then to be as terrified as I should have been.
I get my first taste of claustrophobia when Jeremiah’s acolyte throws me into the trunk of a black truck just outside the Gabriel Mansion’s iron gates; the lid slamming down so hard the vehicle shakes.
I break all my fingernails and scream myself hoarse in the hours I sit trapped inside.
It took six hours by bus to get from New Mexico to Massey, Arizona. My pounding head makes me feel like I’ve been living in darkness for days. I recoil from the intense New Mexico sun when the truck stops and the lid creaks as it swings open.
An acolyte yanks me out of the trunk he shoved me into hours before. With a painful grip of my hair, he drags me through the red dirt, away from the small cabins in the compound where everyone lives.
Toward a solitary cabin that stands alone.
I start fighting. Weak from not enough water and exhausted from hours without sleep, I have no strength to fight him with.
A door squeaks as it swings open.
I groan, and my head rings as it bounces off the wall when he shoves me inside.
The door slams shut as I collapse to the ground.
My world is black.
And hot.
Too hot.
There is no greater punishment than the sweatbox, and until Jeremiah decides what he wants to do to his runaway wife, this is where I will stay.
“Get up,” a harsh male voice orders.
“But I—” I blink, stunned by the too-bright light and the two men who drag me out of the sweatbox and leave me on the red, dusty ground.
I don’t know how long I was in the sweatbox for, but it doesn’t feel nearly as long as the drive from Arizona back to New Mexico.
They wait in a silence so heavy and oppressive that it presses me down to the ground even as I try to get to my feet. I feel their disgust as they watch me, waiting for me to pick myself up.
My sweat stinks, and it drips from every part of me. Time loses meaning when you don’t have the sun or a clock as a frame of reference. I don’t know how long I was in the box for, but I feel sick, dizzy and confused.
What memories I have are muggy, as crooked and warped as my sense of time.
I remember a small tin of water being pushed toward me, bread so stale I had to dip it into the water to soften it, and a corner of the sweatbox I crawled to and squatted to pee.
Using both hands, I push myself up from the ground. Shaking my hair out of my face makes my world tip. No one helps me when I stumble. Not even when I fall.
They just watch.
The camp is quiet.
It’s getting dark. Maybe it’s late afternoon? Someone spiked lanterns into the red dirt, along the path that winds through the small cabins. I know what lies at the heart of the compound, and it’s no place I want to be. My eyes skate left, settling on a raised patch of reddish dirt.
They buried my mom there.
Without her, I wouldn’t be here.
Without her, none of this would have happened.
I get to my feet, and this time, I stay up long enough to take a small step forward, drawing out the inevitable.
A hand in the center of my back shoves me forward. Weak from too little food and water, I go down with a cry and grunt when I graze my knees as I land. Dirt flies into my face, burning my eyes and causing them to water.
Coughing, I brush away the dirt and the tears.
All around me, everyone watches, doing nothing to help me up.
Seren stands with the other women, her once warm expression cold, and her brown eyes hard. It wasn’t long ago that the women were cruel to her, and I spoke up to defend her. Now she looks through me. I ran from Jeremiah, and now I’ve become the enemy.
With my hands on the ground, I push myself to my feet, and the acolytes start walking to the small wooden cabin in the heart of the compound.
Jeremiah’s cabin.
I pass the others, and one by one, they turn their backs toward me.
No one says one word, and even the loudest child is silent.
Shunned.
No one wants to be shunned, not even by the people they ran from.
Maybe I’m weak for my eyes to burn as they turn their backs on me, but I remember how warm and friendly they were when Mom first brought us here. People took my hands and smiled as they showed me around, including me and involving me in a way no one had before.
For a girl dragged from school to town and town to city by her flaky mom, bullied for my threadbare clothes and my awkwardness, it had felt like the best kind of homecoming to be in a place where people wanted me instead of telling me I didn’t belong and chasing me away.
An acolyte pushes Jeremiah’s cabin door open and steps aside. He isn’t just there to hold the door open. He’s there to stop me from running back out of it.
It was his job before.
Jeremiah has six of them. Big, strong men with thick beards, navy shirts, black combat trousers, boots, and piercing stares.
Jeremiah stands beside his wooden desk in the cabin that was once ours. I keep my eyes on him and not on the bed where he raped me.
In his mid-forties, he’s handsome in a quiet, intense way. He’s in his usual blue linen shirt, black baggy linen trousers, and barefoot. His dark brown beard is thick but cut short, and his eyes are silver.
I loved his eyes when I first met him. I thought they were sincere and mysterious and wise. It wasn’t long before I learned better.
Now I look at him, and I feel cold all over.
The acolytes followed me in, and I feel their hot breath stirring the back of my hair.
Jeremiah is calm, his expression placid as he stands with his arms folded behind his back.
“Do you repent?” he asks, his voice almost gentle.
I dart a glance at that hated bed and lift my chin. “I did nothing wrong.”
“Do you repent?” There’s no change to the volume of Jeremiah’s question.
I shake my head this time. “I did nothing wrong.”
He holds my gaze for two beats.
In the silence, I feel him quietly judging me. My life is in his hands, and he takes his time to deliver my punishment. I’m not na?ve enough to believe it ended with the sweatbox.
“The men whose home you were living in. Who were these men?”
Alarm bites at the heels of my fear. “They had nothing to do with this. Leave them alone.”
A tiny muscle twitches in his right cheek. “You are my wife, Byrdie.”
My tongue is too fast to catch the dangerous words that spill out, “Because you forced me to be.”
The hands clasped behind him slowly unwind, and I edge back.
He turns and walks away, folding his hands behind his back as he wanders the room.
And always, I’m conscious of the silent compound, and I’m certain there is no escape from this room. Not unless Jeremiah wills it.
“Doubt is a form of disease. A… leprosy,” he says quietly, and turns to smile at Jason, one of his acolytes. “Is it not?”
Jason smiles pleasantly back. “It is, Jeremiah.”
“Leprosy spreads until it affects healthy skin. A good doctor—one who cares about others—wishes to prevent the spread of that rot. A good doctor removes the leprosy. He doesn’t allow it to spread and infect innocents. He saves.”
It is sick of him to mention rot, and I hate him for it.
He does it on purpose to taunt me. My mom died because he refused to get her the medication she needed.
She died in agony from an infection that she didn’t have to die of at all.
And she died, like a child, believing that if Jeremiah prayed hard enough for her, she could avoid the antibiotics she needed to stop the gangrene spreading up her leg and turning it black.
“Miriam…” Jeremiah looks at me. “You remember Miriam from my sermons, don’t you?”
I root around in my mind for a memory I let go of almost as soon as I heard it.
Between Jeremiah’s two-hour-long sermons, the lessons I had with the other women, and my mother repeating Jeremiah’s lectures over and over during mealtimes as if I hadn’t been sitting right beside her for them while desperately wishing myself elsewhere, his words played like an eternal loop in my head.
Leaving the compound has made me fumble to remember.
“From the Old Testament. She criticized Moses,” I say slowly.
He beams at me, and I hate myself for how warm and pleased I am as I bask under his radiant smile. “She criticized him, and for that, what did God do?”
I shake my head.
He looks at Deacon.
Deacon stands taller as he says, “God punished her with leprosy. And she went out into the desert, and there she died.”
My heart clenches.
In the same gentle voice, Jeremiah echoes, “And she went out into the desert, and there she died.” He pauses for a second too long, smiling again when I start to inch away.
“But Moses was not a cruel man. First, he tried to treat her sickness. They bathed her in holy water, and they shaved her hair, and they hoped that would be enough to hold back the rot from spreading. Do you know what happened then? Did the rot continue to spread?”
At that moment, I notice the razor on his desk, and I feel lightheaded and sick.
I shake my head, my teeth chattering loudly in the too-quiet room. “I d-don’t know,” I stutter.
“The rot spread because it had taken root in her heart for daring to raise her voice against the vessel God had chosen to speak through. But Moses still tried to save her. I can do no less for my wife.”
He walks over to the desk, and he picks up the razor, and I try to run, but his acolytes already have a tight hold of me.
They don’t care if they bruise. They ignore my screams and my yells as they force me down to my knees, and Jeremiah takes the razor to my hair, and he hacks and he hacks until it’s all around my knees.
My head is light. So light. My body is heavy as the acolytes lift me from my knees to my feet, and they take me in a stunned daze out of Jeremiah’s cabin and to the women’s bathing room.
They look, but they don’t see my body when they strip my clothes off me and plunge me in water so cold it shocks me to my bones.
I am no longer one of them, and my pain is nothing to them.
They pull a dress over my head that feels like canvas and itches like fleas are running over me.
My head slams against the boot of the truck. It pounds, and it throbs as an engine purrs.
The acolytes drive me deep into the New Mexico desert, where there are no trees or people or any living thing I can see. And they drag me from the back, toss me into the red dirt, climb into the truck, and leave me alone.
To die.
To them, I am already dead.
Because the leprosy is in my heart, and there is no saving me.