Black Man / Thirteen

“Won’t be much longer now.”

He started. When night fell, the quiet in the derelict building seemed to deepen somehow, and Ren’s voice jumped him like a gunshot. He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway that led through to the tower stairs. Light from the last red-gold leavings of the sunset outside meshed with the bluish glow of the camping lamps he’d lit, picked up a gleam in her eyes and along the teeth of the zip fastener on the ancient leather jacket she wore.

“What you doing?”

“Praying.” Half defiant, because he certainly hadn’t noticed her doing it in the last few days.

She nodded. Moved into the room and folded herself down onto her sleeping bag with unconscious grace.

“We need to talk,” she said, and he thought she sounded weary. “Why don’t you come over here.”

He nearly jumped again. “What for?”

“I won’t bite you, Scott.”

“I, uh, I know that. I can hear you from here, though.”

“Maybe you can. But I’d rather we didn’t have to shout. Now, come over here.”

Tight-lipped, he got up from his own bedroll and walked over to hers. She nodded to her left and he squatted awkwardly beside her, not quite sitting down. Her scent washed over him, faintly unclean with desert sweat—he thought she hadn’t showered since early the day before. She looked into his face, and he felt the same old flip in his chest. She nodded upward, toward the ceiling and the tower above.

“You know who that is up there,” she murmured. “Don’t you.”

Exhilaration sloshed in his guts, chased up and met the feeling she’d made under his ribs. He managed a jerky nod of his own. “It is, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, it is.” She sighed. “This is difficult for me, Scott. I grew up in a big family that had some Christians in it, but I wasn’t one of them. My religious experience is…very different from yours. Where I’m from, we accepted that other beliefs were possible, but we always thought they were just other ways of looking at the same truths we believed in. Less accurate, less enlightened paths. I never thought that maybe our truth would be the less enlightened one, that the Christians would be the ones who got it right. That—” She shook her head. “I never considered that.”

He felt a warm, protective affection for her surge up inside, like flames. He reached out and took her hand where it lay in her lap, squeezed gently.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You were true in your beliefs. That’s what counts.”

“I mean, you have to believe what you see with your own eyes, Scott. Right?” Her eyes held his. “You have to believe what you’re told when nothing else makes any sense, right?”

He drew a deep breath. “This makes perfect sense to me, Carmen.”

“Yeah, well here’s the thing, and I don’t know if there’s anything in your Bible that covers this, because it certainly isn’t what I was taught about the final cycle. He says”—another upward tilt of her eyes—“that he’s come early, that it’s not time yet and he has to gather his strength. He has work to do here, but his enemies are out there and they’re still strong. And that means we have to protect him until it is time. He’s chosen us, Scott. Sorted us from the, uh, the—”

“The chaff?”

“Yeah, the chaff. You saw what he did with Nocera and Ward? They were servants of the darkness, Scott. I see that now. I mean, I never liked Nocera, and Ward, well, I thought he was okay but—”

“Satan has a thousand snares,” Scott told her. “A thousand masks to wear.”

“Right.”

He hesitated, looking at her. “Are you His—” He tasted the word, awkward on his tongue. “His handmaiden?”

“Yes. That’s what he’s told me. Until one of the, uh, the angels can come to take on the task. Until then, he says he’ll speak through me.”

He was still holding her hand. He let go, pulled his own hands back as if she were hot to the touch. He tried not to stare at how beautiful she was.

“You are. So worthy of it,” he said hoarsely. “You’ll be filled with light.”

Then her hand was on him, on the buckle of his belt, pulling him to her. She leaned in and brushed her parted lips across his mouth. Pulled back again.

He gaped. Blood hammered in his head. Below the belt buckle, he felt suddenly trapped and swollen.

“What are you doing?” he hissed.

She gestured at the ceiling. “He’s up there, Scott. Staying up there, keeping watch for us. It’s all right.”

“No, it’s—” Shaking his head numbly. Trying to explain. “—it’s a, a sin, Carmen.”

He wanted to move away from her, but in moving he only tipped back over in his awkward crouch and wound up sitting slumped against the wall behind him, still on the bedroll. He hadn’t succeeded in opening the distance between them at all. Or maybe—he’d wonder about it afterward—maybe he just hadn’t wanted to move away from her after all.

“Carmen,” he pleaded. “We can’t be si

But Carmen Ren only hooked a thumb inside the neckline of her shirt, looked down at her own hand, and tugged. The static seam split with a tiny crackle and she ran her thumb downward, opening the shirt on the molded lift of her breasts in their profiler cups. He could see through the clear plastic sheen to where her nipples were pressed flat against the i

“How can it be?” she asked simply. “Scott, don’t you see? Don’t you feel it? This is meant to be. This is a sacrament, a purification for both of us. A gift of his love. Reach inside yourself. Don’t you feel it?”

And he did.

It had been a very long time.

He was not a virgin, not since the eleventh grade and Janey Wilkins, and Janey hadn’t exactly been the only one before he left for the Rim, either, though he tried not to take pride in that because he knew pride in it was wrong. But the girls had always come to him, no way to deny it. Scott took after his mother, was tall and long-legged, and he’d hardened his upper body in his early teens, putting in all the part-time hours he could get stringing fences and doing river security for the big Bitterroot land parcels so later he’d be able to pay his own way through tenth to twelfth grade and not be a burden or have to sign up for a youth stint with the marines if he wanted to finish out his education. And then, for all his muscle and length of limb, he was still soft-spoken and kind, and it seemed from what Janey told him that that didn’t hurt too much, either, when a girl was looking.

But in the Rim, something happened to him.

Maybe it was the fact that sex was suddenly everywhere—perfectly toned and tampered-with bodies, impossible to know if they were real flesh or generated v-format interfaces, but there they were, twining around each other on the big LCLS billboards, on storefront display screens, on those high-end pixelated shopping bags the women carried in fistfuls like a harvest of some big, brightly colored oblong fruit held up by the stalks and vines. There was flesh and liquid moaning on every nonfaith cha

Carmen Ren burned through his loneliness like a falling star. Months of half-denied fantasy boiled up inside him. Her flesh where he touched it, where she guided his hands, was warm and smooth, and her tongue in his mouth tasted of some dark, unfamiliar spice. She peeled one of the profiler cups for him, dropped the jellied weight of the breast beneath into his hand. It seemed to fit there as if made for him to hold, as if intended that way. Her hands went back to his belt, loosened it and slipped inside. He went rigid as she slid fingers around the shaft of his erection, squeezed hard at her breast in reflex. She moaned into his mouth.