Page 81 of Longing for Liberty
“Elder Wright is dead.”
I dropped the beef onto the counter, my hands giving out. “W-what?” It took far too long for my brain synapses to start firing off in a way that made sense. Elder Wright? As in former President Wright, Samuel Roan’s father? The man who beat eight men weeks ago?
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I…don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s all very surprising.”
“I imagine so,” I said, going to him and standing close. I wasn’t sure how he wanted to be comforted. “Was it his heart or something?” He looked to be in his sixties and healthy.
“No. It wasn’t natural.” His face pinched again. “He either fell or threw himself from his twentieth-floor balcony.”
I covered my lips against a gasp, to which Amos nodded.
“And now Sam is the highest elder in the order.”
I blinked up at him, keeping my horror masked. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand much about…the order, but does it not go by age?”
“No,” he said patiently. “Bloodline first and then birth order. Sam is now the oldest male descendant of the Wrights, who were the highest of the chosen, the forefathers of the order. Roan is not his real name.”
“Oh,” I said, holding back how ridiculous I thought it all was. “I heard you say something about an investigation?”
“There won’t be an investigation.” Amos shifted, his body stiff. “Sam says his father has been ranting and raving lately, that his mind was going, and he believes the Maker ended his life in an act of mercy. But Wright had caught wind of Sam’s pleasure house idea and was not happy. They’d been arguing a lot.”
Pleasure house? Oh, yuck. The sex factory.
“Wow,” I breathed. “I’m…so sorry. And that means President Roan is the highest now? He has the final word?”
“That’s exactly what it means,” he said quietly. “But—” He stopped himself, his jaw rocking.
“You can tell me,” I whispered.
“It’s wrong to question the highest elder, but Sam is so different from Wright. His father was a thinker, level-headed, and faithful to the cause, above all.”
He didn’t say the flipside of that, but I nodded, understanding. Roan was not those things. He seemed impulsive and faithful to his own desires, above all.
Wright’s death was suspicious, especially after seeing him beat his son for partying, and knowing they’d been disagreeing about what to do with the excess of females. Literally nobody was in Roan’s way now. If our society were the way it was because of Wright’s vision, how much worse would things be under Roan’s vision?
My eyes went to the table and saw the laptop open. That meant Amos had logged on after I left and then gotten the call. And the call wasn’t about a security breach. I brought my hand to my lips again, fighting back a rush of relief. Whatever was on the Secretary of Arms’s laptop was now on its way to the resistance just in time for whatever cruel changes Roan might have in mind, starting with his deplorable ‘pleasure house.’
I placed a hand against his chest. “How about I make something to eat?”
He nodded, though I could tell his thoughts were far away as he left me to cook.
I wondered what kind of man Amos would have been if he hadn’t been raised in the OM. My faith never told me it was okay to hurt others in order to seek an earthly kingdom, though many people twisted religion in a way that would validate their desires. My faith told me all people were equally loved by the Maker and equally capable of loving in return and doing great things. My faith valued good choices that were made of free will. What would it be like to have been taught the opposite since the day you were born, and not be able to question it, even when your intuition was shouting at you that something was wrong, as was clearly happening to Amos?
The deeply emotive part of my soul pitied him, but mostly I felt angry. I’d heard many stories of people who questioned their cult raisings and got out of them. Amos could too, if he really wanted. But he didn’t want to. Why would he? His life was cushy. His big, important job stroked his ego. His family was living with more freedoms and luxuries than the workers. The man didn’t even have to raise his children—he got to send them away to academies at five years old to be raised by OM staff until they were adults—that was something I’d learned while living with him. Their idea of family units was not traditional or close, as they portrayed.
Amos didn’t have to live with or deal with his wife. Their families were in blood only. Loyalty was to the cause, not family. The relationships were not there. But it seemed like Amos craved that. Every time I started to feel a little bad for him and everyone raised that way, I remembered they embraced the idea of feeling chosen over other human beings who looked different from them. In fact, they embraced it so fully that they were willing to kill millions of people to see it to fruition.
I thought about Wright being pushed over the ledge by his son or someone working for his son. It was probably the same thought Amos was busy having right now, but he would eat it and swallow it and shit it out to disappear from his life. Amos would not question Samuel Roan—Wright—whatever, no matter what that psycho asshole did, all because some man decades ago had passed out on a sunrise hike and had a dream that God spoke to him. If we all believed our dreams were prophecies, there would be the craziest of things happening every day. I called bullshit on Amos Fitzhugh and his blindly faithful ways.
The sliver of pity I felt fizzled away with ahisslike a branch blown into lava.
THIRTY-EIGHT
STATE NEWS: BIG BEN CLOCK TOWER BURNS TO GROUND IN LONDON!
I didn’t allowmyself to feel true relief until the next day when things were still quiet, and Amos was working on his laptop as usual.
