Chapter 6: Clean Hands

There were seven of us children that morning. One fewer than yesterday. I didn't ask what had happened to the eighth. Asking didn't bring food back to the table, and food was the only thing worth looking for.

I was perhaps ten years old, though no one could say for sure, since birth dates weren't a luxury afforded to children of the streets. I led the group just as I’ve led everything else ever since. I took stock of what was there, decided what to do with the little we had, and never let anyone realize when I didn't actually know what I was doing.

We shared the bread we managed to steal from carts passing too close to the alleys. Our nimble hands made the theft quick and unnoticed. I always ate last, after ensuring the little ones had eaten first. It's not like I wasn’t hungry. I just knew that, without food, the weakest among us succumbed far too quickly to even the slightest disease.

It was during a winter after that that the Church found us.

They didn’t come out of charity. They came looking for someone who possessed, however suppressed, mana strong enough to be detected. A man in a grey robe knelt before me in the middle of the street and said that God had a purpose for me greater than merely surviving another winter. I was too hungry to argue theology. I let them sign whatever document it was on my behalf, allowing my own hand to be used to decide something I hadn't truly chosen.

They repeated the same with some of the other children. Others were left behind. Today I wonder what happened to them, but at that moment, I didn't have the courage to question God's choice.

Looking back now, perhaps that lack of resistance was precisely what the Paladins were looking for.

There was no long farewell. I only remember looking back over my shoulder and seeing one of the youngest raise his hand to me, neither smiling nor crying, simply acknowledging that I was truly leaving.

I didn't think about them again. The Paladins' routine left no room for that. Every hour of the day had a purpose: sword training, doctrine, prayer, sword training again. On certain holy days, fasting was mandatory. Given my history with hunger, that was one of the easier experiences. And so, I learned that hesitation was the only sin the instructors truly punished.

I was good. I was the best, they said, more than once.

When I was first sent on a Purification, the official term used for the procedure to exorcise a Sin, I did not question the magnitude of what was being asked. I had been taught that Balance demands symmetry: if the sin has spread, the response must be effective.

After each purification, we washed our hands in a bucket of holy water. We were taught that clean hands proved purity of intention.

I did what I was trained to do. I returned alive and victorious. I washed my hands. And no one called it anything other than justice. Neither my superiors nor I myself.

The impact of Doran’s shoulder against mine pulls me out of the lake of my memories.

"You froze," he remarks, not accusingly, just stating a fact.

I am standing at the edge of what remains of a hamlet, now nothing but overgrown ruins, beneath a sky as gray as the days of my past.

I don't respond to Doran, but I nod, uncomfortably, and distance myself from him and the others.

If what Bethenah said yesterday is true, if the Sins I’ve spent my life exorcising were never anything more than desperate people, then villages like this one weren’t purified. They were decimated. And I helped wipe some of them out, convinced I was restoring a balance the Church invented to justify its own hunger for control.

I open my hands in front of me, as if expecting to find some physical proof of what they’ve done. There is nothing there but old calluses and the usual grime from days of travel. They look too clean for everything they helped destroy.

Hands hold no remorse. Only I do.

The rest of the group scatters in search of anything usable, be it metal, fabric, grain scraps, or dried meat. Bethenah walks among the collapsed houses with her map unfurled, comparing the actual terrain to the markings and adjusting a route only she understands.

Sela finds a still-functional well, one dug with enough care to last for generations, and begins filling the canteens, humming softly. I recognize the melody. It is the same chant we used to sing during the harvest thanksgiving ceremonies. But for some reason, she calls upon a divine mother I do not recognize from the original version.

As I think about that, my eyes meet Catarina's. She beckons me over to the chapel where she is kneeling. It is a space too small to hold more than twenty worshippers at a time. As I approach, I see her take a tiny, worn-covered book from her shoulder bag and carefully open it.

Catherine reads quietly, almost to herself, a prayer that seems to sound like the ancient language I have only heard before in the mouths of the temple priests. The delicacy of the sound of her voice brings encouragement to the realization I reached when observing the rubble of that village.

These places the Church of Apex labeled "problematic" in its reports are not merely dots on a map. They are homes with doors painted by hand, by people who built them hoping they would last. Nothing here was made to be erased.

It is the first time since leaving the cell that I truly see the outside world. Not as a backdrop for escape, but as it really is: gray, weary, and full of places like this. Forgotten between one crusade and the next.

Catarina's prayers are interrupted by the sound of screams.

A thin man in patched clothes comes running through the ruins toward Bethenah. I recognize the way he runs faster than I recognize the features of his face. It is the run of someone carrying news more important than his own safety.

"Emrik," Bethenah says the young man's name before he even stops running.

As he draws closer, Emrik’s face becomes more familiar. I had seen him from a distance at the cave camp. He was one of the members of the group Bethenah had sent ahead, someone whose absence I hadn’t even registered until now.

"Paladins," he gasps, barely managing to form the whole word before his next breath. "On the valley road, two hours from here. Asking about a dark-haired man with a scar on his chin, traveling with a group."

All eyes turn to me at once, even though no one needs to say the obvious out loud.

Bethenah is already mounting the horse before Emrik has even finished speaking.

"Everyone, now," she shouts, her voice cutting through any hesitation still lingering over the group. "Ditch anything non-essential. We’re heading toward the forest, not the main road."

The makeshift camp, which hadn't even been properly set up, is already being dismantled in a matter of seconds. Sela gathers up the half-full canteens, Doran calls the horses, and Yuri slings his bow over his shoulder while still running.

I feel my body react before my mind decides anything, the same reflex born of years of training taking over. I quickly pull Catarina up, getting my left hand dirty with dust from the chapel floor in the process.

There is no time to wash it off this time. My impurities will remain where they are.

We hurried toward the next hiding place.

Only, this time, I don't know if I'm running to protect myself or to protect these people. The only ones, aside from those starving children in a long-forgotten alley, who ever let me stay close without demanding anything in return.