Chapter 2

Miss Hanni was a teacher, almost thirty years old, who wore her hair tied back in a bun and angular, rimless glasses. Aside from her tendency to be melodramatic and her love of pop quizzes, she was a virtuous and devout believer. But to Kieli, “devout believer” was not a compliment. “My goodness, Kieli! Honestly, whatever is the matter with you?” Honestly, whatever is the matter with you? My Lord. Oh, what are we to do with you? For a while now, Miss Hanni had been lamenting the state of affairs with repetitions from her limited collection of phrases, looking up at the ceiling with exaggerated gestures, and taking off her glasses to dab at her eyes with her handkerchief. “Not only are you late, but dressed the way you are. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about today’s service.” “I’m sorry, Miss Hanni,” Kieli apologized, checking her desire to say, “I didn’t know.” She wanted to avoid giving lame excuses and having a pointless argument with her teacher. After all, it would look bad to say it was because no one had told her (even if that was the truth). A few of her classmates snickered in the three rows behind Miss Hanni. They all wore their beautifully embroidered, white choir uniforms; Kieli alone was dressed in the normal black bolero with its big collar. The plain, black uniform had its own kind of dignity when everyone was wearing it, but right now, Kieli looked like a witch-in-training, wearing a cheap robe, who’d been thrown into a chorus of angels. The parish’s head priest would be giving a congratulatory address on the first day of the Colonization Days holiday, so the service was not being held at the school’s auditorium but rather in the cathedral in the center of town. Kieli and the other ninth-graders at the boarding school would be singing the hymns, so they were to wear their white choir uniforms and meet in time for rehearsal. The announcement was made at the student assembly last week, but Kieli was in detention doing a report and thus absent. The school dorms were double rooms, so normally it wouldn’t have been a problem for one of the roommates to miss an assembly. Unfortunately, Kieli didn’t have a roommate, and neither her classmates nor her neighbors were kind enough to tell her. She was used to it, and she didn’t feel like crying to her teacher over every little incident. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now. As long as you’re sorry, we’ll let it go this time. Don’t let it happen again.” Maybe she’d made the right choice in opting not to make excuses, because Miss Hanni left it at that and let Kieli off the hook surprisingly easily. “Now don’t dawdle. Get in line. The service is starting. Go to the back where you’ll stand out as little as possible.” “Yes, ma’am.” Kieli gave a quick bow as she passed by her teacher and took her place in the very back row of the choir. To her right, the freckle-faced, frizzy-haired Zilla let out a short laugh through her upturned nose. No doubt she was one of the girls who’d laughed earlier. Blond-haired Becca suddenly appeared at her left. She glanced at Kieli, raised the skirt of her own black uniform, and winked as if to say, “It happened to me, too.” Kieli blinked at her for a second, then looked at Becca and let out a small, wry grin. It wasn’t as if Becca wearing the black uniform would help Kieli at all, but it cheered her up a little. Sensing Zilla’s dubious glare from her right, she suppressed her smile, erased the expression from her face, and turned forward. The choir stood on raised platforms against the wall, so even from the back row, she could look out over the inside of the majestic central cathedral. A high, arched ceiling capped the white concrete walls. She’d heard that the impressive stained glass covering the walls to the right and left and the electric lights designed to look like candles were gifts from the Church in the capital. In the front, the black-robed priests were in neat lines on both sides of the pulpit, and behind them, the general congregation packed tightly into the pews. The diversely shaped hats of the parishioners wove together in an artless, uneven wave in contrast to the uniformity of the priests. It baffled Kieli as much as ever that so many people would gather in reverence of a mother planet whose name they couldn’t even remember and a God whose name they’d long since forgotten, but she didn’t speak thoughtlessly of those things the way she used to. As far as Kieli knew, she was the only person who’d realized that there was no God in this church, and the Church’s prestige continued, unwavering, to this day. The rustling noise of the worshippers’ whispers that had filled the space suddenly fell silent. The white-robed head priest appeared from behind a curtain and proceeded to the pulpit at a leisurely pace. Kieli hid her grimace at the reverent sighs that escaped the silent congregation here and there. She’d seen the head priest many times since she was small, but she couldn’t reconcile what was so holy about him that would elicit such appreciation of him from people. He was an aging man with thinning hair, and his stout build gave him a kind of dignity. Anyone passing him on the street, though, probably wouldn’t think of him as anything more than a man getting on in years with a decent amount of wealth. For one thing, if he had any kind of sacred, divine insight, how could he fail to notice that? There was no better evidence that the Church possessed no holy powers than that, weaving in and out of the chapel during prayers as if it owned the place. Shifting her gaze, Kieli could see the image of a man with a rope around his neck, floating in the air above the head priest’s head. Swollen blood vessels colored his face a dark red as he peered with great interest at the manuscript from which the head priest was reading. The hanged ghost lifted his face as if he’d felt her gaze. His eyes met Kieli’s, and his red, blood-swollen lips twisted in a crescent-shaped grin. Kieli glared expressionlessly back at the hanged ghost and refocused her attention on the head priest. Even his oh-so-wonderful sermon that spoke so grandly of death and rebirth didn’t leave any deep impressions; it just sounded phony to her ears. Kieli. She heard a voice calling her name. Kieli, it’s starting. “Eh?” When she came to herself, Kieli looked in the direction of the voice and saw Becca’s blue eyes, like the glass eyes of a doll, winking at her from the end of the choir row. At the edge of her field of vision, Miss Hanni’s rimless glasses glared angrily at her as if to say, “Am I still going to have to talk to you before you’re satisfied?” The next thing she knew, the organ’s accompaniment had started and the choir began singing “The Song of Our First Blessings.” Kieli panicked and started dragging the lyrics from her memory, practically lip-synching along with the alto chorus, and looked over at Becca standing next to her. Becca stood as straight as she could, looking directly ahead, and her beautiful voice happily sang the soprano part. Kieli’s row wasn’t singing the soprano part, and Becca’s lyrics were a little off, but no one but Kieli would pay it any mind. After the service ended, it would be the Colonization Days holiday that her whole class looked forward to so much. To Kieli, it would be just another boring, melancholy ten days. At any rate, Becca was in a good mood today. Apparently she was going to see the sights in Westerbury during the holidays. Her parents and younger brother had gone on ahead and were waiting for her to meet up with them. At the moment she was rambling on about Westerbury being a city that had developed cable networking and audio-visual technology, and how when the sun went down, screens on building walls projected sparkling colors that shifted dizzyingly along the streets as far as the eye could see. Something about a wondrous ice cream inlaid with pieces of stars being all the rage. Something about some experiential theater that just opened and how she was going to see a show there with her family at the end of her stay. Kieli mostly ignored Becca as she bragged about her sightseeing plans, interjecting the occasional “Hmm” or “Wow.” She couldn’t imagine what someone would experience at an experiential theater or how it would be experienced, so Kieli had no idea if it was really worth all the excitement. The ice cream trend was the one thing that held some slight interest for her, but Becca veered away from that subject the second she brought it up. “You can expect a souvenir, Kieli.” While Kieli was using all the imagination she had to picture what ice cream inlaid with pieces of stars would look like, Becca stopped boasting for a minute and turned to face her, her coat twirling as she moved. “What would you like?” “I don’t need anything,” Kieli refused vaguely. Becca pouted. “Aww, you could ask for something.” Her sleeves fluttered in the wind as she turned and resumed her jaunty walk down the street. Becca was a pretty girl. Today, instead of the school-designated travel clothes, she wore a brilliant red coat and carried, as expected, not the school-designated bag, but a brown Boston bag. As for Kieli, over her usual uniform she wore the school-designated black duffle coat, and the unfriendly bag (which most students preferred not to use because of its resemblance to a mail sack) hung diagonally across her shoulder. Becca’s supple, blond hair fell in waves down to her waist and looked stunning against her red coat. Kieli’s hair was long and black and just hung artlessly down her back. Becca was tall and attractive. On the other hand, if her class were to line up according to height, Kieli would be a little ahead of the center. If someone on the street were to catch sight of Becca and Kieli walking together, there is no doubt they would think Kieli was exceedingly plain next to the girl as lovely as a fashion doll. But apparently Kieli was the only one thinking of such trivial things. The passersby paid no special attention to the two girls and quickly walked on by, turning up the collars of their coats. It was the first afternoon of the Colonization Days holiday, and people hunched over as they walked along the streets of Easterbury, all bundled up for winter. Still, there was a sense of merriment in the air. Those who could take long holidays would be traveling with their families, and those who couldn’t most likely planned to go home early to spend a leisurely evening indoors. The Colonization Days came every year as the seasons readied themselves to step through winter’s door. The planet had greeted hundreds of winters since the Saints’ ship made its autumnal landing. The story was that, thanks to the abundant fuel resources they mined from the planet’s strata, the planet used to be highly advanced. But before long, a war broke out over those resources, and the long war itself ate up almost all of them. That happened long before Kieli was born. All anyone could mine on the planet now were the dregs of inefficient fossil fuels. Bundles of exhaust pipes projected from the roofs of all the houses, coughing up thick, yellowish-gray smoke as if to paint a sky already the same color. The train station’s clock tower came into view at the end of the main street, sandwiched between buildings to the right and left. People holding large bags were sucked under the vaulted roof; they were most likely going to spend the holidays in a different town. The station building had been remodeled just a few years ago when it adopted a new railroad line, and a magnificent domed roof matching the design of the central cathedral rose toward the sky. To Kieli, it was needlessly magnificent, and she felt she would still be more comfortable with the old abandoned station building on the other side of town with its simple and unfriendly concrete walls. She went around the rotary, casually gazing at the three-wheeled taxis (these, too, used fossil fuels with frighteningly bad gas mileage and carried cylindrical fuel tanks resembling unexploded bombs on their roofs) waiting for wealthy passengers in front of the station. When the entrance to the station drew near, a man’s silhouette unexpectedly caught her attention. He was sitting on a bench toward the front, his head hanging down. Kieli stopped walking for a second. “Is something wrong? I’m leaving, you know.” Becca looked curiously back at her from a few steps ahead. “Yeah…He’s dead.…” Kieli murmured shortly before she began walking again. At this time of year, if anyone bothered to look, they could find the frozen corpse of at least one homeless wanderer somewhere in town every morning. They were generally elderly people, but the dead body on the bench still looked fairly young. He might be a seminary student. Seminarians from the university in the capital came on study pilgrimages for their priesthood exams, after all. But then, a seminarian on a study pilgrimage would never die in the street, and considering his casual attire consisting of a nylon half-coat and rough workpants, along with his rusty, copper-colored hair, she couldn’t really say he was a proper seminarian. Regardless, the girls at her boarding school recognized all men about his age as seminarians, so, for lack of any better ideas, Kieli decided to think of him as a seminary student. The seminary student had expired where he sat, his back leaning heavily into the bench and his head drooping. He must not have had any unfinished business, because she couldn’t see his spirit around anywhere. Kieli had mixed feelings when she caught herself confirming that so casually. Most people wouldn’t see a dead body and start looking for its ghost. “Ugh, Kieli!” Becca urged. Kieli picked up her pace and passed in front of the bench. She would inform a station attendant later. Then they would contact the priests in charge of body disposal who would come clean it up. Kieli was only a few steps past the bench when she stopped again. Out of the corner of her eye, she felt like she saw the corpse move. She thought it was her imagination. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. He’s dead.