The Unwritten Sin

Chapter 37

The gunfire had since stopped, but searchlights pierced the sky above Phase City as the first stars began to appear. James returned to Wilder, who was sitting on the concrete dock, wearing his now dry jeans. James had a blanket wrapped around him as he walked up the beach. "I managed to get into one of the caches," he said. "Last year I thought it might be wise to hide a few extra stores down here, near the tide line on the beach." He smiled and said, "I thought god was speaking to me for a little while. I was having visions, like the one that Lo showed me on the ship. I didn't really think anything of it at the time. I wrote them down, and made the caches because one of the visions showed me sitting on the sand, wearing a blanket, shivering and freezing."

"Did your vision predict me?" Wilder asked, as James sat down next to him. James paused a moment, and handed Wilder a tinfoil packet. 

"Kind of," he said. "I knew I wasn't alone on the beach but," he looked off into the water. "I didn't now what else I had done on the beach."

Wilder crinkled his nose at him, bumping their shoulders together. 

"I'm lighting a fire," he said. "Do you think we are far enough away that the PCP won't come after us?"

"I think," James said as the wind picked up, "I think that they may have their minds on other things. Plus, most of Phase City is a criminal underworld. The Great Hall and the Ministry are basically the only things that are above the law. Well, and they exist as the law too, so I suppose that counts."

Wilder lit a small fire with sticks of driftwood and brush he had found on the beach, and as the flames licked at the fuel, he sat back on his heels to watch. "What is this stuff?" he asked, unwrapping the tinfoil.

"Food," James said. "Dried apricots and plums, seeds and nuts and some dry yogurt as well. This is what we ate on my Tour."

Wilder ate the little cubes of yogurt slowly, watching the city lights glisten on the water. 

"Do you think they will come back?" 

James shrugged. "Unfortunately, if the vision and the scripture is anything to go off of, the cleanse will happen anyhow. We failed our end of the bargain, and we have to be punished for it."

His face was orange and shadowy in the firelight. "Abel made a pact. There was a great meeting. They ordained the way of ascension through the sins, and Abel decided that if we had lost our way, there should be some way of keeping humans on track. Some way to remind us. They had the holy book written of course, but Abel knew that people would not follow his writings so closely, especially as the years passed. Abel had lived a very long life, achieving what he achieved. He was smart to assume that humans are flawed. Humans will try anything to get around something painful or uncomfortable, especially if it has to do with their growth. In the Dark Ages, people were obsessed with social media, and there were horrible horrible things that happened on earth. Murder, wars, nuclear explosions, devastating climate change. And yet humans filmed it all on social media, unable to show empathy. There was a great need for someone like Abel to set it all right."

Wilder nodded, feeling a chill run along his back. James moved closer to him, and draped the blanket over his shoulders. He extended his legs toward the fire, and scratched his shin, where scars appeared in a ladder shape directly over the bone.

"You got all this from a vision?" Wilder asked. "You were gone not even a full minute."

James shook his head. "No," he said, "Some of it comes from the history books in the Ministry. But now I am even wondering what it all means. If any of what I learned is real." He stared into the sky, and said, "Bless him, Abel made a choice. I thought, while we were on the ship, that it was inhumane. It was an inhumane thought and an inhumane pact to make with aliens to wipe us clean of our home planet. But," he shook his head. "I have seen the destruction during the Dark Ages. No one was enlightened. No one was thinking or sharing or making love. No one was meditating or caring for one another. It was so individualistic that no one could look further than themselves in the scheme of their lives. Everyone lived for seventy years, but diseases of the heart, diseases of the soul, was killing them left and right."