DUALITY /#Wattys 2021

Chapter 2

The roof of the old church blocked the moonlight, making its textured stone walls look flat as a chalkboard. A frigid breeze scraped a few crumpled leaves across the roof and they blew past Ridley, swirling away into the darkness. At ten o'clock on a chill November night, two stories above the ground, Anansa Ridley Faircloth, a black mask over her face, clung to the side of the former Roman Magnus Church, built some two hundred years ago as a super-church for several thousand people. Feeling in the dark for handholds and footholds, she eased up the side of the building without a security line.

The building had been used as office space for well over a century—religious services were after hours in the workplace now—but it still had an old-fashioned wooden bell tower at the top. Although the place had been corporate office spaces for the Guild longer than anyone in town could even remember, the bell still worked, pealing six a.m., noon, six p.m., and midnight to the workingtown of Holstonia three miles to the east, where her mother walked Ridley's patrol tonight with a scarf around her mouth and throat, dressed as Ridley.

Ridley didn't look down. She couldn't afford to. A familiar torpor gripped her body, turning every handhold, every inch up the side of the building into a form of slow torture. She'd hoped the walk here through the woods would have warmed her up better than this.

These days, only exercise made her feel awake at all. It had been so different the day she and Simon came home to wait on pins and prickles for his Guildsmanship to come through, for distant family to be able to come to their wedding, and for their baby to be born. Then Simon had walked late to the terminal for money, gotten caught out after dark, and encountered the Forest People along the way.

Good Neighbors had brought him home to her, bloodied, his head crushed. He'd died in her arms. All Ridley knew was that the Forest Person who'd killed him was a tall light-skinned man with fuzzy hair in long braids. Then, three days of miserable labor narrowed her whole world to a sort of tunnel vision: Exhaustion, grief, baby, sleep.

Since that night, she'd stumbled through the hot summer and crisp fall in a fog of grief and pain. Her mother had seen that something was wrong. She wrung her hands for weeks when she could be home, entreating Ridley to get up, bringing the baby to her bedside.

Ridley'd known she couldn't exist like that; it wasn't good for Sannah, her new daughter. The child needed more than a living corpse for a mother. Blurry memories came to her, as hazy as rain on glass: spinning across the floor as a traveling gymnast for the Confederation in routines that catapulted her to captain of the Confederate Women's National Team; soaring between the uneven bars, her body arcing through space, her bare feet hitting the mats in a perfect landing. Exercise had saved her then.

Running, fighting, training with the Neighbors to police their wilderness town of Holstonia would get her blood pumping again, and maybe bring her face to face with the hermit who killed her baby's father. Exercise would save her again.

It had, at least for the hours she spent patrolling and training, learning to handle a knife and sword, adapting her gymnastics to help her climb, fight, and kick. About ten minutes after she started a training session or a patrol, her head would clear, and when she finished, a warm glow suffused her chest and her limbs for a few hours. For a few hours, she could rock and sing to her daughter, cuddle her, feed her, and find gratitude that Simon's incredibly cute little baby was hers to have and hold.

Then reality took her again, and grief stole her back for itself.

She forced herself to climb, annoyed she'd ever pressed forward with this. The idea had come to her at a Neighbors' meeting and everyone agreed it was genius. This raid would help not only everyone in their town, but everyone in the Guild's retail section across the whole Confederation. Ridley would fall back into loss and lassitude and know she didn't have the energy to do this. But, information and equipment for the raid kept arriving. Word had already gone out to Neighbors all over the Confederation. She'd drag herself out to patrol, she'd run, she'd practice her gymnastics in the Community Center, and that old glow would return to her and she'd know she had to do it.