V2Ch17-Surface Tension

“Wake up! Wake up, everyone!” Ramon shouted at the top of his lungs as he came through the camp’s perimeter.

Within seconds, the camp was filled with the loud commotion of people rousing, realizing what was going on, and shaking others.

“Is this real, Ramon?” Cliff Rogers appeared in a state of partial dress—no pants, although thankfully his boxers and sweat-stained button down shirt concealed everything important—and asked the obvious groggily.

Ramon kept himself from yelling back at the stupid question and simply said: “Yes! Definitely real. We have to move right away. Moishe is distracting them, but they were on our trail, and they definitely know where we are.”

“I see. I’ll wake more people!” Cliff took off back toward his own tent, Ramon noticed, not toward anyone else’s—probably realized he wanted to put some pants on before speaking to other people.

Ramon continued rousing people himself, going and shaking the tents of the few people who were heavy sleepers. Families gathered and head-counted their members to make sure no one was missing. People who had already accounted for their relatives’ whereabouts began taking down their tents. After the last move, everyone seemed to know what to do to move on quickly.

I hope we don’t make a habit of this, Ramon thought. But it seemed like a distressing possibility. What would make the cult leader give up on them?

—

“Camp’s in bad shape,” Jeffrey Ross muttered to himself. Three people dead, everyone else tired and wary, expecting the other shoe to drop at any moment as they moved slowly forward. These and the losses they’d taken against the anonymous intruder the other night were the cult’s first unplanned deaths since Orientation started.

I warned Rostov about continuing to chase the enemy through the night, and now this happens. If the enemy didn’t get a few of us in a situation like this, it would be purely due to their own negligence. Hate to say I told you so…

It wasn’t exactly a good political move by Rostov to relax in the cart with the Moloch statue while everyone else had to move on foot either. More than one in the slow, bleary mass of cultists threw resentful glances his way. Rostov either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Jeffrey wouldn’t want to bet on which. Probably both.

He sought Catherine, who was walking alongside the other priests—other than Alice, who was in the cart with Rostov and the unconscious figure of Leonard Robie.

She’d let her hair down, and Jeffrey thought she looked beautiful. A little worn down, maybe, but serene. Unlike Rostov, she actually sort of resembles what I imagine a religious leader would look like, Jeffrey realized. He snorted at the thought. Pictured her wearing a crown of sunflowers. Holding a white staff. She would present a beautiful picture, but the image felt to him like some overgrown teenager experimenting with Wicca.

Then he swallowed nervously as he imagined what the future was actually likely to be. Christ, the religions of the new world are going to be fucked up! Gods like Moloch and leaders like Rostov. Christ on a cracker…

He stepped closer to his wife, out of the shadows and into the moonlight.

“How’s the hunt going, sweetheart?” Catherine asked when she saw him.

With the actual trackers besides Leonard dead, Kassim was directing the group forward with Jeffrey as a backup navigator in case something happened to him.

“We’re still walking straight,” Jeffrey said, deadpan. “I can confirm that we’ll catch them unless they bob and weave a bit. If they get out of the way, though, we might walk past them and never know it.”

The Rostov forces were in a more condensed group as they moved now, to dissuade further surprise attacks from the Assassin who had injured Leonard and killed his fellows. Their scouting abilities right now were extremely limited.

Catherine stifled a chuckle, covering her mouth so the other priests didn’t see she wanted to laugh. Jeffrey could see, because he knew how her face moved when she wanted to laugh.

“Why don’t you and I step away and talk for a while?” she suggested once the impulse to laugh had passed.

Jeffrey extended his arm. She grabbed his bicep and pulled herself close to him. Both of them smiled, and they created a bit of distance between themselves and the rest of the group.

The odds that they specifically would be threatened by Moishe Rose were much lower than the odds of him attacking other pairs of people who might try the same thing. Besides Rostov, Jeffrey and Catherine Ross were two of the strongest members of the camp. A knife in the neck wouldn’t be as effective as it would against most of the other members of the camp, and there was a good chance that it wouldn’t even land.

“So, what are you thinking about?” Catherine asked, batting her long eyelashes at him.

“I’m thinking about how unhappy the group is,” Jeffrey said, not meeting her eyes. “How tired and resentful people are right now.”

“You’re thinking about how bad of a leader Nikolai is,” she said bluntly.

Jeffrey grimaced slightly.

“Well, it’s not as if I disagree with you,” Catherine said. “It’s still night, so we can discuss things a bit more freely. There’s no chance of him being able to spy on us.”

“Can we kill him now?” Jeffrey asked. “Decapitation, knife in the heart, method doesn’t matter, but he’s probably only barely awake, if he hasn’t fallen asleep. If you got Alice to leave the cart for a few minutes on some pretext, I could get the job done.”

“I’ve been thinking along the same line as you for some time,” Catherine admitted. “We’d be much better off without him. He’s a poor leader, he abuses his position, and he’s slowly but surely losing his marbles.” She lowered her voice. “I definitely want to kill him. But here’s why we need to wait until the Orientation is over to act on it. Moloch is burning through his brain right now. That means he’s only going to become more dependent on us priests. So my position is only growing more secure, which means there’s no urgency to act. The second reason is related to the first. Moloch is literally destroying his capacity to think, slowly but surely erasing his brain with these repeated contacts. My understanding is that Moloch wants to make absolutely certain that the cult survives through the ending of Orientation. After Orientation is over, the level of omniscience Moloch is giving Nikolai right now won’t be necessary. The altered Earth will be dangerous, but not nearly as unpredictable as this place. So the next person who takes over as the Chosen One of Moloch won’t have to burn through their brain to do it.”

Is this something Moloch himself has been telling you? Jeffrey wondered. He didn’t know how much contact with Moloch the priests actually had.

“Anyway,” Catherine continued, “it’s also possible he’ll die of natural causes if he keeps overusing Moloch’s power as he has. But I’m next in line for the throne, so to speak. If we wait to kill him, I can probably get the Chosen One Title. If we kill him now, though, that would probably come with the burden of accepting the same kind of deteriorating Nikolai is suffering now. That’s the only way we’d get through Orientation. So, I think we need to wait. Okay?”

Wordless, Jeffrey nodded. I guess that’s one way to do it. He didn’t know what to say to any of that. His wife gave him a long kiss on the lips, which he returned with more fervor than he felt, and then she walked slowly back to the other priests. For once, he didn’t watch her walking away.

He felt numb.

Jeffrey had just figured they could off Rostov and steal away in the night like bandits. In this relative chaos, it felt like a perfect opportunity. They wouldn’t have to kill other members of the camp to get away. No one would know what had really happened for some time. No one would be likely to come after them until they had a new leader. By then, the Rosses would be long gone.

But that was based on his premise that they were sticking with the cult for pure survival reasons. It seemed that his and Catherine’s motives had diverged. He wanted to kill Rostov, because Rostov was evil. Full stop. The fact that Rostov was sacrificing people to Moloch was an additional motivator, albeit that it was hard for Jeffrey to judge the cult for doing so, when Moloch had so obviously kept them alive in the deadly Orientation space, where people were dying every day.

But the idea that Catherine would become the new Chosen One of Moloch didn’t resolve the dissonance that Jeffrey felt in this situation. It just shifted.

What the hell have I gotten myself into?

—

The Rostov camp buzzed with nervous activity. Tensions that had festered within cultists now began to show on the surface.

From those anxious that they had been woken in the night, to the individuals who knew what had really happened and feared further reprisals from Moishe Rose, no one looked comfortable. Some clearly looked at Rostov as if they blamed him for their current predicament.

Moishe looked on the scene with grim satisfaction.

Back when I was one of them, they never would’ve looked at Rostov that way, he thought. I only wish I could stay and inflict more damage. I really think that if I could keep going without ever being caught, they might eventually turn on him. I was very lucky that I was able to snag my gear when we fled before.

He backed away from the camp and retreated some distance forward, outpacing Kassim, who was leading them toward the Rodriguez camp. Despite all of Moishe’s efforts, the cultists would certainly find the Rodriguezes if they didn’t move quickly enough. It was time for him to catch up to them and make sure they were moving in the right direction, and with the appropriate sense of urgency.

Once he was far enough ahead of Kassim, Moishe began to run at top speed without concern for stealth.

The sun was just beginning to rise. Rostov would be able to track him and the Rodriguezes without difficulty soon enough.

—

Nikolai Rostov emerged from a trance, about an hour after sunrise.

He chuckled madly.

“Excellent, excellent!!” Rostov said.

“What’s the good news, Niko?” Alice asked with what sounded like genuine enthusiasm.

“With the sunrise, I have laid eyes on the enemy,” he replied. “And we have very good news from Moloch. We simply have to continue driving them forward. The region ahead of them is one that Moloch identified for me previously. The Dead Marsh.”

Alice frowned. “A marsh? Doesn’t that mean it will be difficult for our group to pursue them? Swampy ground is hard to walk through, isn’t it? And the cart—”

“We don’t have to chase them through the Dead Marsh,” Rostov interrupted, shaking his head. “The important thing is to get them into the marsh itself. My understanding from Moloch is that it’s an incredibly dangerous place. We might be able to destroy our enemy without needing to fight any further.” He rubbed his palms together.

“Don’t we need sacrifices?” Alice couldn’t help asking.

He didn’t let her doubt spoil his mood.

“Oh yes,” Rostov said, shrugging. “Best to capture some if we can. If not, we’ll set up the signal fire and resume our previous strategy. But the Dead Marsh solves a lot of our problems, you see! We don’t have to worry about these people getting away from us, warning others about what we’re doing, perhaps uniting with others to fight us. As long as we keep them from escaping the marsh once they’ve entered, I don’t think any of them will survive.”