Lord of Order by Brett Riley (the reading list book TXT) 📕

Troy stood and left the sanctuary, his head throbbing. Twilight had come, the buildings casting long, deep shadows over the streets. The tallest structures looked like great claws reaching for the moon. Most of the higher levels were empty and rotting, the city’s population too small to need the living space, the stairs too old and dangerous to make the places useful for storage. If the city survived, those floors would need to be repaired or imploded. Already, debris sometimes fell, threatening to crush people on the streets. Why had no one ever fixed them? Why did it fall to Troy? And would there ever be time now, with the future bearing down on the city? In the darkness of a world without the fantastic machines of old, night made everything strange. You could stumble into the great river or collide with a building you passed every day of your life. Even the Bright Crusade’s familiar shape had been distorted. Troy rubbed his eyes, wishing his headache gone. Perhaps he could find some medicine before he slept.

In his dreams, the history Troy had learned often came alive. You must know the seed to understand the tree, his teachers had said. This is what we strive to preserve. With words, they showed him the Crusade’s genesis. He had never seen the kinds of machines he learned about; he had seen the ancient people only in paintings. But, slumbering, he floated backward through time, a ghost with eyes and ears but no voice.

It always started with a God’s-eye view, the continent in all its vastness spreading before him. Then the distance narrowed until he stood on the streets of Washington, part of a crowd the scale of which he had never seen. Behind him, a rectangular pool stretched back and back. Despite the cold, many people stood knee-deep in its waters; to the pool’s rear, a great monument pointed toward the sky like an arrow with its fletching buried in the planet. Far ahead, Jonas Strickland stood on a stage, his sand-colored hair blowing in the wind, his strange clothes formfitting. He shouted, red-faced, spittle flying, one fisted hand smacking into the other’s open palm. Sometimes he raised both hands to the sky, and the people surrounding Troy would do likewise, moaning and lowing like cows in need of milking. Troy could never make out the words, but he had read the transcripts. Strickland spoke of a great country called the United States and how it had turned its back on Jesus Christ. Of how its people had devolved into gluttons who hoarded and strutted and fought each other over children’s trinkets. Of how they coddled the slothful. Of how their nation’s leaders had drifted from God’s teachings, had even allowed worshippers of other deities to prosper—blasphemy masked as freedom. Of how their love of personal choice and legal equality amounted to nothing but hubris, a revision of God’s true creation. Of how the nation needed a strong, godly hand to wipe away all that sin.

The scene changed. Strickland stood on another stage behind a lectern. Only feet away, another man behind another podium trembled with rage, shaking his head, his fists, as Strickland pointed a finger at him and preached. The winner of their argument would lead the nation. The words were muffled, but Troy had read these transcripts too. Strickland painted his opponent as a heathen who would bring more shame down on God’s city on a hill. The Supremor’s cadence peaked at just the right time, for Strickland was, at heart, a preacher. The opponent, whose name had been lost in history, could only weep. Troy had never been taught much about the people in those crowds, but in these dreams, some dressed in finery and wore precious jewels and scowled at the faceless masses supporting Strickland’s opponent. Some hung on Strickland’s every word, clutching their Bibles and weeping. And some were as red-faced as Strickland himself, screaming in triumph as he spoke.

And it came to pass that they chose Strickland as their leader, then called the president. He resided in the grand white mansion the Crusade’s leaders had occupied ever since.

When Strickland stepped inside its doors, the building became a pale horse on which he rode, hair blowing in the wind, eyes blazing.

The horse faded, and Strickland stood in the great house’s yard, watching a red-and-white-striped flag descend its pole. Two men wearing robes of crimson and white cast it on the ground and set it aflame. In its place, they raised the standard of the Bright Crusade, a simple white cross on a crimson field. When the new flag reached the pole’s zenith, a great rumbling shook the earth. Strickland fell to his knees, head bowed, hands steepled together. From behind the mansion, long white tubes shot into the air, trailing fire, arcing across the sky, their screaming thunderous enough to rend the very air. The image came from one of the Bright Crusade’s most famous paintings, titled The Purge Begins. The ancients had harnessed the unthinkable power of disease, the worst humanity had ever encountered, gases that melted organs and invisible creatures that ate flesh, sicknesses that cooked a person’s brains or expelled blood through the eyes and nose and pores. Troy dreamed those tubes fell on the ancients’ greatest cities and burst open, pestilence spilling from them and flowing over everything like black water. The fleeing hordes carried those illnesses into the countryside. Bodies fell everywhere. Pockets of survivors managed to escape and hide; some of these became the world’s first Troublers. Strickland and his upper echelon watched it all from shelters secured against contagion. In every major city, handpicked Crusaders had somehow been protected, and in the wake of all that death, they swept over the lucky and the naturally immune, killing every potential Troubler they could find.

This was the Purge.

Then, as the last of the dying closed their eyes, one final