Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

looked down from the hill to see a thin column of black smoke curving out of the center of town, and from the top of the bell tower I could see the pyre at its foot. I told myself I didn’t know what it was. I split one of my bodies off and sent it running down the hill into town as fast as its legs would carry it, to find out what had happened, while the rest of me stayed behind in unity. I just sat. I don’t remember all that might have been going through my heads while I waited for that body to return. Maybe I already consciously realized that that self was already dead, as was Lorelei. That it was my fault.

Nearly two hours passed between when I saw the smoke and when they came for me. It should have been the simplest thing in the world to know it was time to run. Any wastelander would have had that much wisdom, but I sat still and waited, lost in my thoughts, as if I could change what had already happened if I could only ponder it deeply enough.

It wasn’t until I heard the mob marching up that hill that everything finally snapped to focus. From the windy bell tower, I could see them, almost the entire population of the town, with the church elders and patriarchs hobbling along at the front. I could hear the men chanting in such a mindless and discordant unison that I couldn’t make out the words at first, but I kept still until they were close enough for me to understand it.

“Five, eight, thirteen. Five, eight, thirteen.” Just those numbers, over and over. Then I understood.

Mark 5:8-13: The exorcism of the demonic Legion from the Gerasene man.

My survival instincts finally kicked in. Everything snapped into painful focus, and a blast of adrenaline brought me to a startled understanding: the advantage was all mine. The Keepers had all the guns, but they could kill my bodies over and over again without ever truly killing me. If even one of me made it out of here alive, so would I.

I thought fast. I stayed in unity. I bolted the front entrance with one of my bodies and ran for the back door with two others—and that was the last moment in which I can recognize myself or remember what it was like to be whole, because Brother Curtis was standing there waiting for me. He pressed the gun’s emitter against my heart. He met my eyes and grinned before he fired.

Unity had never ended that way before. The death resonated so hard that it nearly struck me unconscious. As I recovered, I found myself constrained to a single body, fighting to hold myself upright with the phantom heat of the blast still persistently crackling inside my chest. I had to concentrate to discover which body I was in. I made some noise with my throat and recognized the voice.

There was one exit they probably hadn’t found: a small bomb shelter in the basement, sealed with a heavy steel door, with a carpet-covered trapdoor in the floor leading to an old sewer tunnel. I doubted mine would be the body to survive—out of all of us, I was in the one farthest from that room—but I ran anyway. Another of my bodies was right in front of me when the front doors burst open, close enough to hear the shriek of the waver that cut them down. Circles of ash and fire popped across the weathered pews. Woodsmoke filled my nose, then the unmistakable odor of burning flesh. I heard one of my selves scream, very close, and I instinctively knelt to help. The beam had only grazed their forearm superficially, but we shared a look, both of us knowing there was nothing I could do. That body was almost eighty years old.

“Go,” they said, and started to stand up—but they fell lifeless into my arms with a circle of white hair burning on the back of their head.

I lunged for the stairs. Waver shots warmed the air around me and miraculously missed, but I couldn’t spare the coordination to negotiate the steps. I tripped and rolled all the way down with my head braced in my arms. The Keeper who waited at the bottom had been expecting me to come through that door at standing height, and his fire hit the empty space above me. I made it to the next flight of stairs in the second it took his rifle to prime again.

I rolled again, less elegantly than before. I heard my left arm snap against a step before my nerves even registered the surge of white-hot pain—but my fall at the bottom was cushioned by something soft.

It was dim down there. It took me too long to recognize my other bodies, all dead. Their birth names flashed through my mind—Elana, Castille, Arjun—and I thought of the lives I’d lived as them and couldn’t now; the places I could never go back to without those faces; all the family and friends who’d never greet me again. But there was no time to mourn myself now. I was close. I pulled myself up from my own dead bodies and ignored the pain, and I shut out the thud of boots, the shouts and chants and waver shrieks following just behind. I just ran, and the door to the lightless shelter room yawned open at the end of the last hallway.

I barreled through without seeing. My hand groped in the void and found the heavy steel door, and I threw all my adrenal strength into heaving it shut. I could hear fists and heels and rifle stocks hammering on the other side the moment it locked, but it was a century-old post-nuclear relic. They’d need a tank to break it down.

My eyes started to adjust. A single spark of daylight breached a fissure in the ceiling, and in the fizzling darkness all my