THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#7)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

(yesterday’s last lines:
“I want to talk with you.”
      Thinking this would give me a chance to tell him about the world of Light and Love, I leaped off the branch and lit down a few feet away from him.)

The man took a step back. He was frightened, I could tell. Then he made a little motion with his hand and three men jumped on top of me. They handcuffed me, jerked me to my feet, and hauled me toward the tall man’s horse and buggy. With a pang I saw Matilda and Jocelyn watching silently from the door. Though I wanted them to, I didn’t blame my sisters for not protesting. We rarely felt his influence out here in the woods, but the duke of Sequoia had a terrible reputation for cruelty. And the thought nagged that Matilda had pointed. At me.
The tall man waited until I was cuffed to the wooden buckboard in the buggy, then he got in next to me. The rank human smell rising off his body turned my stomach. He flicked the whip and the horse cantered off down the bumpy trail.
“Where are we going?”
“The coast.”
I knew there was a salmon fishing settlement by the ocean where the duke had his headquarters.
“Why are you taking me there?”
The tall man made an impatient noise. “To test you, of course.”
My heart sank. There was only the one test, the Kachfeldern-Rheingold-Smytherite Measure of Bioneurogenetic Integrity. Though no one knew what had happened during the Great Miasma, some of our people were born with weird distortions to their bodies, others lacking their native good sense. These misfortunes were attributed to the Great Miasma and were thought to be both contagious and inheritable. KRS was supposed to weed out undesirables who tested at the high end. But I had no physical deformities, nor was I mad. I’d only suffered the misfortune of dying and coming back to life with new abilities granted by virtue of an indestructible mortal body.

(to be continued tomorrow)