Free Sanctus by Simon Toyne

would have made of the supernatural events that were taking place in the world today: melting ice caps, tropical weather in formerly temperate zones, unprecedented tidal waves and hurricanes, coral reefs poisoned by acidic seas, disappearing bees. They would have thought it was the end of the world.
    On the desk in front of her lay the field report she’d rescued from the passenger seat of the minibus. It had done little to lighten her mood. She’d only read half of it and already knew that it was going to be too expensive to fund. Maybe this was just one more bit of the world they were going to have to let wither and die. She stared hard at the carefully annotated diagrams and charts outlining initial building costs and projected tree growth, but in her head she was seeing symbols etched on to fragments of slate, and the shape made by the monk before he fell.
    ‘Did you see the news?’
    Startled, Kathryn looked up into the bright, clear face of a willowy girl beaming at her from the doorway. She tried to remember her name but the turnover of people in the building was so rapid she never trusted herself to get it right. Rachel maybe – or was it Rebecca? Here on a three-month placement from an English university.
    ‘Yes,’ Kathryn replied. ‘Yes, I saw it.’
    ‘Traffic’s rammed out there. That’s why I was late getting in.’
    ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Kathryn dismissed the confession with a wave and returned to the dossier. The morning’s news, which hung so heavily around her, was clearly just an inconvenience for most people – something to be gossiped over, wondered at and then forgotten.
    ‘Hey, you want a coffee?’ the girl asked.
    Kathryn looked back up at her fresh, untroubled face and suddenly remembered her name. ‘That’d be great, Becky,’ she said.
    The girl’s face lit up. ‘Cool.’ With a whip-crack of auburn pony-tail she turned and ran down to the kitchen.
    Most of the work carried out by the organization was done by volunteers like Becky; people of all ages, giving freely of their time, not because of any religious obligation or national pride, but because they loved the planet they lived on and wanted to do something to look after it. That’s what the charity did: brought water to places that had dried out; planted crops and trees in land that had been blighted by war or poisoned by industry; though this was not how Ortus had started, and it was not the work it had always done.
    Her desk phone rang.
    ‘Ortus. Can I help you?’ she said, as brightly as she could manage.
    ‘Kathryn,’ Oscar’s warm voice rumbled in her ear. Instantly she felt a little better.
    ‘Hey, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’
    ‘I was praying.’
    ‘Did you hear?’ She didn’t quite know how to frame the question. ‘Did you hear that he . . . that the monk . . .’
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard.’
    She swallowed hard, trying to hold back the emotion.
    ‘Don’t despair,’ her father said. ‘We should not give up hope.’
    ‘But how can we not?’ She glanced up at the door and lowered her voice. ‘The prophecy can no longer be fulfilled. How can the cross rise again?’
    The crackle of the transatlantic line filled the long pause before her father spoke again.
    ‘People have come back from the dead,’ he said. ‘Look in the Bible.’
    ‘The Bible is full of lies. You taught me that.’
    ‘No, that I did not teach you. I told you of specific and deliberate inaccuracies. There is still much in the official Bible that is true.’
    The line went silent again save for the rising hiss of long-distance interference.
    She wanted to believe him, she really did; but in her heart she felt that to carry on blindly hoping everything was going to be OK was not much different from closing your eyes and crossing your fingers.
    ‘Do you really believe the cross will rise again?’
    ‘It might,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to believe, I admit. But if you’d told me yesterday that a