Free The Enclave by Karen Hancock Page B

recanted.
    “You must enter the Cube.”
    As Andros flinched and mewed with horror, Zowan clenched his teeth ever harder, hating this more than he had ever hated anything.
    “May the Body have mercy in accordance with your crime.”
    The prisoner slumped between the two Enforcers, resigned now, but still trembling. They jerked him toward the opening at the side of the stage and disappeared into the bowels of the Justorium. The lights dimmed. The Elders burst into a song about the glories of the Father, and his unfailingly righteous judgments.
    Zowan glanced across the small theater to where Terra stood with the other First Gen girls on his same level, her long red braids draped over the fronts of both shoulders. Seeming to feel his regard, her gaze shifted to meet his, and in it he saw all the helpless, furious sorrow that boiled in his own gut.
    Why couldn’t Andros have just said the stupid Affirmation in the first place? He’ d been doing it all his life, most of that time unknowingly. What difference did it make whether he had come to the realization that he might not believe it all now? It was just a thing everyone did. Whether he meant it or not, who would know?
    Now Andros would still have to say it, every day, morning after morning, but with who knew what handicaps. Memory loss, inability to concentrate, slurred speech, twitches, blackouts—those were only some of the recurring side effects of having gone through the punishment of the box. It had been a stupid, prideful, stubborn thing to do. But somehow Zowan couldn’t hold it against him.
    Terra’s gaze flicked away from his and up to something behind and above him, then darted back to the stage below. It was Gaias she’d seen, Gaias who stood in the aisle at Zowan’s back and who had promised him this morning as he’ d brought him to the Sanctuary to say his own Affirmation that he would be watching him here. To be sure he did his duty. Even though the whole point of the Body doing this together was to allow each man to pull his lever as he deemed just.
    The Elders reached the end of the first verse of their hymn, and the Body took up the chorus, voices filling the chamber. Beneath Zowan’s feet, the cement trembled, the faint vibration escalating to a violent shuddering as the distant stage blossomed in petal-like sections and a gleaming black point emerged between them, spearing toward the red-lit ceiling. Part of the technology of the ancients, largely lost to humankind now, it rose slowly, gaining width, until it was revealed to be a massive cube of smoked glass floating above the dark petals.
    The rumbling vibration stopped, the chorus’s last note faded, and silence fell over the Justorium. Though Zowan’s hands were ice, sweat dribbled down his sides beneath his tunic. He swallowed on a dry mouth, straining to see through the glass, knowing Andros was within, alone and sick with terror.
    Tall, skinny, gawky Andros, with the pimply face and the dark, sad eyes. Andros, who never hurt anybody, who always seemed caught up in a mental flight of fancy, concocting some peculiar new invention, who hated talking as much as he hated exercise but loved anything to do with numbers. And who asked way too many questions.
    “What if all is not as the Elders have told us, Zowan?”
    Each Elder placed a hand on his lever. The Body followed suit in a susurrus of rustling fabric—Zowan, as well, his fingers so cold the lever burned beneath them. He felt Gaias’s eyes on the back of his neck, imagined the oculus bulging in its bony socket.
    “May the Body judge as the sin deserves,” the Elder intoned.
    A thread of light snaked across one face of the glass, and inside the cube Andros yelped. It was followed by another and another as the sides began to lighten, revealing the man within, already hopping and shuddering and yowling as he tried desperately not to touch any of the surfaces that enclosed him—a hopeless impossibility.
    “Do you ever wonder if