So...I should probably mention that this is my primary NaNo project, which means two things:

1) There is nothing you can do to make me stop posting chapters on this story.

2) You may, hypothetically, sometimes get chapters that are really, really scattered. Like, say, this one.


Treading Water

Adalia had just finished getting Noah calmed down when the phone rang.

"This is Liz from the Church," a woman's voice began. "You may have seen the appearance of the two Lord's agents on the news. Don't panic. The pastor will be holding an emergency meeting tomorrow at nine AM to discuss what this means. He is currently studying the Word and will address any questions you have tomorrow."

"Who was that?" Noah asked when she hung up.

"Recorded message from the pastor," Adalia told him. "About those - what we saw on TV."

"What are they?"

"He says he's studying the bible and there'll be a meeting tomorrow about it, but that they're agents of the Lord."

"But they - they killed someone!"

"I don't know, I..." Adalia closed her eyes, shook her head, said, "I think he was trying to kill them. It was self-defense, it's not murder if it's self-defense."

"But..."

She didn't have any answers for him. "I'm sure the pastor will explain tomorrow. He knows more about this than we do."

-

Technically, she was right.

The meeting took place downstairs, in a huddle of folding chairs.

"In Revelation," Matthew explained, "it is prophesied that there will appear two Witnesses in Jerusalem, who will proclaim the truth of the Lord Jesus. They will shut up the heavens, so that it will not rain for all the time of their prophecy, and they will have the ability to call down plagues at their will, and to anyone who stands against them, fire shall come from their mouths and consume their attacker's flesh.

"It has not rained in Jerusalem since they appeared," he said, and Adalia thought it was odd that he would say this and not, "Their attacker was burned alive." but she thought that perhaps, like her, he didn't want to think of it. Then he said, "They have the covering of God. No one will be able to harm them for the duration of three and a half years, to the midpoint of the tribulation."

"When will that be?" one of the men asked. "Three and a half years from now..."

But Matthews shook his head. "I believe they will be killed exactly midway through the tribulation. Three and a half years in, and then they shall be dead for three and a half days before being resurrected. We can't yet know the exact date, as the countdown to the Glorious Appearing will begin with the signing of the treaty with Israel. I suspect that will be within the next week or so."

"It doesn't start with the Rapture? You're sure?"

"This is Pastor Jason's official timeline," he said.

That was enough.

The vanished pastor was already spoken of with the reverence of a lost prophet. His office was empty. Matthew was the only one who entered his library or touched his papers, which were treated with the amount of care that would have rivaled the handling of a saint's body. No one would argue with what they said.

It wasn't as simply as just following them, however. As Matthew explained it, the late pastor's notes became less detailed and certain the further into the tribulation they went. "It makes sense," he said. "God knew he would be taken, and saw no need to burden him unduly with tragedy he'd escape. The rest will be up to us.

"Scripture teaches that there are many dispensations. Once, for example, the way to God was through the following of the Law, and so books of the bible contain the rules of Law for those of that dispensation. We are in the dispensation of Grace, and different passages apply to us.

"Remember that, although the bible contains the full accounting of history and the future, it is hidden. This protects it from being understood by the enemies of Christianity. Hints of what's to come are throughout the books, but we need to know how to interpret it, and to have the grace of God to guide us. This is how the pastor's books are helpful. We can also find clues among the writings of other Christians. All writing is but an imperfect reflection of God's Word."

He let this settle in, then returned to the topic. "As I was saying, I cannot believe it will be long before the treaty with Israel.

"Already, the antichrist is calling for greater unity among the member states of the UN, greater obedience to the will of the UN. Our ambassador is a Democrat appointee, so it's unlikely he'll do anything to fight this. We'll be lucky if he doesn't insist on being one of the first to go along. He's already come out in support of the census the antichrist is calling for under the guise of looking into the disappearances.

"Once that happens, there will be a crackdown shortly after on churches, as anyone apart from the mystery faith that will be raised up as the one world religion the antichrist supports will be in danger. We do not want to be on their books. One of the few benefits of the Rapture and chaos that followed is that many people are simply listed as missing, such as the precious children God sent to us for protection. If you are not yet confirmed alive, keep your head down. Many of us can simply disappear off of their books. Those less lucky should do their best not to stand out. We must not alert them to our plans."

-

The pastor spoke for hours, but when Adalia returned home she was jittery and wanting to know more. The news was back to singing the praises of Carpathia, and she quickly abandoned the television to Noah and his videogames. Instead, she took the bible from her bag, sat on the couch, and began to read.

"Adalia," Noah said, interrupting her. "I'm hungry."

"Eat a poptart," she said, not looking up.

"I'm hungry," he repeated.

"So have a poptart."

"Adalia," he said, shaking her shoulder. "Adalia, please, I'm really hungry."

"So eat a poptart."

"You already told me to do that."

"So go do it."

"That was hours ago!" His voice cracked with fear.

Adalia looked up from the bible for the first time.

The windows were dark, the curtains open to expose the dusky blackness of the sky. Her brother looked strung out, like a nervous dog. The bible on her lap was open to the middle, though she'd started at the beginning.

"Oh God, Noah, I'm so sorry," she said, closing it and getting up. She realized she was starving and her throat was painfully dry. She hadn't noticed.

She went into the kitchen and drunk a glass of water, then started on dinner. "If you see that happen ever again," she said to Noah, "even just an hour, interrupt me."

"What did happen?"

"I don't know," she said.

-

Her strange trance didn't repeat itself again when she tried the bible again the next day, more cautiously. All that came was fatigue, and halfway through a fidgety impatience with reading. She wondered if it was for spurning the gift, but if so, she was glad God seemed to have listened and taken it back from her, and if the price of it was some mild boredom, she'd pay gladly.

All the same, she finally gave up and closed the bible. She paced around the living room several times, not sure what to do. She realized the plants hadn't been watered in days and busied herself with the ones in the dining room, then worked her way through the upstairs rooms to make sure each plant was cared for. She felt better after doing something concrete, however inconsequential. Returning to the living room, she thought of what the pastor had said about the Witnesses and a treaty with Israel, and decided to check the news again.

It was the young blond politician who was the antichrist again, talking about the UN. Even Adalia knew enough about foreign affairs to know that any time the United Nations was brought into a subject as if it mattered, it signified that nothing much was going to happen and she could ignore the whole thing. For the UN to be a comparatively important player in the story, it had to be about total nobodies. She settled on the couch, opening the bible to read and glancing up occasionally to see if there was anything new.

There was more on the nuclear resonance theory, still not making any sense, and of course more scientists praising the politician, Carpathia, as a breath of fresh air for agreeing with them. Adalia wondered if the nonsense theory wasn't actually agreed on by the scientific community the way newscasters described it. Perhaps most scientists hadn't yet found any options they were sure of while the nutcases had thrown all their vocal weight behind this one. Scientific consensus and what people thought everyone agreed about could be very different. And if that was true, she reasoned, it'd make more sense they'd be praising anyone who supported them, because they needed that support to be taken seriously. Science that couldn't get funding from actual scientists turned to the politicians. They were probably hoping for fat public grants to study the phenomena. And there weren't any honest scientists to argue with them, since this was the Rapture, and there wouldn't be any natural explanation for them to find. That was what supernatural meant. The inexplicable, the unexplainable, a breach in the normal workings of reality.

The next story was more frightening. In some areas the police had taken to arresting anyone who'd been involved in abortions, not because they'd committed a crime - though there was legislation on the table in several states to make it exactly that - but in an attempt to prevent their murder. One doctor's house had been burned to the ground, also killing her husband and teenage daughter. Several more had been shot, and others were simply missing. Murdered or vanished, no one knew.

When the segment ended, it switched back to the news anchor, who added that violent crime in general had skyrocketed. Up next, he continued, was a story on a murdered rape victim, who had survived the initial attack only to be lynched when she tried to buy the morning-after pill at a pharmacy. Women were advised that it was still unknown if pregnancy was possible and that, at the moment, they were better off taking the risk.

"In this time of crisis and trauma," the man said, "one can truly understand what Romanian President Carpathia means when he says we have no choice but to come together and work to build a better future. With society coming apart at the seams, drastic measures no longer seem so much drastic as simply common sense."

She got up and turned the television off. She looked back to the bible, lying on the couch, then shook her head. What had the pastor called it? A leading from God? She didn't feel any leading right now. She knew intellectually that she should be reading the bible. What she wanted to do was watch Sakura chant excitedly about penguins, or read some of her old books from when she was in middle school, ones with bright worlds and triumphant characters.

I don't know, she thought. And hadn't the pastor said something else? All fiction was a reflection of the Word of God and there were clues hidden inside.

Perhaps that was what this meant. Perhaps she simply hadn't understood what God was trying to tell her.

She went upstairs to her brother's room, where her old books were stored in the closet bookshelf, and found her dog-eared copy of Wild Magic.

Adalia woke in the dark in her parent's bed, her heart pounding as if she'd had a nightmare and her brother sleeping peacefully next to her.

She'd been dreaming of a spell from the books, a protection spell. They'd made a circle, first of water, then of salt, then of glowing magic fire, chanting all the while. She'd been dreaming of the spell, only it had been used for something else. It had made the children disappear.

And she had thought, that's all it is. Not something inexplicable, impossible, something so far out of human hands they couldn't even touch the furthest edges however high they reached. Only a spell, a thing that happened because of something someone did, a regular part of the world that followed the rules. And in the dream she'd been making plans, thinking, so they've done this and there's a spell to undo it, and she was remembering it as she watched, a spell to call them back -

And she had thought, I'm dreaming, and the shock and horror and wrenching betrayal she'd felt had woke her.

It was the most basic promise, that the world would make sense. Reality had rules. Fantasy had rules. This strange place she'd stumbled into had none.

-

The Witnesses were still at the Western Wall. After several attempts to remove them had ended in rioting, officials tried to cordon off the area they were in, only for them to somehow appear on the other side. Cameras seemed to have strange problems recording there and would often cut out, leaving how they moved about unknown. Some people claimed the Witnesses vanished and reappeared, others that they were actually many people masquerading as two and that they'd seen replacements moving into position and current Witnesses slipping under the crowd and pulling off their sackcloth to disappear. The people interviewed from the closest ring of the crowd, those who said they'd seen it, came off to Adalia as insane, some staring fixedly forward as if trying to appear normal while missing both their interviewer and the camera with this gaze, speaking stiffly and repetitively as if reciting something they'd made up and decided had to be true. Others were ranting and raving, froth in the corners of their mouthes. The last time a member of the Israeli police force had tried to enter the area, touching the outer fence had burned the fingers from the man's hand. They were planning on declaring the entire length of the wall off limits.

The news told her companies were going bankrupt. Life insurance, for one - they should have been able to stall on claims, requiring a body, but no one had been putting up with it. There were still riots, though it wasn't so bad as in other countries. Regimes had been toppled across Africa and South America, and China had dissolved into a civil war. Even as Carpathia was calling for disarmament, nuclear-equipped countries were hurtling towards World War Three. In places they didn't trust the news, entire classes of people were wiped out. In places they didn't have the news, it was tribes of people being slaughtered down to the last. Survival was determined by whoever cast the first stone.

People without God. Adalia wondered if she would simply have to get used to living in world where people would act like this normally. She'd never really felt the presence of God in her daily life, but looking at the news, she could understand what the others at church meant when they spoke of the effects caused by a lack of it. God was extricating himself from this world in preparation for the next, and this, however horrible, was the new status quo.

And everywhere, people spoke of a young blond politician who was the only one able to save them from it.

Sometime between when she'd last paid attention and now the UN's president or general had stepped down, and everyone, if you believed the news, wanted him to take the position. The man would be giving a response later that day, and the newscaster reported this with a lack of composure that would have embarrassed fourteen year old girls at their first concert. He looked seconds away from bursting into squeals of delight at the thought.

Carpathia would accept, of course.

-

Carpathia didn't.

-

And then the next day Carpathia had, in all but name.

Adalia listened to it on the radio, feeling her stomach start to knot as what she'd be viewing as a strange spectacle reached an absurd high that flipped it abruptly to horrifying.

They replayed clips of his speech. The opening refusal was reasonable and sane and it was a refusal. He talked about how the United Nations was a paper tiger, unable to fulfill the noble but too lofty goals its founders had meant. It could do little to censer even the most severe abuses nations committed, especially, of course, when the nations committing the crimes and the nations in change of condemning them overlapped - Adalia cringed, knowing exactly who and what he was talking about - how, much as he loved the dream, he had to accept that the organization itself had fallen far, far short, through no fault of its own but short all the same.

How this had turned into them replacing the UN with a new and completely different version Adalia wasn't sure. The only thing she'd heard in the summary of it that made any sort of sense was that they were moving the headquarters to Iraq, which she'd heard suggested a few times before and had an understandable reason given. The rebuilt country was a testament to one of the few times the UN had been (eventually) given the power and money needed, and a success beyond what anyone had dared believe possible, and it made sense that someone who loved the ideals of the UN would see it as a fitting symbolic move to mark their new direction. And they needed to build a new one somewhere after the New York one was blown up by a couple members of a local church. She supposed a new name made sense with all that too. A new organization entirely, though...

The rest of it - it didn't make any sense but as the fulfillment of the prophecies the pastor had spoken of. It was like the early days of America, when the confederation of states had given way to the modern federal government. But they had been a country. The world wasn't a country, couldn't treat America like a state...could it?

There was talk of destroying the world's weapons, or handing them over to the UN-that-wasn't-the-UN for safekeeping. Carpathia was a pacifist. And he spoke passionately of the need to end war, blaming the nuclear missiles in particular for playing a part in the largest loss of life ever to happen, the vanishings. That, Adalia was sure, was the real reason he supported the theory. It fitted with what he already wanted, a dismantling of the nuclear arsenal, a banning of all nuclear weapons.

In some ways, it wasn't so bad. If it meant an end to guns, then at least some good was coming out of it. How much less damage would have happened across the world if the people hadn't had ready access to weapons? If God was withdrawing his grace to leave most of the population lurching about like the criminally insane, the least the sane people could do was take away the sharp objects.

The way it all happened, though, hammered home how different things were. The non-Christian media seemed practically hypnotized by the man, and everyone seemed driven by some strange force toward the next step of prophecy.

It'd all come true, however impossible it sounded.

As if to confirm it, NPR continued on to Israel's agreement to share their formula with the UN and the world, in return for a treaty promising protection.

Israel, which had singlehandedly destroyed the entire Russian army without injury or even attacking. Israel, who had only been attacked in the first place for not sharing that formula. That Israel was signing a treaty.

A seven year treaty.

-

After church that day, Adalia had intended to wait to speak with the pastor. She was hardly the only one. It seemed like most of the church members had something they wanted to ask or say, and none of it short. Taking a look at the number of the crowd massed around Matthew, she took Noah and left to eat lunch, then drove back. When she returned most of the crowd had left, and she waited for the remaining few to finish. she wondered if she was imposing on the pastor, but the man looked almost manic with excitement.

"I want to help," she told him when it was finally her turn. "I don't want to just wait for what's coming, or be a drain on your resources. I can do something. Scout houses for you maybe, I don't know. Anything."

"I've been thinking about this very issue," Pastor Matthew said. "Doing something like scouting is far too dangerous, of course."

"It is?"

"Haven't you seen the news?" he said kindly. "Well, perhaps it's better if you haven't. Violent crime everywhere. Hardly the time to send a young women out walking alone to look for empty houses."

"Oh."

"Most of the petitioners will be getting normal jobs, for we will, after all, be needing money. However, I think I know something you'd be perfect for. It might be dangerous as well, but it would be a great boon to the cause."

"I'll do anything," she said, and meant it.

"We need a spy."

"A..spy?" she repeated, feeling lost.

"Nothing major, of course," he said quickly. "Just someone to keep tabs on the antichrist. Right now, you see, believers are still safe. The first signs of any change in that will be there, in the antichrist's forces. You can keep the church abreast of developments. Of course," he said, "the instant it looks like you'd be in danger you should leave. I'm not talking about sacrificing you to the cause. And I'm sure that the antichrist will simply begin firing believers long before taking any more punitive action. But it will be a steady job until then, and you'll be the first to know if there's any change in policy and what his plans are. We might need that advantage."

She nodded. "Of course."

When she told him, Noah found the idea exciting. "I wonder what I can do."

"You're going back to school when it starts up again," she told him.

"I don't know if it's going to."

"It will. There are still plenty of kids your age. It's just everyone's scared. Once things calm down, they'll start the schools up again."

"What about you? You're supposed to be in college."

"Going to college is optional. Going to middle school isn't. You'll need to know all that stuff when you grow up."

"I'm not going to," he said. "I'll be your age when Jesus comes back."

She didn't know what to say to that.