“Thanks. That was kind of fun.” He punched her lightly on the shoulder.
“You’re about to be consecrated, you know. You could sign up for my team.” Mathew wasn’t teasing her in a mean way, but it was a joke. Witnesses didn’t sign up. They were recruited and became part of a team only after they had passed a rigorous exam designed to ensure they could handle the hardships of working on the coast. The reminder that Mathew would be gone for months and exposed to untold dangers sobered her. Without Mathew, she would be truly alone, powerless against Bradley Fiske, and without a distraction from everything that was so hopelessly broken. If Mathew hadn’t been acting so brainwashed since Gram died, if she could somehow save him from excommunication in the event that he believed her and chose to act, she’d tell him everything in a heartbeat.
“It’ll be fine,” Mathew reassured her, mistaking the cause of her silence as he folded the towel on his floor. “I’ll be back before you know it. Hey, tell you what. Why don’t you work out with me sometimes?”
Gabi wouldn’t have believed herself capable of laughter just a moment before, but now she nearly doubled over with it. Work out with Mathew? What was she going to do, bench press drinking straws? “I’m serious!” he said, scooping up his weights and lining them back up against the wall by his desk. “It’s something we could do together, and it might help you beef up a little bit. You really scared me this weekend, Gab. I haven’t seen you that bad in a while.” Gabi stopped laughing. She knew Mathew worried about her, but as he’d gotten older he’d become better at hiding it. “I know you get a hard time at school and stuff. Can we just try? If you’re not into it, we can stop.”
The idea, absurd as it was, intrigued Gabi. Maybe it was possible for her to get stronger. Then, an insane idea hit her. What if she did become a Witness? What if she could get herself recruited for a team and use its protection to venture outside the fellowship? How better to find someone to help her challenge the council without putting them at risk for excommunication?
There were people out there, former fellows who had been excommunicated already or chose to leave the flock and risk the perils of the coasts rather than live according to the doctrine. Those people were regarded as criminals, worse than the Tribes because they had achieved salvation, then cast it aside. They left because they were overcome by the temptations of sin, or that’s what the doctrine taught. Gabi had always believed it, but now she realized the fellowship might not be a shelter from chaos but the cause of it. Though she was horrified by the experiments on D Wing, she still believed in the fellowship’s founding principles of peace, unity, and protection. Their meaning had simply become distorted to serve the ends of a powerful few. It cut her to the bone to think that even for someone as essentially good as her father, a little power was still too much. At the very least, joining a Witness team would get her out of Alder and away from the constant reminders that her father—no, Sam, wasn’t who she thought he was.
“Yes.”
“What?” Mathew said, having abandoned his argument in favor of fiddling with the dials on his shortwave radio.
“Yes, I will work out with you. It could be fun.”
Gabi couldn’t tell Mathew that she wanted to train to be a Witness, of course. Sure, it had been his idea, but he wasn’t serious about her making a team. No one of consecration age was less likely to be recruited to test for a Witness team than Gabi. It was expected of most junior fellows that they would at least attempt to serve before coming back to the branches for career training and domestic life, but no one had ever expected it of her. For people like Noel’s father, who had been a high-ranking Apostle, Witness work was a divine calling. For Gabi, Apostles might as well inhabit the uppermost reaches of Mount Olympus. That didn’t matter, though. She didn’t need to become an Apostle to escape the fellowship. She just needed to improve enough to get noticed by the recruiters, and if she couldn’t make a Witness team on her own merit, she had a secret weapon. She only prayed she would never have to use it.
Chapter EIGHT
GABI WORRIED that Sam would be suspicious of her workouts with Mathew, but in the end they could have converted their entire house into a home gym and he wouldn’t have noticed. Sam spent long hours at work, often not coming home until Gabi and Mathew were in bed. Though she took care to make sure her light was out by nine in a nod to Gram’s old routine, Gabi always stayed awake until she heard Sam’s car pull in. He usually spent a few minutes picking over the plate kept warm for him in the oven, then peeked in on her and Mathew before retreating to his room. Sometimes he didn’t stop in the kitchen at all, and he was growing thin, his pants bagging at the seat the way Gabi’s did. At breakfast, Sam was quiet and preoccupied, but he still made an effort to ask Gabi how she was feeling and check in with Mathew about his progress in tutorials. His eyes, which once crinkled easily with good humor, were now flat and dull like two tarnished coins.
It was easier not to see Sam much. Gabi still loved him, but the feeling hurt. She yearned to tug off his glasses and clean the smudges for him the way she
