Chapter Text
It was quiet in the Simmons house. Sonia Simmons herself, along with all close-to-100 of her devoted followers, was sleeping peacefully, and the night was as calm and still as could be. The people inside lay on almost every available surface, sprawled on couches or curled up in chairs or (for the most part) simply resting on the floor. The array of bodies strewn across it would make it almost impossible for anyone to traverse the floor of the house without at least waking a few people up, and in the dark it was almost guaranteed that more than a few would get stepped on or kicked accidentally. Fortunately for them, of course, none of the residents were in any danger of that. All the current occupants of the house were deeply asleep.
All, that is, except one.
While everyone around her shifted and murmured and twitched in their sleep, making all the usual small sounds and movements characteristic of deep slumber, Chastity Sawyer lay still and quiet as the night outside. She was wide awake. Her eyes were open and she was staring fixedly at the ceiling.
She had gotten to bed, so to speak, fairly early, wanting to be among the first ones to pick a spot and stay there before all the good ones were taken. She did save a place for one person, but until nightfall she stayed where she was and watched everyone else come in and settle down on the floor area or piece of furniture of their choice. When the person she saved a place for – that being Rachel “Raina” Browes, her long-term lover and closest companion – arrived, she shifted over slightly to allow her to lay down, but she did not get up or try to trade places with anyone or even start a conversation. The only person she talked to was Raina, but mostly she was watching.
She was using the few hours of light they had left to make note of all the people who entered the house and where they lay down. She was trying very hard to remember this. Once all positions were fixed, it would be lights out, and if she wasn’t sure of the layout, the aforementioned kicking or body parts getting stepped on or inadvertent awakenings could occur. This might not be so bad if they immediately went back to sleep, as she probably would if something briefly woke her up in the middle of night, but they were under strict orders not to move from their resting spots until sunrise. If she were caught up and walking around, well…
She couldn’t risk it. She’d already faced the consequences of disobeying Sonia Simmons twice before and knew it could only get worse.
All around her people settled in, lying down alone on the floor or packing in on the couch in a row or nestled in each other’s arms on the carpet. She and Raina probably would have been one of the latter couples, but she had to choose her position carefully, which is why she came in early. She was on the floor – close enough to the rug so that Raina could comfortably lay there beside her – and as close as she could get to the hallway leading to the room Sonia referred to as her office.
Chastity knew the house pretty well by now. As seemingly one of Sonia’s favorites, she’d been called in to said office quite a number of times, either to be given an assignment or for post-mission debriefing or, occasionally, to be congratulated. Most of the time, she hadn’t been able to concentrate on taking in the details of the room, being too nervous or exhausted or focused on what Sonia was telling her to really examine her surroundings as much as she might like. But she had noticed things. Things like the fact that Sonia always kept a glass and a pitcher of water on her desk, but never once offered any to her followers no matter how obviously they might have needed it. Things like the tremendous climbing plant in the corner that stretched its creeping limbs all the way up the wall and across the place where the wall met the ceiling, which actually had distracted Raina the first time she saw it; her gaze had remained riveted on the plant the entire meeting, and she’d asked what kind it was, but Sonia claimed she didn’t know. (Raina had seemed a little perturbed by this, but never said anything.) Things like the strange painting of an intense close-up of the face of a snarling tiger, which had so startled her the first time she turned her head and saw it that she couldn’t resist asking about it. (“Oh, it was a gift from an old friend of mine. Striking, isn’t it? She’s a freelance illustrator. Rather inspired by the works of Blake…” Whoever that was.)
Things like the telephone. The only one she’d seen in the entire compound, if you didn’t count the pay phone set up just on the outskirts of the property which had been mysteriously disabled sometime last year. But Sonia’s phone worked – she’d seen proof of that several times, usually when Sonia had to answer it in the middle of a meeting. Or the times when she wanted to confirm something and dialed a number, asked a cryptic question, listened and nodded for a minute, then thanked whoever was on the other line and hung up before telling her audience some new information.
Who she was talking to, Chastity didn’t know. She and Raina and their other friends had certainly speculated a fair bit about the kinds of contacts she had, but none of them would ever have even the faintest idea what went on in Sonia’s private life. They were all just cogs in the machine of Sonia’s grand plan, whatever that was.
Well, now they knew what that was. Or at least they knew what the end result of their role in it would be.
“Oh, no,” Sonia had told them, in her usual way of sounding so calm and reasonable and matter-of-fact you wouldn’t question anything she said. “Don’t worry so much. It’s not suicide. You’re thinking of it in terms of the finality of something so simple as death. And if you were still here by next week, that would be what you would experience. But here, with me, all together, we can experience something wonderful. We’re not killing ourselves. We’re saving ourselves.”
That was a week ago. She still remembered it vividly, and suspected she always would. It was a surreal experience. The calm, gentle, almost maternal way she talked. The slow, dawning horror of realization amongst the audience. The variety of reactions – from shock to outrage to sudden bursts into tears to beaming, grateful, understanding acceptance.
Raina, unfortunately, fell into the last category.
“It’s fine,” she said, much more desperately reassuring than Sonia’s calm explanation, but with all the fervor of a true believer. “It’s not really dying. We’ll be together – we all will—”
Chass had surprised even herself by roughly pushing her aside. She’d already tried to explain why this was not a good thing, but Raina hadn’t listened to a word she said. It brought her no pleasure to realize that Raina was by now truly in too deep.
Instead of continuing to try to reason with her, Chastity had instead gone to her friend Isabella, one of the few people around who she could consistently rely on to provide a more rational perspective than her own.
“So, you know we’re gonna die, right? ’Cause a lot of people right now don’t seem to understand that.”
“Yes,” said Isabella morosely. “She’s really doing it, isn’t she?” She cracked a sardonic smile. “I suppose we all should have seen this coming, or something like it.”
“What are we gonna do?” Chastity asked. She would not let herself give in to despair just yet. She’d gotten out of plenty of worse (probably) situations before this.
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Probably, yeah, but—”
“But we won’t,” said Isabella. “Whatever we can think of, it’ll get shot down. If we do manage to go through with something, she’ll be one step ahead of us. Face it, if you’re still here by this point, you’re not getting out alive. We knew that. We were just unlucky enough not to have gotten out while we still could.”
“Stop it,” Chastity said. “Stop talking like that. This isn’t the end.”
But it certainly felt like it. If only she could—
“Chastity,” said Raina behind her, sounding so meek and plaintive that Chass had to turn around.
“Oh, Raina…”
Chastity went to her. She couldn’t tell if Raina was scared of what was going to happen or just upset because they’d been arguing, something they didn’t do very often. In fact, their disagreements over the validity of Sonia’s pronouncements were probably the only thing that could spark a legitimate fight between them, so they generally tried to avoid the subject.
“Please don’t leave,” said Raina softly.
“I won’t.” Already she was trying to formulate a plan, even if it wasn’t coming to anything right now. Whatever happened, though, she knew she wasn’t leaving Raina behind, no matter how hard she had to work to drag her away.
That was a week ago. Chass had spent most of that week working on figuring out something to do about the situation. Since no one had been able to leave the compound in at least a few weeks, a lot of this involved casing the area, particularly Sonia’s house, which sat like a grand castle in the center of the property. And when Sonia announced that everyone would be sleeping over with her the night before the day of the end times, something they had only done on a few very special occasions before, Chastity knew exactly what she was going to do.
It was a very simple plan. She just hoped it worked.
Chastity lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, for some time after the lights had gone out. She didn’t want to get up right away. For one thing, she wanted to give herself a bit more time to adjust her eyes to the dark before picking her way across the mass of sleeping bodies sprawled across the floor. For another, the obvious thing was that she had to make sure everyone was asleep before doing anything at all.
She had an advantage in that she was considered one of Sonia’s more loyal followers, despite not believing a word the woman said most of the time. It just meant that she was among the most likely to do whatever she was told without question, which was probably the mark of a loyal follower in any situation no matter what they were thinking while they did it. She was also among the most likely to be trusted with the more “high-risk” missions, which usually just meant assassinations. And not even necessarily of high-profile people.
Sonia admired how good she was at this. Chass and Raina both were, which made them valuable as a team, which was another advantage – they got to work together all the time without even having to ask special permission. (Not that Sonia was in the habit of granting anyone that, but it was nice not to have to even try to humiliate themselves in that way.) They were good at both working together and keeping each other out of trouble, even if Raina was much more loyal to the cause than Chastity was.
Chass had often wondered whether Sonia knew just how little Chastity actually believed in her teachings. She came to the conclusion that Sonia must know, but didn’t care because what mattered was that she got results. She also realized that the reason she and Raina were paired up so often, aside from the fact that they really did work well together, was that Sonia always sent at least one especially loyal follower along with each mission team, to ensure that if someone messed up or tried to run off they would be caught.
Chastity never tried anything like that, but the thought of Raina selling her out if she did was not a pleasant one. She didn’t know if Raina would do that. She hoped not. She certainly wouldn’t have, although she had no idea of what she would do if she was as brainwashed—or, well, loyal as Raina was.
Of course, she knew that most of the other cult members – because that was what they were, no use dancing around it with alternative terminology – would sell each other out in an instant. Raina had kept some of her books from college before she dropped out, and could still offer up her thoughts on them; Chastity remembered flipping through her copy of 1984 and Raina marveling at how fascinatingly fucked-up it was to create a society where everyone was encouraged to be willing to betray absolutely anyone else to an unknown but dreadful fate for the pettiest of reasons. Ironic, now. Chastity supposed she had no room to talk at the time, given the rather insular environment she was raised in, but she would never betray any of her own sisters that way, to a singular, elusive authority figure. Now she was in exactly that kind of society, where you had no allies except for your leader, unless of course you were betrayed to that leader, but no one thought that would happen to them, but you still had to be prepared. And unlike Big Brother, Sonia was unfortunately, definitely real and right there.
This was why she couldn’t risk waking anybody up.
She didn’t know how long she laid there – could have been a few minutes, could have been hours, she didn’t know what time it was – but finally she decided it was time.
For once, she was glad that she and Raina weren’t wrapped up comfortably and lovingly in each other’s arms. She never would have been able to disentangle herself from that without a disturbance.
She sat up and got to her feet as stiffly and carefully as possible, feeling rather like Count Orlok rising from his coffin in Nosferatu. (Not Dracula, as Raina had explained to her when they snuck into a screening of the film – oh, how long ago that seemed! – and Chass had ended up learning the entire history of the film’s production and near-destruction by the Stoker estate from Raina whispering to her between subtitle cards.) Holding her breath, she surveyed her surroundings and began tiptoeing across the floor, stepping cautiously between sleeping human forms.
Now if there was any silent movie character she felt like, it was Cesare the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the second film in that screening and the one they both found significantly more mesmerizing, picking his way along the cardboard mountain and rooftop backdrops of the German Expressionist film set. She did feel like she was moving in her sleep, or in a dream. Except she wasn’t being sent to kill anyone. One way or another, those days would soon be over.
(Raina had told Chastity after they slipped out of the double feature that she looked rather like the sleepwalking assassin, with her jet-black hair and ghastly-pale complexion and tall, lanky build, and that she could easily play a vampire – think more Dracula’s Daughter than Nosferatu. Despite the knowledge she’d picked up from her old film student friends, Dracula was one of the few books Chastity had read that Raina hadn’t. Chastity had merely said she hoped to introduce Raina to the novel someday and not anything like you have no idea how right you are.)
On her journey to the hallway, all Chass could think about was how vaguely unreal she felt, which might have had something to do with the fact that she was about to do something she never in a million years would have predicted she would do. If she had gone back in time and only been able to tell herself one thing, and told her past self of five years ago or one year ago or even last week what she would do tonight, she never would have believed herself.
Well, she might have believed herself, especially if she explained her reasons. But even then, her past self would probably have responded with, “there’s got to be another way…”
And maybe there was, but this was an urgent situation. Desperate times, as they said, called for desperate measures.
Finally making her way over the veritable minefield of the main floor, Chastity let out a slow, shaky breath as she stood safely in the hall. That was the hard part over. Or at least she hoped it was.
Sonia was not on the floor with the rest of her followers – she had retired upstairs, presumably to her personal quarters. Chastity had been seriously wondering if she herself planned to go through with the mass suicide tomorrow, or if she was going to have all of the rest of them drink the poison first and then desert them. It could honestly be either way. Sonia was maddeningly unknowable.
The important thing was that Sonia was not in her office, which is where Chastity needed to go. And bless her heart, she’d left the door open.
Chass crept up to the room and hesitantly knelt down at the doorway. She didn’t see or feel any tripwires or laser sensors, but how would she know for sure until she walked right in and set one of them off? Maybe she could—
She was overthinking things again. As well as proving to herself that she didn’t have any reference for this kind of thing outside of heist movies. And besides, if there was any kind of complex security system in place, she probably would have already set it off somewhere out in the hallway.
Right?
Making plans was not her strong suit. Or at least it wasn’t when she had to stick to a rigid strategy. She did far better when she was able to improvise a bit in the heat of the moment. This was not a situation where she could afford to do that. And she was at her best when she could come up with a plan with someone else. If Raina had been planning this with her, it might have gone better, but of course Raina would never have agreed to do this in the first place.
On the very tips of her toes, like a ballet dancer on pointe, she stole into the office. When nothing happened, she swung the door shut behind her, very quietly closing it, and – after a brief moment of something close to panic when she couldn’t feel it in the small area she was groping around in – found the light switch on the wall.
Now for the true test. She flicked the lights on.
There was Sonia’s office, exactly as she remembered it, complete with stately oak desk in the center of the room, plant creeping up the wall, and freaky tiger painting. And on that desk was the same old water pitcher, framed picture of some unknown relative (she thought), and, yes, the phone.
She was in.
Chastity still remembered the first time she was in this room, which would be a little over five years ago now. The interview process for getting into the community had been something like a standard job interview that went into greater detail about your personal life and history than usual. Sonia made herself easy to talk to, and Chastity had spilled quite a bit about herself to her upon their first meeting. (Within reason, of course.)
"So tell me a little about yourself," Sonia had said, leaning forward across her desk and folding her hands eagerly in front of her. "Where do you come from? What's your family like?"
"Well," Chastity had said, making herself as comfortable as one could in the chair she was allotted. "I'm from a tiny little town in the middle of south Texas, you've probably never heard of it, in an even smaller county--"
"How is the county smaller than the town?" Sonia asked, smiling to let her know she was amused but meant no offense. Chastity still found herself flushed and stumbling verbally.
"Oh, I meant - just - they're both small. It's called Muerto County and it doesn't even show up on a lot of maps of the state. Our town is called Newt and we were right on the outskirts of it, just barely close enough to qualify as in the town. Pretty isolated."
"Muerto County," Sonia repeated. "You're right, I haven't heard of it. Its name means death, correct?"
"Yeah, that's right. Well, really, 'muerto' means 'dead'. That always seemed about right."
"Hmm." Sonia nodded. "And you grew up poor?"
Chastity did not know if she should be offended by that statement or not. "You can tell, huh?"
"I don't have a problem with that," Sonia said, "I'm merely inferring. Most people who come through here are from middle-class, upper-middle-class backgrounds, and you can definitely tell when you speak to them. I must say, it's refreshing to meet someone at all different than that. We'll welcome your perspective."
"Thanks?"
"Anyway, what about your family?"
Chastity had been reciting variations on this story for years whenever she had to explain her situation. "I live with - lived with, before I came out here - my sisters and my grandmother. My mother died when I was nine and my older sister started taking care of us - she was 17, our grandmother was already getting on and there was no way she'd have been able to support the four of us full time. I also have two younger sisters - well, one of them is my twin sister, but I'm the oldest between us."
"Do you get along with them?"
"My younger sisters, yes. My older sister, no." She chuckled. "We haven't gotten along since our mother died and she had to be in charge. Not her fault, really, but it was a bad situation for all of us and part of why I felt like I had to move out was because I really didn't want to live with her anymore. I feel a little bad about leaving my younger sisters with her, but I know they can handle themselves..."
"Why don't you get along, do you think? Is there a main cause, some kind of fundamental source of disagreement between the two of you?"
Chastity shifted in her seat. She did not particularly want to enumerate the myriad reasons she and Patience clashed over the years to a woman she'd just met. The most common ones were about Chastity's own lack of work ethic and unwillingness to pull her weight in that house, which would not look good to Sonia. "Aside from her being an authority when she really shouldn't be and me not caring for that?"
"I mean do you often argue about...politics? You know, most of our applicants describe their relationships with their families similarly - their parents are conservative or just very traditional, they have expectations on them that they can't or don't want to meet, their own beliefs are in conflict with their parents due to being more progressive and left-leaning. I'd imagine you can relate even if your class situation is different."
"Well...on that front, not really, no. See, a lot of people where I come from are like that, but my family never has been. My mother and grandmother always kept quiet in public about their political opinions because they'd probably get reported for being communists if they were honest. Not a high bar to clear for that, probably still isn't even around here, but we were raised a lot more progressive than you'd think. And even the neighbors would agree with us on some things, stuff like labor rights. My grandmother organized the first union of slaughterhouse workers in the county." A bit of pride in that statement, that kind of legacy should help her out. She did not mention the town's industry folding in recent years, or the crackdowns on that kind of organization that really began in earnest after her mother's death.
"Interesting," said Sonia. "Anything else about your family - religious beliefs?"
"...none? I mean, I know, my name is Chastity, but we weren't raised religious at all, really. Again, lot of Christians in town, some Mexican Catholics, some Southern Baptists, but not us. My mother was a free thinker. Grandma never trusted any kind of church. They left us alone to figure our own ideas out for the most part. I've been developing my own spirituality recently, I'm sure you know, there's a lot of interesting stuff out there that people are more aware of these days. My mother would have liked this kind of thing, I think. She was all about being in tune with nature. Didn't really pass that on to all of us, but my twin sister has always been into, you know, witchy shit." She started smiling thinking about what Temperance would think of all this. "If any of the folks out here who call themselves occultists or neo-pagans or whatever met her, they'd..."
Sonia smiled back, but she seemed less interested in what "they" would do. Probably good to get off this topic before she said too much about her sister's personal brand of occultism. "So you don't have any real history of political or religious disagreements with your family?"
"I mean, I don't think my older sister really gets or likes what I'm talking about most of the time, but not really, no. She and I probably agree on politics more than anything else, we just have different priorities. In life."
"Right. You were chafing under the thumb of a familial authority figure, before you came here."
"That's about right."
"Did you have a lot of friends where you came from, Chastity?"
"I had some. Close ones, even. They're mostly gone now, though. They got out and I was stuck there. Maybe if I'd made friends with the kinds of kids who were also destined to be stuck there their whole lives, I'd be less..."
"Lonely? Unfulfilled? Desperate for a sense of belonging, a place to fit in, a real community? Outside of your family, of course. You just wanted something different."
Chastity stared at her for a minute, then grinned in the way she did when trying to let someone know they didn't have as much of a handle on her as they thought. "Trying to psycho-analyze me or something? I thought this was a job interview."
Sonia was eerily calm. "Trying to see where you'll fit in among the rest of us. I think you're awfully lucky you came here before anyone else in the area with similar...methodologies could snatch you up. You're at a very vulnerable time and place in your life, you know that? I wouldn't want to see you taken advantage of."
"Well, don't worry about me. I can handle myself." She leaned in and offered a smaller, conspiratorial smirk. "Believe me, Sonia, you don't know the half of it when it comes to how I grew up. I can do anything you need me to. I didn't get the chance to really show her, but your friend Abigail can tell you - I'm real good with a knife."
She let that hang in the air; a slightly risky offering, dangled over the table if Sonia wanted to bite. Sonia just kept sitting and smiling placidly.
"We'll see about that, then, won't we?"
"Maybe. I think you will."
"Alright." Sonia shifted gears then, subtly but noticeably. "I would like to get to know you more outside of your background. What do you like? Interests, not just what you can do."
Chastity leaned back, snapping herself back into her usual mode of interacting with new people. She was casual, she was friendly, she was cheerful and enthusiastic and just quirky enough that you might find her interesting no matter who you were. "Oh! For starters, I like music, of course, who doesn't..."
Chastity had been aware from a young age that the legal aspects of her family's situation were in a delicate position, which got more so after her mother's death. Other families might have to worry about custody disputes or family services checking up on them; their concerns went far deeper. No one outside the family was ever invited to their house for good reason. If Patience did something wrong, if she slipped up just a bit, everything could come crashing down around them. If one of the sisters made a mistake at the wrong time, none of them would ever see each other again. Which was at least part of the reason Patience could be so hard on them.
It was something of an alienating experience being around people who had mostly been raised to understand that if you were in serious trouble, you could always call the police. They wouldn't actually do it, at least not now, but throughout most of their lives they wouldn't have anything against getting the law involved if they were in a crisis. Chastity could always be counted on never to do so. It was one of the things Sonia liked about her.
("Most people here seem to view their sociopolitical beliefs and stances as more of an aesthetic than anything," she confided in Chass once, in a rare moment of sincere - she thought - heart-to-heart communication. "You, though, you're one of the few who seems to have actual convictions. I like that."
Chastity had been pleased with this assessment, especially because she'd been told before, by more experienced people they occasionally met with, that she didn't actually understand a lot of what she was throwing herself into when it came to social issues and activism. But she had sincerely wanted to get it right, and she supposed that was what Sonia saw in her. On the other hand, this was coming from Sonia fairly early on in the game.)
And now she was about to betray not only Sonia but also herself and her deeply-held principles and quite possibly bring down exactly what she'd feared all her life on her own head, but hey, it was literally life or death. And hers wasn’t the only life at stake, so she was also technically doing so for the greater good of the people.
So that made it okay. And at this point, even if she ended up dying herself, Chass really wouldn’t mind seeing Sonia get what was coming to her.
Chastity was once again experiencing that strange feeling of being outside of herself. She supposed it could come from being very tired and it being very late at night (or early in the morning – she didn’t know and couldn’t tell), but she’d been running on far less sleep before while feeling mostly normal. This was different. It was like she wasn’t really controlling her own actions, but the actions of a strange being whose only function was to do what had to be done. Or maybe it was the other way around, and that being was controlling her.
Whatever was going on, Chass felt herself as more of a body than a mind.
All she had to do was say what she needed to say into the phone, and then whatever happened, happened. If Sonia heard her, then so be it, as long as she got the important parts out. If Sonia – or someone else – stopped her before that, then everything would be for nothing. But if she did it, then even if she ended up dead, at least it wouldn’t be in vain.
She hadn’t exactly prepared for the possibility of her own death, but what could you do to prepare for that? Really, the prospect terrified her. So much so that she was risking everything in order to avoid it. It would have been rather selfish if she wasn’t also trying to save so many other people who risked the same fate.
Some might wonder how she could be so seemingly callous towards human life but care so much about certain people. The answer was simple: those people were her friends, her family, her inner circle. Of course she cared about them.
Which kind of meant that maybe this whole thing was a selfish choice after all. Would she do the same if she didn’t know any of these people?
Would she do the same if Raina hadn’t been among them?
Who cared? She was doing it now.
She picked up Sonia’s phone and dialed 911.
That was what you were supposed to do, right?
“911, what’s your emergency?”
Shit. She really didn’t know what the protocol here was. “Yeah, hi, um—”
She lowered her voice, heart hammering. “Look, I have to be quiet, I’m in a house and people are—well. I’m at Sonia Simmons’ house.” And she gave the address – she felt that was important, at least. “And I don’t know if you know her, but she’s been running a cult claiming the apocalypse was coming for at least the past five years. And now that she thinks it is, she wants all of us – her followers – to go out tomorrow at noon and commit suicide in a public place.” And she told them what place that was, because that also seemed important. “But before that, she’ll probably have us preparing in the house all morning. At noon, she’ll have everyone gathered outside and she wants us all to drink poison at the same time. That’s what she’s planning, but I want to stop it as soon as possible.” She paused. “Sorry for the short notice, but this is a last resort.” She paused again, running through what she knew about emergency services in her mind. “You can get my location from this, right?”
“Yes, we can—”
“Alright, good. Because I’m not lying or playing some kind of prank.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“Good. Thank you. I have to go.”
“I understand. We can help you as soon as—”
“Thanks. Bye.” And she hung up.
She’d been keeping her gaze firmly on the door the entire time she was on the phone. No one had knocked or come bursting in yet. She stood staring at it for a few more minutes before she was satisfied that no one was going to break it down.
Calmly, she went to the door, turned out the lights, opened the door, tiptoed back out into the hallway, and, retracing her steps as carefully as possible, made it back to her original sleeping place. She lay down next to Raina, who was still fast asleep.
Now all she had to do was wait.
Chastity didn’t realize she was shivering until she’d been lying there for a few more minutes. Raina stirred in her sleep, and Chastity turned over and nudged her.
Raina’s eyes flickered open briefly. “Chass…” she breathed.
Chastity inched closer, and then they had their arms wrapped around each other as they usually did. Together they drifted off to sleep.
Neither Chastity nor Raina saw anything unusual or improbable about the idea of people in close physical and/or emotional proximity having shared dreams. They reasoned that it was entirely possible to have the same dream as the person sleeping next to you and not know because neither of you remembered it, which often happened with dreams. And if you did remember it and never told the other person, then you would never know you'd had the same one. This was why they always told each other about their dreams if they remembered them. It was something Temperance and Chastity had been doing for years. So far they hadn't ever shared one that they knew of, but it was worthwhile all the same to tell it.
Raina would not remember what she dreamed that night, but she was aware by the next morning that it had been troubling. Chastity remembered nothing, but if she had she might have remembered sitting cross-legged on the floor across from Raina and asking her if she'd dreamed of anything while Chass was up.
"Yes," Raina said, appropriately dreamily. "I was standing in the middle of a forest that was burning down all around me. I didn't feel anything, though, not even any heat, which is how you know it's a dream. But then I saw people trapped in the flames just off to the side, and they were screaming, but I couldn't hear anything. So I reached into the fire to grab someone's arm, and that's when I felt it, just like if I'd reached into a real fire. But I didn't let go, because it was you and I had to save you. I dragged you into the clearing where we'd be safe, but there was only room for one person. I tried to give you the space but you wouldn't let me, you just stepped back into the fire. Why?"
"I guess I wanted to save you, too," said Chastity. She was more uncomfortable than she normally would be, sharing dreams with Raina. This felt more like when Sonia organized everyone into groups and made them sit in circles and share things with each other, like their greatest fears or worst memories or deepest secrets. It was supposed to encourage openness and connection among the community members, and increase their trust in each other, but even when they were all under the influence of the most powerful hallucinogens Sonia had access to, nothing would make Chastity share her actual biggest secrets or fears or regrets. (It was also total bullshit since later on, Sonia would prove that she did not care very much about her followers connecting with and trusting each other, so they were probably right not to be completely honest with each other.) Still, she felt a little guilty whenever she had to hide something from Raina. She felt like she was hiding something now, but could not quite tell what it was. There was an awful sense of foreboding in the air.
In the morning there would be no time for Raina to contemplate her vague memories of a troubling dream or discuss them with Chastity. It was just as well. If she had been allowed the time, she wasn't sure she would have told her.