Seamstress

“Can’t you go one week without causing trouble?” Cassandra-G006 demanded. She knelt in damp shadows behind Camp Currahee’s barracks. Distant shouts drifted through the rain. A brawl still raged out on the parade ground.
“They started it,” Simon-G294 protested. Cassandra’s teammate looked like he’d headbutted a JOTUN thresher. A black eye, bloody nose, and cut lip leaked beneath the mud that caked his face and fatigues. “Kopis will think twice before they screw with us again.”
“I’m sick of getting punished for these stunts .” Cassandra’s arms already ached from the “correction” that she knew would come as soon as the drill instructors found them. “Jake’s right. This team’s out of control.”
“So that’s how it is, huh?” Simon’s mouth twisted into a crooked smile. “Fine. Maybe I won’t give this back after all.”
He pulled a small black book out of his pocket and held it between thumb and forefinger. Cassandra’s eyes bulged. “My prayer book? How did you…?”
“Swiped it from the Kopis bunks after Ralph set off that stun grenade. Teach them to steal from us. But since I’m so out of control, guess I’ll just keep it.”
“Give it back!” Cassandra swiped at the book. Simon laughed. He held it out of reach until Cassandra tackled him. They tussled in the mud until she pried the book from his dirty hands. Then they crawled apart, giggling like fools.
“Thanks,” Cassandra panted. She held the dirty book close to her chest. “It was my mom’s. The only thing I have left of her.”
“No problem.” Simon wiped blood from his nose. “Who’s Augustine?”
“What?”
“The name on your book, idiot.”
“Oh.” Cassandra flushed. “I don’t really know. This book is how my mom taught me to pray. She’s written all over the pages. She said God was a seamstress who wove the universe together.”
“Isn’t your god a man? ‘Our father’ and whatever?”
“Well…” Cassandra couldn’t admit that she didn’t get it either. She liked the seamstress idea. Whenever she prayed she imagined God as her mother sowing a blanket to wrap around her shoulders. It was the only time she could bear conjuring up visons of her mother. “It’s complicated.”
“Whatever.” Simon kept an eye out for drill instructors. “Kopis shouldn’t have stolen it from you. But just between us, I think one of the drills put them up to it.”
Cassandra blinked. “Why would they do that?”
Simon gave her that look he always gave her when he thought she was being stupid. “I don’t know about Chief Mendez or the lieutenant, but the others don’t like you reading that book. You know how they get about unauthorized reading. And religious stuff. It’s not exactly useful like that Zen stuff some of the others do, is it? They think you’re just being an individual.”
Cassandra pressed the book to her chest. She’d never thought the DIs had a problem with her before. A spike of shame pierced her heart. Was she just another troublemaker to them?
“Sorry.” Simon made a face. “I thought you knew.”
Two years later Cassandra lay on a medical pallet, writhing in agony as ONI’s augmentations coursed through her body. CHRYSANTHEMUM’s chemicals hardened her bones and strengthened her muscles, completing her transformation into a Spartan. Simon screamed from the bed to her right. On her left, Jake-G293 endured the pain without a sound. A few weeks later Cassandra looked at herself in the mirror and felt sick. A nauseating sense of loss washed over her. She couldn’t recall her mother’s face anymore.
The next year found Cassandra trying to pray in a troop ship’s ready room. She ran a finger through that grubby old prayer book. Her mind stayed silent. God held no meaning—not as a father or a seamstress or anything else. Years of indoctrination and training and augmentation had finally done their work.
Across the room the remainder of Team Jian spoke in dull, hushed tones. The war was over. The Covenant was broken—without Gamma Company’s help. They’d paid a price all the same. Simon was gone, missing and presumed dead on dusty Mamore. Jake, Mary, Ralph, and Cassandra marched on without him. The war might be over but the fighting certainly wasn’t. Plenty of Covenant holdouts still needed mopping up. "Combat operations and dissident suppression measures are projected to continue for the next decade,” their latest Naval Intelligence briefing had intoned.
Cassandra knew better. The fighting would never end. Her thumb pressed down on the word truth at the end of a ream of meaningless scripture.
“It’s the truth about the Forerunners that smashed the Covenant,” Jake was saying. “I’ve been reading the dispatches about the Ark. Their entire religion was built on a lie.”
“Can we not?” Ralph rubbed his temple and glared at Jake. He’d been testy ever since they lost Simon. “This Forerunner crap makes my brain hurt.”
“Billions dead,” Jake said. “Our parents. Our homes. All because some religious freaks worshipped a bunch of dead aliens.”
“Give it a rest, Jake,” Mary growled.
“But things will get better from now on.” Jake pressed on. “The Forerunners are a new frontier. It’s not just the Covenant they’ll break. Once the truth spreads people won’t be able to use religion to divide and oppose anymore. The UEG will rebuild a unified humanity. We can finally lose the old Earth history dragging us down. And have you heard? They’re even talking about changing the calendar, sweep away the last of that anno domini nonsense.”
He turned and looked at Cassandra without really looking at her. “What do you think, Cassandra?”
Her finger hovered over the book and its empty words. She wondered why she’d ever taken the hollow prayers seriously. Nonsense. Yes, it all seemed so silly and childish compared to the golden age she and her fellow Spartans would help sweep in. A military future. A rational future.
“I think you’re probably right.” She snapped the prayer book shut.
Jake looked proud of her. He offered an approving nod and left the ready room.
“Don’t let him bully you, Cassie,” Mary snapped. A month later she’d be dead, pierced by a Jackal’s beam rifle on her thirteenth birthday. “He’s been insufferable since he broke out those political science tapes.”
“He’s just sore because of what Joshua said about Simon at the last briefing,” Ralph said. He’d already begun to die the long, slow death that would end with a teammate’s knife in his throat. “Everyone knows we could have saved him.”
Cassandra shrugged. She left the prayer book in the ready room. The prayers and the memories behind them didn’t matter. In this new godless universe all that mattered was following orders and marching from one mission to the next. A few hours later she thought about her mother and Simon and felt ashamed. She crept back to the ready room to retrieve the prayer book, but by then it had disappeared.
Six months later and Cassandra was on the run, disgracing her Spartan duty and joining Simon-G294 in treason. She stood on alien worlds and saw the primordial wonder of the Forerunners firsthand. Humanity’s militarized hegemony swept across the galaxy, yet the golden age Jake predicted never materialized. War and division and conflict raged on. Cassandra foundered, drowning in the merciless tides of history.
Soap splashed the clinic floor as Cassandra scoured out a copper stain. A child’s blood, a boy caught in the crossfire of some New Tyne firefight. Cassandra hadn’t bothered to ask his mother where or why. Here on Venezia no one needed much reason to get shot. Cassandra’s treatment had saved the boy’s life today. He might die tomorrow. Or maybe next month. Cassandra tried to care. She really did. But she just felt numb.
She’d seen so much since deserting the UNSC. Yet no matter where she went it was always the same. The powerful got stronger and the weak were crushed beneath the wheel of progress. The UNSC preached order before they bombed villages from orbit. The rebels spoke of colonial brotherhood before shooting children into shallow graves. The Covenant spoke of God and—
Cassandra drowned sponge and emotions in the soap bucket. Nothing she felt or did mattered. A few hollow-eyed colonists patched up in this clinic wouldn’t change anything. Her body was built for killing, not healing. She couldn’t escape.
The clinic door slid open. Instinct made her snatch up the M392 Bandit rifle propped against the near wall. Soapy water splashed the floor as a figure in weather-beaten SPI armor stepped inside. He raised hand in cautious greeting.
“It’s just me,” Simon-G294 said. “Do you greet all your patients this way?”
Cassandra set the rifle aside. Simon was probably just in from some Syndicate contract. The other mercenaries called him “Stray”—a nickname he’d picked up from the Insurrection. Cassandra refused to use it. “Simon. Where’d you get shot this time?”
“Oh, so I need a reason to come say hi? I’ll go get shot. Back in five minutes.”
Some days Cassandra could pretend this man was the same little troublemaker who’d enjoyed teasing her back on Onyx. But then he’d saunter in fresh off the kill and she’d see just how thoroughly the years had warped him. Strong and weak, Spartan and human: it made no difference. An uncaring universe claimed the soul one way or the other.
“Sorry. It’s been a rough day.”
“You have days that aren’t?” Simon set his helmet down on her operating table. He reeked of dirt and sweat, a nurse’s nightmare. Cassandra would need to sterilize the entire clinic after he left. “Anyway, thought you’d get a kick out of this. Guess what I found down in the market?”
He reached into an ammunition pouch. “That book shop in Center City is selling paper copies for nothing. Those morons have no idea how valuable hard copies will be in a few years.” He pulled out a small black book, held gingerly between gauntleted thumb and forefinger. Years of wear had scraped any trace of a title off the cover. A helpful clerk had taped a clinical label over the weary leather: SAINT AUGUSTINE’S PRAYER BOOK. TENTH EDITION. 2512 PRINT. PLANETARY ORIGIN UNKOWN. USED.
“You’ve got one of these things, right?” Simon pushed the prayer book into her hands. “I remember it from Onyx.”
Cassandra took the book warily and tried to look grateful. Simon thought she still prayed. For all his faults he’d never mocked her over that. He was trying to be nice, strange as that felt with everything now between them. She ought to at least try…
The book felt warm in her hands. A strange sense of nostalgia swept over her, as if years of pain and grief had suddenly washed away. She opened the yellowed pages and saw handwritten notes scribbled in every margin imaginable. "That day in the garden their apparel was inadequate. And so God became a seamstress for the sake of humanity.” Her mother’s book, here in her hands.
“This is mine,” she whispered.
“What?”
“My mom’s prayer book. I lost it on the Caspian after the war. And you found it in a book shop. It’s a miracle.” A joyful pain pierced her heart, unraveling the cords that bound it up these past years. Moisture stung her eyes.
“Coincidence,” Simon looked uncomfortable. He hadn’t expected this reaction. “Plenty of trash winds up on Venezia.”
“You’re right.” Cassandra smiled. It wasn’t a case of miracles not happening. It was just a case of someone calling it something else. “Thank you, Simon.”
“Sure. Keep it then. I…” He snatched up his helmet and beat a retreat. He paused at the door and looked back. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, what you believe. Never has. But ever since Mamore I’ve learned that things only make sense when you force them to. Me with a gun, you with this clinic, it’s… well, you’re way’s better than my way. We’re all looking for something that’ll never betray us, even if it’s just some old book or a mangy dog or…”
He realized what he was saying and shut up. He slid the helmet back on. That earnest expression vanished behind the cold visor. He stepped through the door and disappeared into the dusty street. Cassandra stood alone in the clinic. She held the book close to her chest. It was more than just a coincidence. This book in this place in that man’s hands.
In that moment she reclaimed what they’d taken from her. She remembered her mother’s face for the first time in years. Without opening the book, the words of the nunc dimittis slipped unbidden from her mouth.
Another year found her kneeling in an alley beneath a rain swept sky. Great concrete towers loomed up around her. The stench of wet trash and refuse rose in her nostrils, the inescapable karma of human existence.
God had brought her here to Talitsa, the black heart of the Syndicate’s colonial empire. Here the rich lived in penthouses high above the squalor while criminal enforcers ground out a profit one block at a time. Human misery was all around her. Out in the great wide galaxy great leaders made great decisions. Fleets mobilized and armies marshalled. The golden age of human hegemony marched on. But Cassandra’s place was here.
A young girl in torn worker’s clothes leaned against the alley wall. She stared up wearily through dull, sunken eyes. Kneeling, Cassandra took a cup from her bag and filled it with water. The girl snatched the offered cup and drank desperately, as if afraid it would be grabbed back at any moment.
“Where are your parents?” Cassandra asked. She already knew the answer.
“Don’t know. They’re gone.”
“I can take you somewhere for food and a bath. A bed to sleep on if you need it.”
The girl eyed her suspiciously. She knew better than to trust a stranger’s kindness.
“This isn’t a trick.” It was the only assurance Cassandra could give.
“Is it far?” The girl’s voice broke. “I can’t walk much farther.”
“I can carry you.”
The girl was hideously light. Even without augmented strength she’d be an easy load. Dim sunlight broke through the clouds. Out in the street shops were opening. A Warthog loaded with armored police rolled past. No one spared Cassandra so much as a strange look as she walked past with a girl on her back. The weight of the little book in her pocket felt heavier than the girl herself.
How much human misery had she carried through these streets? How much good had she done since she came here? The questions no longer seemed important to the little Spartan traitor. Rain and sunlight beat down on her neck. Lord, you carried our sins and climbed the hill to Golgatha. I imitate that act. You carried us all even when we abandoned you. I imitate that act.