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Think no vice. Think no vice.
    We met years later at the training academy. We were posted to the New Bethlehem force and later became Acolytes—Doe was the first woman ever so ordained. How, I often wondered, had a parentless orphan secured such a gift?
    I lead a charmed life , Doe herself often said. We were partnered together. Our paths seemed oddly bound.
    Could I be blamed for feeling it was all somehow part of God’s plan?
    She said: “Could we run? Somewhere they won’t find us?”
    “Anywhere we go, they’ll follow,” I said. “If we stay on the lam for a few months, they’ll dispatch Trackers. Maybe even the Quints.”
    “Think they’ll be lenient?” she wondered. “Amputations?”
    “I doubt leaving the scene helped.”
    Don McLean sang about good ole boys drinking whiskey and rye. Wind whistled through the room bearing the scent of autumn.
    “How long?” I asked. “How long since you stopped believing?”
    She met my eye, unembarrassed. “It’s not like asking someone when they lost their car keys, Jonah.”
    Following a span of silence between us, she said: “When you’re a kid it’s simple. God is good. Followers do good work. When you’re older you learn about The Prophet and The Prophet is good. You go to SuperChurch, watch the fireworks, they trot out The One Child and you feel all that energy and think, I’m blessed to be a part of this. But that’s just the stage dressing. And when you find yourself behind the stage backdrop with the rusted pulleys and frayed ropes—when it’s your job to pull the strings and rig the guy wires . . . you realize how fake it is. You know what we do, Jonah. The games we play and why we play them.”
    “To keep the citizenry sedate. Maintain equilibrium and social harmony—”
    “Don’t quote The Charter at me.”
    I said, “You can’t mean this, Angela. We’re . . . we’re the Chosen People.”
    “Everyone thinks they’re the chosen people.”
    “But,” I told her, confused, “we really are .”
    She smiled in a way that conveyed sadness, or confusion, or both. “You can take nearly everything away from people—every right and freedom, every want, most every need. But you can’t take their Gods. We’re killing their Gods, Jonah.”
    I recited the departmental boilerplate in my head. Moral Turpitude: a critical loss of faith severely affecting performance of duties, potentially injurious to oneself and one’s unit. Any Acolyte suspecting a fellow officer of Moral Turpitude is beholden to report these suspicions to their Commander .
    Angela came to me. Extended her hand. “Dance with me?”
    To dance alone in the darkness with a woman to whom I was not betrothed was an act of abject sacrilege. . . .
    I gave her my hand.
    Her body still held the latent heat of the explosion. I was clumsy, nervy; she placed my palms round her waist. Her wet hair smelled like a doused campfire. She sang with her chin rested on my shoulder, her breath prickling the hairs there. Don McLean sang about flames climbing high into the night and Satan laughing with delight.
    Doe unfastened the sash of her robe. I glimpsed that smooth cut of skin. She shot a hip to one side, a pantomime of sexuality she must’ve seen someplace. After all, what did she really know? What did either of us know? We were both virgins . . . weren’t we?
    “Are you . . .” I was grinning like a child. “Trying to corrupt me?”
    “Are you willing to be corrupted?”
    Doe slid the robe off her shoulders, old knife wounds criss-crossing them, down the toned ladder of her rib cage. A bullet scar on her left thigh, the deep impression like a core sample. Her body a map of the roads she’d travelled in service of the Republic.
    “Do you love me, Angela?”
    “I don’t love anyone, Jonah,” she said. “But I probably could have, had the world unfolded differently. Is that good enough?”
    “No.”
    “Will it be good enough for tonight?”
    Lips soft, tongue soft, but the body