Rhys threw the small Braeburn apple, with its mottled green and red skin, in an arc directly at the boy’s chest with enough force for it to crush the fruit, but the it swerved in its path, yanked to the side by an unseen force, flew wide, and bounced with a wet thud off a nearby tree and down to the ground.

    “How many more you think it can move like that?” asked Sammy.

    Another apple, smaller than the last, arced through the air at the small boy’s head, and, not seeing where it had come from it jolted his cranium sideways several inches.

    “Ow!”

    The target, trapped in a half ring of a dozen boys, stood with his back to a copse of trees under layered with a bramble of raspberry bushes. His head swiveled constantly from one boy to another, trying to follow the movement of the apples as they tossed them up and down like balls. Small tanned hands raised in defense vibrated the air around them in visible waves, like the air over old asphalt on a summer’s day.

    “Careful Rhys, he’s getting angry.”

    Rhys shrugged his shoulders in a stretching action he had seen the older boys do when they were warming up to throw at baseball. Twelve years of growth saw him tower an easy four inches over his classmates, and that height, wed to a bulky build, placed him in a commanding position. A few of them whispered he lied about his age, and had at least one extra winter, but in truth nobody really knew. 

    “See if he can move a pair,” Rhys said.

    His brown eyes flicked to Sammy, then to John, and he added a hint of a nod.

    They wound up, but Sammy stopped. “Run!”

    Sammy dropped the three apples in his arms, and bolted in a line directly away from Rhys. The other boys’ heads turned in unison to look past him, then dropped their apples, and sprinted in every direction as leaves scattered by a strong wind.

    The familiar figure strode toward him from up the street. Arrayed in long voluminous sleeves of his robes, embroidered simply but elegantly with red thread encircling the sleeves, Bishop Alexander pointed at Rhys with an outstretched hand.

    Rhys, poised to run, slumped in defeat.

    The reverend’s thundering tones reached him. “What are you doing, Mr. Dalton?” Strong oratory tone carried the way it did at the Sunday sermons, easily crossed the hundred feet between them as effortlessly as if they spoke in a small private room.

    “You’re fucked now,” said the previously trapped boy.

    Rhys turned to him but was left with no recourse when the boy stuck his tongue out. Throwing an apple while the bishop stared him down would have him scrubbing dishes for a month. When he turned back the bishop stood uncomfortably close to him.

    “I said, what do you think you are doing?” Reverend Tobias Alexander asked.

Rhys opened his mouth to speak, with stories of picking apples, and good-natured jokes, but a stuttered series of syllables fell out in an incomprehensible jumble. “We, I, were, going, apple.”

    “Young man, please come here for a moment.” Alexander spoke past Rhys.

    Face flushed, under the scrutiny of the bishop, even though the man now addressed the boy down by the brambles. Through a smile on the bishop’s face Rhys felt wrath coming his way. The Abnormal boy took a halting step up, and looked about equal parts ready to run and obey.

    “Please,” the bishop added. “What your name, young man?”

    Steps squelched up the embankment in the grass and mud from the previous night’s rain. He stopped part way, and picked up two apples nestled in the muck, but his eyes never left the bishop, and the tension in his muscles suggested he might run at a moment's notice. The boy left an easy fifteen feet between himself and the bishop, and a few additional feet separated himself from Rhys.

    “Adam.” 

    “Adam is a wonderful name,” Alexander said. He gestured slowly toward Rhys, specifically to his apples.

    “If you would like more, perhaps ones which were not on the ground?”

    Adam shook his head in decline, but said nothing. A lump swelled on the side of Adam’s head where fruit had hit him. Rhys flushed up the back of his neck as he saw the diminutive stature o the boy up close. 

“I’m very sorry, Adam,” the reverend said. “Sometimes young men are foolish, and they test others when they do not know how to pass the tests God has set down for them. I do not understand your gift, but I am sure it is from God. Rhys, here, has something he would like to say to you.”

    Sweat forming on the back of his neck when the reverend’s eyes landed squarely on him. He swallowed hard, certain they heard it. He didn't need to ask what the bishop expected of him.

    “I’m sorry.” Rhys said.

     His voice chose that moment to crack, whether out of adolescent growth or a throat constricted in fear Rhys did not know.

    “I don’t know that Adam heard you.”

    “I’m sorry.” Rhys repeated, after clearing his throat, and met Adam’s gaze while he did. Adam didn’t look at him with anger, glee, gloating, vengeance or anything else Rhys understood. Adam nodded, and walked away from the pair, leaving them alone.

    The bishop stood statue-still, emphasized by flapping about his red stole, draped over his neck and shoulders. The off-white of his cassock served to emphasize the color and pressed firmly by the wind against the bishop’s thin frame. Despites his diminutive stature, Rhys could not stop fearing man, even though he gave no outward signs of anger. Rhys reminded himself of the Church’s mantra and recited it silently to himself.

    That which is believed is fact, and he believed in the fact that he was scared of the bishop. 

    “Come with me.”

    The bishop turned and strode east, toward Saint Joseph’s Cathedral, visible several blocks away from where they stood. The reverend moved at a pace which Rhys’s legs easily matched. The clergyman's hands moved constantly, waving to several others on the road, and blessing those who crossed his path.

The pair walked on the sidewalks of the old city, instead of the wide walkway of the streets. All the people from before the Fall did that, acting out habits from when cars still moved. Rhys’s mind briefly wandered to what it must have been like to move faster than a horse could run, but he couldn’t actually imagine it. He once ran down a ten-foot dolly while some of the other boys had pushed it, and that was the fastest he had ever gone.

    Musings served as a thin veil to pretend he didn’t notice the lack of commentary from the bishop.

Teachers yelled when he did something wrong. Priests always corrected the orphans’ errors within seconds of the transgression, and the assignment of nightly chores for chastisement would have been assured as soon as they caught him. Reverend Alexander still said nothing.

    The bishop’s footsteps carried him right past the church and its tan brick architecture which stood a four stories over Rhys’s head. He expected to be brought straight to the confessional booth, but instead they went around the back, and continued up a block, past the housing for the priests and then past the housing maintained by the church for orphans, in which he lived. People on the street no longer waved congenially to the bishop, but stopped in their path and gave him an almost courtly nod. He was, after all, the senior official of the Kritarchy in the city, second only to the archbishop in old Cincinnati.

    The Kritarchy pretended they were not a government, but Rhys and everyone else knew they were.

Around the back of an old grey apartment complex, the bishop stopped to speak with a man pruning a rose bush. Bishop Alexander’s eyes bounced from rose to rose and he grasped the dirt-smeared hands of the gardener and shook them with extra joy and vigor. After several minutes of discussing the health of different shrubs, the bishop finally led him away. Rhys looked back and watched as the man cut, pruned and cleaned with renewed energy.

    “Have a seat,” the bishop said as they entered their destination.

    Tucked away behind the rest of the priory, the chapel held only two stunted pews, and a small altar. He sat on the bench farthest from the door and stole glances sideways at the reverend who gazed up at the altar and the image of the cross beyond it. His mouth moved, but he said nothing aloud. Several minutes of silence passed, and Rhys began to tap his foot, but the silence made even that small sound echo. He forced himself to stillness by pressing down on his knees with his hands.

    “How is school?”

    Rhys looked at the reverend, who now looked intently at him, and sat as still as the wooden statues placed around the room. Eyes the color of blue, after the sun had risen but before the day had asserted itself over night’s purple, sat behind unblinking lids. Smile lines creased his face, lanced out from the corners of his mouth and eyes, and they crinkled at Rhys now. Those creases were somehow more ominous than the yelling of a triplet of priests or nuns.

    “Fine.” Rhys’s voice cracked again. Definitely fear, he thought to himself.

    “How do you find the school’s dorms?”

    “They’re ok, I guess.”

    Another moment passed in silence.

    “This is my private chapel. Sometimes I come here for the silence. Sometimes I come here to think. Sometimes I come here to pray.”

    “Does God answer you?”

    “Bold you man to ask such things of a bishop, aren’t you?” The bishop looked to the cross and smiled more widely. “Sometimes.”

     Rhys blushed but pressed forward. “So, are you an actual Orandimancer?”

    The bishop’s smile faded and his gaze went alternately from Rhys to the alter, where it rested for a long time before he spoke again.

    “I am a man of faith, Rhys. If I believe strongly in the right of what I am requesting, then sometimes God will answer me in the affirmative. If that makes me an Orandimancer, yes, I am. But it is not like other forms of magic since the Fall. Our magic is not magic to be tapped by our whims, or to be asked for willfully, or demanded. It not like pyromancers or people who simply believe strongly enough in themselves or myths of magic. It isn’t born of fear like iconomancy or idemancy, so much more in the heart of the recipient of the spell. Orandimancy is a faith of humility and a request that must be born of love for another.”

    “Oh.”

    “Oh?”

    The bishop laughed, loud and heartily. It reverberated in the small room, making him seem much larger, and Rhys did not understand if he had said something else wrong. He shrunk down into the pew, and tried to appear helpless and small. That worked on some adults.

    “The truth of the world’s magics and you say, ‘oh.’” Do you know why you are special, Rhys?”

    Rhys did not mean for it to escape, but he sighed. He had heard the same story so many times from so many lips he didn’t want to hear it again. He hated the titles they used for him, like guarded, and protected. His eyebrows raised in surprise when the answer the bishop volunteered had nothing to do with his literal miraculous past, saved from death by his guardian angel in the now distant and fallen New York City. He’d heard the story of the children’s miraculous rescue from the black van too many times in his life.

    “You are special, because you are a leader, Rhys. People follow you, whether because of our worlds new order as belief and impact of that belief into fact, or because you are good with others, maybe even a little bold, I don’t know. But, being a leader has a price tag, young man. It has a price tag you will not know you paid until you are much older. You see, it is possible to be a leader, who leads other men to good actions, or you can be a bad man, and lead others to the same folly.”

    “I didn’t start it!” Rhys protested.

    Rhys took a breath to continue in his objection but the words died in his throat at the way the bishop stared. He had already heard everything Rhys could say, and Rhys knew it.

    “Why don’t you like them?” the bishop asked.

    Rhys shrugged.

    “Maybe you don’t dislike Abnormals, and instead, perhaps they are just the group who people need to dislike? The symbol of the end of the world, the result of the Fall. But you don’t remember the world before the Fall, so why do you hate them? How did you know the boy was an Abnormal?” The Reverend paused between each question, letting Rhys wrestle with the idea.

    “I don’t know. Someone else said he was?”

    “Did he look different than you?”

    “I guess not.”

    “Was he hurting anyone? Or doing anything wrong? Was he making you feel like less because you don’t have a gift like his?”

    “I get it.” Rhys’ tone rose a little too terse even for the forgiving nature of the bishop.

    “Do you?” asked the reverend.

    The hot feeling in Rhys’s chest died down and the need to defend himself suddenly felt very silly. He shrugged.

    “I am not saying you had to stop the other boys, Rhys. I am saying you had a choice to not join them and you did not make that choice. Sometimes that is what it means to lead. It means making a choice to not do a thing everyone else is doing. That is a kind of hero, young man. Sometimes, all you have to do is live life well enough that you are not the villain in anyone else’s story. When others follow that example, think of all the other things you could start to do.”

    Silence.

    The bishop crossed himself as he stood. Rhys heard the older man’s knees pop as his rose.

    “That’s it?”

    “Not at all,” Bishop Alexander answered. “The cleaning rags are in the cupboard in the back. Please polish all of the wood in the room, the banisters, the pews, the altars, and the carvings. I will be back in several hours to check your progress. Contemplate who you wish to be, Rhys.”

    The trailing edge of a red hem flashed as the bishop closed the ornate wooden door behind him. The patterns in the wood made the outline of the door look like a cross surrounded by more intricate carvings of farm animals and pastoral scenes.

    The bishop asked things of God, and because he believed so strongly in what he asked for, God answered him. People bowed to him as he walked by, but he still stopped to talk about roses. Rhys had barely noticed the man cutting the shrubs before the bishop had spoken to him.

    “Don’t be anyone else’s villain,” Rhys said out loud. Then he sighed, took in the wood-filled room, and the back cupboard. He predicted leftovers in his dining future. 

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