Flux by Beth Goobie Page A

the front of the church, the Interior agent ducked forward. Deller’s double gave a hoarse grunt and Nellie felt brilliant flames of pain shoot from his body—another entreaty to the Goddess, unseen and unheard.
    “Fire,” she hissed, her eyes skittering across the sanctuary. “We’ll set this place on fire with candles.”
    Deller stiffened, his gaze racing from tapestry to tapestry. “You game?” he asked, darting her a glance. Heart thundering, she nodded. In the last few seconds, everything had changed. Hereyes had been opened, she’d sensed Deller’s double cry out to the Goddess and now she could feel Ivana responding to his plea, filling the sanctuary with Her holy anger. This place was about to go up in a fiery prayer—anyone who’d ever suffered and cried out to the Goddess would be part of Her blazing revenge.
    “I’ll take the far side,” said Deller. “You stick to this wall.” Then he was off, stopping only to lift a lit candle from a nearby alcove before ducking along the back wall. Quickly Nellie darted to another alcove and grabbed two candles that were glowing at the base of a small blue-robed statue. Slipping behind a confessional booth, she raised one of the lit stubs to the lower edge of a tapestry. Blood pounded in her head as she watched the flame flicker against the thick border, the heavy cloth refusing to catch. Impatient, she jammed the candle against the tapestry and the flame snuffed out. Nellie’s entire body convulsed with disappointment. Moron , she thought contemptuously, breathed deep, and brought the second candle to the tapestry’s lower edge.
    It caught. Slow flames licked at the border’s thick weave, then mounted the tapestry’s design. Fascinated, she stared, then jerked herself out of her trance and slipped from behind the confessional booth. A glance toward the front of the church showed shadowy figures continuing to swarm, focused on their prey. As Deller’s double let out another cry, Nellie set the confessional booth’s drapes on fire. Beside it stood a small table covered with pamphlets. Circling it in a crouch, she touched the candle flame to the various stacks of paper and the table went up in a crackling roar.
    Shouts alerted her and she glanced up to see the men turning en masse toward the back of the church. Suddenly Deller came barreling past, hunched low to the floor, and she followed him up the side aisle as the group of men tore down the center of the room.
    “Stay here,” Deller hissed and took off toward the boy who sprawled semi-conscious, alone before the altar. Just beyond them loomed the floor-to-ceiling statue of the Goddess, a mass of prayer smouldering at her feet. Closing her eyes, Nellie wished those prayersleaping up the tapestries behind the statue, eating the walls alive. Then she opened her eyes to see a vivid line of flame meandering up the central tapestry. Beneath it she could just make out Deller’s dark outline reaching down to hook his double under the arms.
    All over the sanctuary men were running and shouting, flap-ping their shirts uselessly at flaming tapestries. Somewhere a fire alarm had gone off, and a bucket brigade was forming at the back entrance. As Nellie watched, the priest came darting through the doorway with a fire extinguisher, but to no avail—the tapestries were ancient, as old as the church itself, and ready to release their souls. With a creaking roar the entire back wall of the sanctuary erupted into flame, a century of prayer spewing ashes and smoke.
    Darting forward, Nellie grabbed one of the Deller’s double’s arms and helped Deller pull him into the hallway. “I think he’s coming to,” Deller panted, one arm over his face to muffle a cough. Thick tendrils of smoke were beginning to drift into the corridor. “How do we explain this to him?”
    “We don’t.” Yanking the boy’s inert form from Deller, Nellie started lugging it down the hall for all she was worth. “We shove him out the