Read Online Dominion by J. L. Bryan - Free Book Online

smiling and slapping hands with anyone he vaguely recognized.
    He lay awake many nights waiting for someone to kick in his front door, or at least come to question him, but as far as he could tell, his mistaken visit to Sully’s house brought no consequences. It was always possible they were monitoring him closely. He would never know the difference until it was too late.
    Sometimes he looked at the sleeping form of his wife and wondered how he had come to this place, sleeping next to this person who existed in a different universe from his own, a universe that could be reordered from top to bottom at the proper signal. He’d been fifteen when Columbus happened, and much of his life since then felt like a dazed sleepwalk. His private questions, too dangerous to be asked, targeted the larger truths about the world, about why his country seemed bent on ruling the planet, how they got away with claiming morality while they rained death on millions around the world, how they managed to claim his county was free and democratic when ten or fifteen or twenty million people were incarcerated, depending on what numbers you saw, and there was only one ideology represented on the ballot.
    He puzzled over the mass behavior of humanity, but drifted like a zombie through his own life. He’d wanted to work as a print journalist, the kind who took long research trips and studied problems in the most troubled parts of the world. By the time he graduated college, those jobs had become not only scarce, but dangerous—writers kept disappearing without explanation, as had much of the faculty at Berkeley. Newsgathering in foreign countries was limited to military and intelligence personnel for national security reasons.
    He’d wisely joined the Dominionist church, a denomination that had spread quickly through the nation after Columbus and become more or less a requirement for those who wanted to participate in public life. Contacts at the church had gotten him his first internship with GlobeNet, and he’d worked there ever since.
    He met Madeline as a “suggested match” from the church’s Unmarried Young Adult ministry. Membership in that group was automatic for anyone who fit the description. The counselors would set you up on dates whether you asked them to or not. Madeline had been the fifth woman Ruppert met in this way, but they’d all been very similar, from well-heeled conservative families, all of them employed in some branch of the sort of social-service work the church deemed proper for females.
    He dated Madeline for seven months, and as she pressed him harder and harder for marriage, he had trouble finding any cause to object. Madeline was undeniably beautiful, but she was also far more socially poised than Ruppert, navigating the new strangeness of life like a born native. She was about the same kind of person he would have to eventually marry anyway. The entire culture around him insisted he marry as soon as possible.
    Madeline had finally gotten her way when she came to his home one night by herself, without one of the matronly chaperones that usually observed their courtship. This was shocking behavior on its own, but then Madeline had tied his hands to a chair and slowly removed her clothes until she stood naked in front of him. It was not illegal, so long as he wasn’t paying her money to do it, but it was all completely forbidden.
    The extreme audacity of the act impressed him even more than the sight of her body. For an unmarried woman to be alone with a man was shameful, but to reveal herself in this way could have gotten her flogged, if she belonged one of the more severe women’s groups, or excommunicated from the church altogether. He admired her for it, and he agreed to marry her.
    She had never done anything so bold again. Over drinks on the golf course, Ruppert occasionally heard similar stories from other men, and it eventually occurred to him that this was a technique women taught to each other, perhaps