The girl looks puzzled. “Why don’t you know?”
“Because I don’t know what to believe in right now,” she answers.
The little girl takes a short breath and then shoves her slightly damp hand into Tabitha’s, squeezing her fingers. “I know what to believe,” she says. “My mother told me and her mother told her.”
“What’s that?” Tabitha asks.
The little girl scrunches her face. “You won’t get me in trouble for saying?”
Tabitha shakes her head.
The little girl motions for Tabitha to bend down, and she obliges, getting on her knees so that she’s face-to- face with the child. The girl leans forward, her dark hair falling against Tabitha’s cheeks. “My mother says there’s a world outside the fences. She told me about the ocean, and when I get older, I’m going to find it. If you want, you can go with me.”
The little girl pulls back, her eyes shining and her little body almost trembling with energy. Tabitha thinks about telling her that it’s true, that there’s something greater beyond their gate. That she’s touched the very edge of it. But when she opens her mouth, nothing comes out.
Tabitha starts the Midnight Office early and races through the words, baldly reciting them hot and fast without thought to their meaning or significance. After the last Amen, she slips from the pews past the altar and toward the secret door.
She’s just pulling back the curtain when she hears the whisper of feet over stones. “I thought we would keep you company tonight,” Ruth says, carrying a candle into the sanctuary, a yawning Ami at her heels. They pause when they see Tabitha and the hidden door.
Tabitha’s heart beats fast and wild. There’s a certain thrill, she realizes, in getting caught. “I finished early,” she says.
Her two friends drift closer. “What’s that?” Ruth asks.
Ami tugs on her sleeve. “It’s not our place to know if they haven’t told us,” she says. The whites of her eyes almost glow in the darkness.
“Where does it go?” Ruth asks Tabitha.
Tabitha grasps the key tight in her hand, dull teeth digging against her palm. “I don’t know,” she says because in truth she doesn’t know what’s past the door in the basement.
“Ruth?” Ami’s whine is tinged with anxiety. She glances over her shoulder as if expecting someone to come upon them at any moment.
“You’re going to explore it?” Ruth asks. Tabitha recognizes the hint of thrill in her voice. Knows that Ruth is like her—that she craves the knowing.
Tabitha raises her chin. “I am.”
“Ruth,” Ami is now close to panic, scrabbling at her friend’s arm. Ruth looks between them, and Tabitha knows the moment she makes up her mind because her shoulders sag a little. She places a hand over Ami’s.
“We’ll pray for you,” Ruth says. Ami sags with relief. “And will make sure no one asks about your absence.”
Tabitha nods. “Thank you,” she says, thankful to be left alone but more grateful to know her friends will be looking out for her.
Ruth tugs Ami toward the rail, and together they kneel. Tabitha slips through the door and, before the curtain falls back into place, she sees Ami’s head bowed low and Ruth’s glittering eyes following Tabitha’s movements with a lusty resignation.
The basement is the same as before: dark, damp, fecund. She slides back the curtain and pulls out the key. The lock on the door doesn’t even protest or groan, just slips away revealing a long low tunnel.
There’s a thrill in her chest like the first time she opened the secret gate between her and Patrick. On a small table just past the door, she finds a stash of old candles, but she ignores them, cupping her hand around the tiny flame she brought with her and pushing into the darkness.
She can tell she’s underground, the walls slick with moss and sweat, the floor a hard-packed dirt. Her steps are slow and hesitant not because she’s afraid, which she is a little, but because it is rare for there to be something new in her life.
Rare for her to have a feeling she’s never experienced or a thought she’s never shared. She assumed she knew this village and this life and everything about it, and now she’s found something new, and she wants to make it last, not gobble it up like the tart treats of the Harvest Celebration.
Down the low tunnels she finds a series of doors, most of them with locks that her key won’t budge. But one door opens easily after she twists away metal bars that hold it closed into the stone wall. Inside, the glow of her candle illuminates a low bed piled with mildewed blankets and a rotted mat on the floor.
Against the far wall sits a rickety table with a thick book resting on top. She knows even in the dimness that the book is a copy of the Scripture, and she’s about to return to the hallway and her explorations when something about it calls to her.
She wonders if this is what it was like for the prophets she’s learned so much about, this pull and tug toward some offering of a truth. She places a hand on the book, thick dust sliding smooth under her fingers.
With a reverence and deference she’s never before felt, she opens the cover. The printed text is as she expects, as she’s seen before. But what she doesn’t expect is the cramped handwriting covering the margins. She sets down her candle and leans closer to the page, reading the first line:
She immediately recognizes the writing for what it is: a history of the village beginning at the Return. She carries the book to the bed, arranges the blankets around her, and reads. When her candle burns out, she gets another from the table by the door.
Time ceases to exist for Tabitha in that room. All that matters is the words, the memories. The horrifying facts of her world. Memories and stories she’d never even known about the brutality of the pre-Return existence. The sacrifices those who’d come before her had made to keep her village safe.
It feels as though the words slide from the page and eat their way under her skin, infecting her with a fever that causes her head to pound and her blood to burn.
She begins to understand the precariousness of their existence. The delicate balance of what knowledge to pass down to the general populace of the village and what to keep locked up safe in the Sisterhood.
And she learns the reason the paths are forbidden. She reads about the bandits who attacked the village in the early years. About the men who would leave and never return, who would alert the outside world to the village’s existence, who would incite a fresh wave of refugees that overwhelmed the village’s resources.
There were times the infected from other villages would try to invade. There was a year when her village almost perished because a small child had wandered from the Forest and turned Unconsecrated in the middle of the night, sparking infection that raged.
In a desperate act, those who’d come before her closed off the paths. Sent word that their village was infected and broken, would never survive. They started to tell the next generation that they were all that was left. They killed any who dared to tip this delicate balance.
They did it out of love. Out of loyalty. Out of a desire to continue the existence of humanity in the service of God. They did it with a passion of conviction.
This, Tabitha realizes, is what she inherited. This is what she jeopardizes every time she steps into the Forest.
As she closes the book, Sister Tabitha understands that she has to decide what she will stand for: her own selfish desire for love or devotion to her village and the people within it.
Tabitha has just stepped back into the sanctuary, weak and trembling, her face pale, when the oldest Sister comes upon her. “You’re late for the Midnight Office,” she scolds. “Your face is streaked with dirt and hair uncombed. This is no way to come before God.”
In the past Tabitha would have seethed inside for being treated like a child, but tonight she merely nods and walks stiffly to her room. She’d been in the tunnel chamber almost an entire day, and her eyes burn dry and painful.
