She ate her breakfast and washed herself as well as she could. After that, there was nothing left to do but pick up the pages.
WELCOME, SEEKER
DOCTRINE OF THE ORDER
Cass read the first page three times before giving up. The words refused to come together in her mind, the paragraphs swimming before her eyes.
Somewhere, not far away, the children of the Order were being cared for. Fed and clothed and sheltered and kept safe. That was more than Cass had ever accomplished. Much more than she’d managed already, and she’d only had Ruthie back in her care for a single day-a day in which she’d let her be bitten, infected, and nearly taken. A day that had caused her girl untold pain as she turned, then reverted, then healed in that small library room.
Cass tossed the pages on the table and lay back in her bed, pulling the sheet up over her head. Her breath fouled the air under the sheet, and she pulled her arms and legs in tight and made herself as compact as she could. She squeezed her eyes shut and wondered if, in here, her prayers might actually work.
The prayer she would say, if she allowed herself, was the old one, and for that reason Cass knew it was a bad idea. It was the prayer from when she drank. On mornings like this, in beds not dissimilar, Cass breathed her own stink and reviled her own body and prayed only for God to let her forget-the things she had done, the things she had lost, the things she would do tonight. It was not a prayer of hope.
Someone would come, eventually. She had managed to sleep through the other neophytes washing and dressing and preparing for their day, but she would not be so lucky again. She would be expected to study, to eat, to make conversation. Cass had come here with hope and something even better-with thoughts of Ruthie dancing like diamonds in her mind, never far from her thoughts. But that was gone now. Yesterday, as Lily’s kind voice stirred the silt from her memories, she had remembered.
And remembering stole her resolve. Cass wanted to be Ruthie’s savior, but she was the one who had forsaken her.
She wanted to be Ruthie’s everything, but she deserved nothing.
Cass pressed her face to the mattress and felt her tears hot against the cotton. She pressed harder, harder, until she couldn’t breathe, and wished she could stay that way until the last of her life left her.
But her body was a traitor, and as she willed the air from her lungs and her mind went black at the edges, she knew that eventually it would seize deep drafts of air to sustain life, a gift she no longer wanted.
38
IN THE END, OF COURSE, SHE BREATHED. SHE stared at the pages and ate the food an acolyte brought for lunch, and slept and woke, and when the others came back at the end of the day she listened to their talk and answered when they spoke to her.
Monica offered her a gift, a single sleeping pill wrapped in a page torn from a magazine printed back when there were still celebrities to gossip about. Cass thanked her and turned her down, but she wondered how many times she would say no before she said yes.
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said instead, fanning out the typed pages.
“Don’t worry about it.” Monica sat cross-legged on her bed. She was wearing faded pajama pants printed with penguins on skis, and a white tank top, and her hair was pulled back from her face with a wide band. Her thin brown shoulders and the bangs that slipped out of the hair band made her look like a teenager, though she’d told Cass she was twenty-two. “It’s not like they test you on it or anything. It’s just all of Mother Cora’s crazy ideas.”
“Did you read it all?”
Monica laughed. “
“Then what?”
“Then nothing, really. You get to be a neophyte. Big thrill.”
“Monica…why are you here, if you don’t believe any of it?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe
“What?”
Monica glanced around the room. Some of the women were already in bed, others were reading by the light of the industrial fixtures mounted in the corners of the room. No one paid any attention. “I haven’t told this to anyone but Adele, but I was going to go to divinity school. Down at Fuller. I wanted to be a minister. I mean not like right away but…someday. I was saving up.”
Cass remembered herself at twenty-two. The account she started at the bank, where she was going to put away money for landscape design school. The single deposit she made-and the day not long after, when she took it out to buy a leather skirt.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to go,” she said softly.
“Yeah. Well.” Monica smiled and yawned. “Here I am, anyway. I like most of the people here. Even a lot of the ordained aren’t so bad. And three meals a day and a bed sure beats living on the outside. It’s just-I don’t like it when people think they have all the answers, you know? Especially when they make them up and then want to make you believe the same crazy things.”
Early in the evening of the second day, there was a knock at the dormitory’s single door. A key turned in the lock. Cass expected an acolyte bringing her dinner, but it was a gray-haired deacon in a ruby blouse.
She gave Cass a smile that didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. “I’m Hannah. Sister Lily tells me that you have finished studying the Doctrine. Tonight you will join us for dinner, and afterward I will give you your new clothes. Congratulations, Cassandra.”
Following Hannah down onto the field, Cass realized how little she had moved during the two days she’d spent confined to the dorm. Her legs felt tight, her heartbeat sluggish. It had been days since she’d ended her solo journey at the school, months since she ran flat-out through the Sierra foothills.
She needed to decide whether to make the effort to live, or let her ennui spread through her body until it atrophied and withered, but even the idea of making a decision sounded like too much effort. Already she wanted to return to her bed and just go back to sleep.
Hannah led her to the neophyte table, where Monica and Adele had saved her a seat near them. “I’ll return for you later,” she said. “There’s something special planned after dinner, but I’ll be back after that.”
Monica waited until she was out of earshot. “Oh goody, maybe there’s going to be fireworks. Or Jell-O shots.”
Adele sighed. “You know darn well what it is, Monica. Come on, don’t ruin it for everyone else.”
Cass got through the meal as she had got through the past two days. She answered when spoken to, and forced herself to lift her fork to her lips until most of her meal was gone, all the while concentrating on keeping her mind as blank as she could. The night settled in as the servers cleared dishes and poured weak kaysev tea, and Mother Cora ascended the platform and took her place at the podium.
“Tonight we have something special to celebrate,” she said. “There has been further progress with Sister Ivy. She is responding to our prayers!”
On cue, the doors to the enclosure at the other end of the field groaned open, and a large, wheeled cart rolled slowly onto the field, its top half a cage with a dark figure inside. In the rapidly descending night, Cass couldn’t make out any of its features.
But the creature made a sound. At first it sounded like an engine turning over without success, an escalating whine that ended in clattering coughs before it started up again. Cass listened, goose bumps rising along her arms, knowing exactly what she was hearing: the call of a Beater, frustrated, hungry and lusting for flesh.
Sister Ivy.
