Gabi pushed the door of her room open and froze at the sight that confronted her. Each and every one of her spindly, crooked book towers had toppled, leaving the floor of her room covered in a shin-deep sprawl. Without the towers, the room looked empty, yet there was not one clear spot of floor where she might place her foot to come inside. Gabi slid down the wall, staring dumbly at the mess. How could this have happened? She’d been careful to reconstruct the towers that fell the night before when she’d left her room. Had she closed the door with a bit too much gusto in her hurry to get to the temple and carry out her plan? Not that it mattered. The only person in their family who cared about tidiness and order was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.
Gabi was astonished that she had any tears left to cry, but the small salty drops just kept leaking out. She kicked her foot out from under her and used it to plow a small path in the books so she could scoot through. Inch by inch she uncovered glimpses of the colorful rug Gram had given her for her seventh birthday. It showed a scene from an old fairy tale called “The Little Mermaid.” Her father had objected to the rug, as such fables glorified a world dreamed up by humans rather than the one created by God. But as with the pots, Gram had won out, arguing that the rug had been gifted to her by a dear friend lost during the Strain who had no family of her own to leave it to. Gram had gone on to suggest that if Sam thought that something as harmless as an old rug could undermine the doctrine, perhaps that pointed to a problem with the doctrine, not the rug.
The scene woven into the rug was of the Little Mermaid bidding farewell to her father and sisters as she joined her prince on land. Gabi had begged Gram to tell her the story many times, never tiring of hearing how the mermaid’s longing to experience a world beyond her own inspired her to withstand great suffering. Gabi loved how the rug’s weaver had made the sinuous bodies of the merfolk visible beneath the waves and included all manner of marine life in their underwater world. Before Gram explained the tale to Gabi, she’d thought the image was of a girl about to abandon her life on land for the mysteries of the deep. Looking at the scene now, Gabi wished she could disappear inside it and never return.
“Gabriela? Honey?” Gabi’s father knocked softly at her door and poked his head in. “What happened in here? Are you okay?”
Gabi realized that, seated amid all of it, she probably looked like she was literally drowning in a sea of books. “My stacks fell over.”
“Well, you’re lucky you weren’t hurt.”
“It happened while we were out,” she replied, tossing a textbook onto her bed. There was virtually no uncorrected material in it, and it occurred to her that she might as well get rid of it. Perhaps she should get rid of all of them. The uncorrected material could probably be condensed into half of that big reference text from the Corrections Facility. The one that was now missing a certain whale photo. For the first time since leaving the hospital, she was aware of the sharp corner of the stolen page digging into her skin beneath the waistband of her skirt. Gram had told her to keep it along with Sam’s passcard, even though she knew it could get Gabi into a lot of trouble. Why? Gabi badly wanted to pull out the photo and look at it again, but her father was still standing in the doorway, taking in the shambles of her room.
“Do you want to talk about anything?” Sam asked, absently fiddling with the doorknob. Gabi did want to talk. She wanted to tell her father what Grammy Low had told her. She didn’t want to be the only one to know it, but she had made a promise. “You and Gram are—were very close,” Sam continued, his voice rough with emotion. “I know this is hard for you.”
“She was your mom,” Gabi said. “Do you need to talk? And why did people come into our house when we weren’t here? They cleaned things, and they knocked my books over, did you know that?” She hadn’t meant to bring up the intruders, but the weight of so much secrecy was too much. Who else would answer her questions now that Gram was gone, and why was her father talking about Gram as though she’d been just another member of the fellowship?
Sam’s head jerked back, and for the first time since the Care Center, he looked at Gabi. Really looked.
“I know this might be hard for you to understand, Gabriela, but as a councilmember and Primary Translator, it’s my duty to hold all of my fellows equal and prioritize the highest good of Unitas above all else. I took an oath. What happened today was a tragedy, but it was also a security situation that had to be resolved through the proper channels. Your gram was involved, and so some investigators came to the house to do a routine search for clues to what happened. The safety of our community was at stake.” There was that tone again.
“Was it?” Gabi countered. “I thought you said it was just a faulty wire. Why are you being like this? Don’t you care that she’s gone?”
“Of course I’m sad. I loved her. She’s—was—” Sam worked his hand
