Archon(19)

Even if I am weakened by your smiles. Why do you have to be so damned nice?

“What if you pay dearly for befriending me?” Sophia was sitting in the same position when Angela stepped out again. She barely acknowledged the sight of her tights and gloves, not even questioning them with her eyes, as if she understood why they existed in the first place. “There are stipulations in the sorority that apply to other students. I don’t have to reveal them to you.”

“I’m not really afraid of Stephanie. Not the version I saw of her anyway.” Angela slipped on a boot, lacing the leather until it cinched tight below her knees. “What I am afraid of is that she and everyone else will end up making my search ten times harder than it has to be. That I’ll be slowed down.”

“What are you searching for?”

Angela stopped tying her boots. There were a lot of answers she could give. Brendan. Kim. Her angels. Death. But each one also required a longer explanation than she felt like giving. Especially when it might find its way back to Stephanie’s curious ears. “For my sanity,” she ended up saying.

But that was probably too late by now.

“When you turned that lock last night,” she continued, “it was like being in the institution all over again. They always made sure we couldn’t get out of our rooms at night. And that no one else could get in. I’m not too keen on stray cats inside the building, but I wouldn’t have cared if it was hunting a mouse in the bedroom either.”

Sophia left her seat, reaching for the ceremony pamphlet. “The lock was for peace of mind. Not to act as any kind of barrier.” Her eyes were cold and opaque in the gloom of the room. “It would have held, but only for so long.”

“What—is this a super cat we’re talking about?”

“I never said it was a cat.”

An awkward silence drifted between them. Angela finished lacing her boots and stood, ready to leave the room, but not quite so ready to open the door. Now it seemed like nothing more than a sliver of wood positioned in front of a crushing and invisible menace. There was no cat? What, then? Angela would have heard a dog days earlier, and foxes and weasels were extinct on the island. Maybe a raccoon? “If the lock couldn’t keep it out—”

That’s right. Not a cat now. An ‘it.’

“—what did?”

“The light,” Sophia whispered. She pointed to the chandelier swinging above them, its brass half gray with tarnish. “The candles that I lit, when you finally fell asleep.”

The introductory ceremony had been scheduled for an hour after breakfast, during a time when downpours were common. That way, so the thinking went, the students would stay indoors and attend, rather than meandering back to their dormitories in the fairer weather. But in a stroke of irony the sky broke open, and instead of water, dreary sunshine descended on the city with rays of sickly yellow. The light looked like it had aged somehow, pent up behind a screen of clouds for days, and Luz aged beneath it, all of its flaws newly glaring and raw.

Angela had decided to sit in an apse of the church, hoping to be screened by darkness.

Yet the sunlight glowed through the stained-glass window, haloing her and Sophia with red and purple. Everyone else who’d bothered to come—and there weren’t many—sat in relative obscurity, half hidden by pillars, or shadowed over by a large statue meant to hold two flickering chandeliers. Now, it was too late to get up and change her seat, joining them. The novices were deep in the middle of a boring ritual, their Latin prayers and monologues utterly alien to her, and the moment she stood up to escape, she was sure a hundred heads would turn and take notice of the transgression. One of those heads would be Kim’s. He stood behind his older peers, reciting the prayers with a tormented expression, and he glanced at Angela every once in a while, his amber eyes dull like the sunlight.

She did little to acknowledge him, merely nodding and slumping deeper into the pew.

Brendan, oddly enough, was nowhere to be found. For a person who adhered to rules like a fly to honey, he was behaving more than out of character.

He probably did what you can’t and finally ended it all. Are these ceremonies supposed to be this boring?

She leaned over toward Sophia. “Please tell me this is almost over.”

“Five more minutes,” Sophia said. She was also watching Kim, maybe because he was watching Angela. She certainly didn’t have a lovesick glitter in her eye like some of the other students. “You should consider yourself lucky,” she said with a teasing smile. “The Masses tend to last two hours.”

“They have Masses here?”