Then Will the Sun Rise Alabaster

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Cover art by Tithi Luadthong.

ISBN: 978-1-60701-537-6

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Then Will the Sun Rise Alabaster

Morning begins in apocalypse: by accident of location, sunrise on this star comes in like a herald of the great finale, that severance of time, a sky flushing to red and shivering with fire. The Church, the fall, the final armageddon that awaits them all. For the last eighteen years of her life, this is what Panthida recognizes as dawn.

She is older than eighteen. She may be twenty-five or twenty-seven. But the years before these eighteen have been pulped up between the Church’s jaw, swallowed like communion wine down its long throat. The Bible is teeth and each time she touches it, it is as though she’s handling bare razors. Sometimes she imagines the pages gleam like them too, redder than anything. Red, she is fixated on it, the color and the sound even though in English it sounds nothing like what she used to speak—a language now forgotten, burned up along with everything else, a language of vowels like a feast and tonal variation like music. Reeducation is a blunt process. She has kept her name and that is more than most of the women raised here can say.

She imagines what her habit would look like in crimson. She envies the priests’ stoles, which come in all shades, breaking the monopoly of black and white upon the body. They visit here but rarely and she perceives them as black wraiths brightened up by those slashes of vibrancy, scarlet or green or purple, threaded with gold. A species apart from hers.

Sometimes she dreams of the ship that carried her family, still drifting in the dark, slowly sawed in half. A vast numinous fruit and when it finally breaks, it vents an avalanche of the viscera and the wet humors that reside beneath human skin. All evaporates instantly. Nothing remains that is recognizable: no face, no body. Afterimages seared into memory—anonymous flashes—but that is all.

Red, red. The color of her dreams. The color of memory. She is obsessed with it, consumed by it. In her sleep, she hears its voice calling to her in that dissipated tongue, the tongue of her childhood.

After morning prayer, they are summoned to greet the new intake. Orphan girls, some younger than Panthida was when she came here, some older. Twelve at most. She wonders where the older ones go or if, over that age, a child is judged heathen and too impure for redemption. She searches their faces—her own is blank and remote, as is every other nun’s—and remembers her own baptism like drowning; she was submerged a long time, the better to erase what she once was, to erase the years that existed before the convent. These children: they could be from anywhere, fair- and dark-skinned, eyes like hers or like no one’s at all. Perhaps a station failed, perhaps like her parents their ship was intercepted or stranded in the dark, and the only offer was to give the children away to a passing Vatican vessel in exchange for survival. Only children, because adults are beyond conversion, have been immersed too long in infidel manners, infidel uncivilization. Cleaved from the Lord, the Gospel.

She sees in their faces no recognition, no common ground. But then from their perspective she is another jailer, another enforcer of what is to come: the canings, the flagellations, the hours of knees on cold, rough stone in the chapel. She wonders how many will remember their names when all is said and done; whether they have already forgotten. Occasionally she thinks of extending a hand, committing small subversions, and whispering to one of the orphan girls that she is here to help—that they have a friend, not all of the sisters are their enemies, that she was like them once. But her back has been bloodied one time too many, and no one ever offered her anything.

In the Abbey of the Pale Mother, charity has specialized definitions.

The children are separated, more than they already have been—no siblings or cousin, any family ties have been sundered long before; there are plenty of convents and monasteries. Boys to one place, girls to another. That there exist categories beyond those two is not a point the Church cares to acknowledge. Panthida leads her assigned orphans to their cells, one per. No point allowing them to conspire or commiserate. Escape is impossible in any case, but children are easier to break in isolation. She says nothing to them, and they say nothing to her, and she leaves them each a Bible. Small and made of paper: overlays are not permitted until one makes their perpetual vow to Christ, and even then they are heavily limited, tuned to Vatican broadcasts and not much else.

Panthida remembers a life where she had overlays from an age as early as five, an AI companion integrated at six.

Once the children have been put away—sedated for their first night, to minimize disharmony—she is pulled aside by a senior sister, who tells her, “You’ve been here for a long time, Sister Josephine, and you are exemplary in all ways.”

That is not her name—never will be. But she says, “Yes, Sister.”

“We have a rare visitor today.” A meaningful pause. The deeply lined grooves in her face crinkle, like dunes stirred by wind. “You will have heard of the Order of Eshim.”

The armed division, the avenging angels of the Lord, those clergies who dedicate themselves to root out sacrilege and hunt down apostates by force. “Yes,” Panthida says, again. Within the cloisters her lexicon is a narrow, truncated thing.

“One of them is bringing us a new sister today and shall be staying with us for a time to purify her thoughts, ease her mind after her time as a sword to our Lord. I’d like you to be her guide. Of your class, my dear, I trust you the most.”

Trust, she thinks, a peculiar concept to apply to someone like Panthida—to any of them, as if they have come here willingly and chosen this life. Once she feared that in the absence of all else, she’d come to love the Abbey, she’d come to love these women that terrorized her for eighteen years: that she’d crave their attention, their approval, their kindness after such long deprivation. That never came to pass. Somewhere between the praying and the beating, she lost all capacity for affection. Under Church doctrines, devotion is meant to go one place only, upward to the Lord, like myrrh or golden light exhaled from one’s lips. This adoration never eventuated within her either.

Though she has been told the Eshim is female, this fact does not register until she gazes upon the actual person in the convent’s landing bay. Two women step out from the shuttle. The new sister is dressed much like any of them are, the long habit that cloaks the figure, the wimple and veil that obliterate all identity. But the other one. A woman like no woman Panthida has ever seen, clothed in a black cassock split at the waist to show black trousers. The ensemble is so precisely tailored that there is no mistaking the shape beneath: the broad dark-skinned frame, the small high breasts, the thick biceps. Red stole trimmed in alabaster.

The Eshim smiles faintly—Panthida startles; she has been caught staring. “You’re to be our host, I believe, Sister . . . ?”

“Josephine.” She curtsies, her cheeks warm and her eyes floorward. The Eshim wears polished shoes, as sharp as the rest of her. Almost secular in their fineness. “Please follow me, Revered Eshim, and I’ll show you to your cells.”

“One cell will do. The two of us have traveled together for some time.”

Nothing improper in that: they’re both women, after all, and sworn to chastity. Yet somehow it feels wrong, if only because the Eshim wears such vestments. She steals another look, searches for evidence that this woman is a weapon of the Lord’s, the guns or knives or something else. But at a look it seems the Eshim carries such things concealed, no weapon disturbs the lines of her clothing. On the way to the cell, the Eshim introduces herself as Anoushka and the sister as Numadesi. Heathen names, Panthida thinks, not baptized ones. And beautiful, and she envies. Perhaps it is the privilege of the Eshim and those they bring into the fold, to retain their names.

“How long may we stay here, Sister Josephine?”

She blinks, still keeping her eyes down. A reflection of Anoushka in the black marble that makes up the Abbey’s corridors. How tall the Eshim is, how long-limbed. Anoushka makes the few men Panthida has seen in the Abbey look stubby and graceless, clumsy boulders next to Anoushka’s poise and stride. “As long as you wish, Revered. For that duration it’ll be my honor to serve you in any way.”

The Eshim’s image laughs softly. “You shouldn’t promise people that, Sister.” They walk past new novices, tight-lipped girls in white being herded to their Latin class. “There must be a lot of children here.”

“About eighty, Revered.” Higher than average, lower, right in the median—Panthida will never know. She’s only been out of the Abbey of the Pale Mother a few times, visiting other similar institutions. “Half under ten. The rest somewhere between that to seventeen.”

“The sisters must be most caring to shoulder the guardianship of so many. Truly God is full of mercy.”

The cadence of with which this is uttered makes Panthida glance over her shoulder, but the Eshim’s expression is noncommittal, as empty of meaning as blank paper. Sister Numadesi’s face likewise betrays nothing. She sees them off to their room and lets them know the Abbey’s prayer and meal times.

Panthida spends her evening preserving flowers and turning them into jewelry. All the nuns have their chosen crafts: pressing flowers into bookmarks, weaving, sewing doll clothes. Hers is dipping lilies and orchids and peonies in gold, bronze, brass. They become broaches or pendants, and she hears they are in demand, in the world outside: secular women wear them alongside crucifixes, to display their devotion and their appreciation of the Abbey. On her part, she does it because it is the one thing she can call her own, even if she doesn’t get to keep them.

Her company is usually Sister Menodora, a woman of indeterminable age who long ago took vows of silence, and who has never done anything to Panthida. How old she is, Panthida can’t tell—she has not changed much since Panthida was fifteen. Perhaps her extreme piety has caused true stasis, suspending her within a smoothness of face and body that suggests statues, bas reliefs, a mask. Menodora most likely has another name too, but Panthida has never heard her called anything else. She is currently painting a rose in preservatives, in the solutions that would keep the petals stiff and ready for metallic pigments.

It is companionable work. Function and quiet. She needs to pay attention—even after the preserving and hardening the flowers remain delicate, and after the process they don’t remain intact long, most likely falling apart on some woman’s blouse or jacket. Even attempting to imagine clothes beyond habits is difficult now. Silk and lace, skirts and long coats, what are those. Only this rough fabric she wears, faintly scratchy, the better to reinforce physical poverty so the spirit may be enriched.

An hour through and they have made enough ornament for two dozen women or only one woman with a particular enthusiasm. Panthida wonders if such a woman exists—whether she is, obscurely, opening a line of communication to the outside world; whether that woman looks forward to each batch and each collection. She tries to make them unique and tries not to imagine them dissolving to dust.

Their work finishes. They part ways, as they always do, each to her own duty. Panthida sometimes looks for signs of alliance, an overture of trust, but Menodora is a blank slate, an entity of neutrality absolute. A mirror which reflects back nothing, and yet the closest she has to a friend.

She opens her overlays. They are not the same ones she had as a child, in that forgotten former life; she has a clear memory of her original implants being ripped out one by one, her connection with the time before severed on an operating slab. (Did she cry or struggle? She does not recall that part.) Under the Church, even overlays are overwhelmed by song, the choir of angels. Merely to check the time—as she now does—is to be flooded by holiness.

The Eshim has been informed of supper hour, but she expects it best to be sure: this is her newest task, and she has learned what it means if she fails in any way, deviates from what is given to her. On the way she imagines making conversation—this is the first time she’s been in the personal company of someone so unusual, the first time she’s ever met an Eshim. She formulates questions, safe topics. Small talk, even that is foreign to her, it does not quite exist in the Abbey. Gossip yes, after a fashion. But to speak to an Eshim, a person sublimated by being God’s weapon. Even as she knows that is not a blessed profession, even as she knows someone like that must have played a part in events that cause orphans, the same orphans that are sent to a place like this and have everything within and without them eroded into emptiness: clay dolls to be reshaped by the nuns’ hands.

Even so. A woman like that, a woman in such garb and such colors, whose height dwarfs men’s and whose mien declares that nothing in all of cosmos strikes fear in her.

Anoushka’s and Numadesi’s cell is a little larger than most, though like the rest the door is not locked. She reaches to knock and pauses when she hears a low, rough sound: as of someone in pain. The door gives and she rushes inside.

On the cot, Sister Numadesi is straddling the Eshim’s lap. Her head is tipped back, her mouth ajar. One of Anoushka’s hands is on her hip, holding her upright. The other disappears beneath the habit, and though much is obscured by fabric, Panthida knows . Sheltered from the secular world or not, such things are nevertheless whispered of among the orphans. Adolescent thoughts may be punished if caught, but the flesh tells its own verity. She stands paralyzed, captivated. Numadesi’s legs are parted and her breathing is labored, as if she means to suppress an impossible agony. “My lord,” she says, hoarse.

The Eshim’s hand goes still. She raises her eyes to meet Panthida’s. Her mouth curves. “Sister Josephine, you may misunderstand. This is prayer that we’re doing.” Her arm shifts, adjusting the sister on her knees, changing angle. Something she does makes Numadesi cry out. “See how she finds rapture and approaches ecstasy, as did the saints of old. This is divinity received, Sister. It is nearness to God.”

Panthida finds she cannot move. Sister Numadesi clutches at the Eshim’s shoulders. The line of her spine bends as she pushes against—what? Against the Eshim’s fingers, against the wicked deeds being done to her there. But Numadesi makes no effort to flee, to avert this sin. Instead she bucks and moans and begs, “My lord, please—” Then she goes rigid, eyes wide, veil thrown back. Her hair has come loose, a brilliant black tide. A glimpse of her throat, long and shadowed, and Panthida finds herself thinking how splendidly shaped that is, the geometry that makes up a woman’s throat.

Slowly Anoushka eases the sister onto the bed. She withdraws her hand: it gleams wetly. “Was there something you needed of me, Sister Josephine?”

“I—” For an instant it is as if she was the one balanced on those powerful knees, the one who was impaled on that hand and writhed as though suffering from a fatal thrust. Panthida does her best to not look at Numadesi at all. “I wanted . . . I meant to say, supper is soon, Revered. In ten minutes.”

The Eshim smiles wider. She licks her fingertips, one by one. From the littlest to the thumb. Her tongue is pale pink and small. “Delightful, Sister. My thanks. Will you be showing me to the dining hall?” She crosses the room, almost impossibly quick, to wash her hands in the basin. Nonchalant as anything, as though she was caught doing nothing more extraordinary than counting rosary beads.

“Sister Numadesi won’t be joining us?”

“We take our meals in private, she and I, but as it is my first day here I thought I should be more communal in my manners. I’ll make sure she is fed, at this moment she’s indisposed.”

Panthida half-expects something more, another sacrilege: perhaps the Eshim will kiss the sister, will rip the habit off. But Anoushka does no such thing, leaving Numadesi on the cot with eyes shut, breasts rising and falling harshly beneath the black cloth. Cheeks flushed and limbs splayed as though in a dead faint. Panthida hurries out.

The Eshim follows, walking level with Panthida, hands clasped at her back. Her eyes take in the black marble, peer at the stained-glass windows where the images of virgins filter the world: the immaculate mother, the female saints, those touched by angels. She expects Anoushka to smirk, to sneer at such things, but the Eshim looks merely intent. Her footfalls are bold, her stride determined and long. She does not walk like a nun.

In the dining hall, Anoushka is invited to say grace; save the Mother Superior herself, the Eshim is the highest-ranking woman on the premise. She recites the words with solemnity. Her voice reaches the entire chamber of bare stone unaided, a voice of cool command. For the entire supper, she is the focus of attention. Few of them have ever beheld a creature like Anoushka, if another like her exists.

The Mother Superior invites the Eshim to contemplation. Panthida watches them go, trying to locate the word with which she will make her report to the Mother. The Eshim was defiling her charge . No. She committed the gravest of sins under this roof . . . The sin of what, exactly. She knows the rhetoric and the tenets, she knows the vows that she has herself taken. Pledged to Christ, bride of the Lord, as unblemished as the Great Mother herself. And yet. The way Numadesi moved and sounded.

“What is she like, Josephine?”

Panthida nearly drops her bread roll, but she realizes Sister Ruth cannot possibly mean the state of Numadesi on that cot. “The Eshim?” she says, a little stupidly.

“Yes, her.” Ruth is a fair-skinned girl with sharp glittering eyes, Chinese perhaps, her birth name could not possibly have been Ruth either way. Panthida imagines—though has never asked—that it might have been something more elaborate, something like Xiaohuan. It is a name she remembers hearing once, possibly in a play. “Who else would I mean? That’s the most interesting thing I’ve seen all year.”

“She is not a thing.” Panthida is trying to remember that play but the details scatter like mist.

“Did you know,” Ruth goes on in a low voice, “the Eshim administer justice even among the clergy? In the Priory of Martha’s Sacrament last year, a terrible calamity happened—some act of supreme blasphemy, very grave. The Order of the Eshim paid them a visit and the next day the entire place was emptied. Priests lined up and one by one shot in the head.”

“Certainly not,” Panthida whispers, her fingertips gone to ice.

“But it’s true. They may execute even a cardinal.” The girl seems to relish the fact, mouth pulling into a fox’s grin. “The blades of archangels. The Eshim are not to be crossed in any way, so they say.”

Panthida spends that night sleepless, replaying over and over what she has borne witness. Why the Eshim continued on until Sister Numadesi was brought to—to that state—almost as if this was meant for Panthida to see. The Eshim’s smile which burns like a slow fire. She turns in her cot, facing the wall, and sinks into her overlays. But no amount of liturgy can bring her peace.

When a hand falls on her shoulder, she freezes, thinking that this is it then—the muzzle of a gun, the edge of a knife, her punishment for having seen what Eshim Anoushka does with a sister in her care. But it is only Sister Menodora, holding a small red candle.

“Sister?” she asks, before remembering Menodora can’t verbally answer. The woman gestures for her to follow.

It is irregular, but today has been a day for it, for unusual happenings. Sister Menodora is senior to her, in both age and piety. Panthida puts on her wimple and veil.

Being out in the corridors after dark does not invoke good memories: for Panthida that meant a beating because she was caught sneaking more food than she was allotted, all those portions of tasteless gruel, or because she asked a question in Bible class that a sister thought impertinent. Is Jesus Christ like Prince Siddhartha? It seemed an innocuous question, even a clever one—there was a time she was taught by teachers who encouraged her curiosity, who encouraged her to ask and intuit connective tissue. She still knew how to pronounce Siddhartha then. It is as well that the convent does not allow vanity: there are no mirrors for her to check what her back looks like these days, how the scars have gouged and thickened across her spine. How there is nothing but scars. She has a small, remote recollection of being a child who wanted to grow up beautiful.

No place for that in the convent. Though they have left her face untouched, for the most part. Sister Ruth, who was older when she arrived than Panthida was, has a notched scar down her left cheek. Not the kind that ruins a face’s symmetry, but it is an obvious mark in nearly any light.

Menodora brings Panthida to a door she hasn’t seen before, a white door circumscribed in red, the reverse of Eshim Anooushka’s stole. Unlike most, this door is locked; it purrs open at Menodora’s touch.

The room is not like the rest of the convent either. Well-lit and opulent, the walls softened by rose gold and copper paneling, the ceiling dominated by a mural. An archangel clothed in silver, with six wings made of flame, carrying in their arms a bloodied woman. Most angels look androgynous or masculine; this one somehow seems feminine—proud and stern, but female. Against the walls are set display cases of manuscripts, ancient preserved paper tinted by vibrant pigments. Primary colors for the most part, the occasional gold.

Sister Menodora puts a finger to her lips and points her to each display. On one illustrated page, two women in chitons kneel in embrace, bare breasts pressed together. On another, a woman buries a red knife in a man’s breast while tenderly clasping another woman’s face. A third case still shows several women in snowy kimono, their heads pillowed on one another’s lap or breast. These are not images of sin—the clothing is all wrong for Biblical didacticism and there is no snake or apple about, nor a wrathful angel above.

“What are these?” Panthida touches the glass lightly, frightened that it might sting her like acid, eat through her skin. The sear of impure thoughts.

Menodora tilts her head then opens her mouth. Where her tongue should be is only a fleshy stump, gray and mottled.

Panthida leaps back. Her throat closes, bitter with acid and revulsion. The punishment in the Abbey can be without remorse: her skin tells that truth, as does Ruth’s, as does any girl’s. But there is, she thought, a limit. A line that is not to be crossed.

Gently Menodora lays her hand over Panthida’s, shaking her head. She pulls a sheet of blank paper from one of the desks, works quickly with a pen, and turns it over to Panthida. On it she has drawn a striking likeness of Eshim Anoushka, a figure in black standing with feet planted apart, her arms laden with stars. Her hair streams behind her, haloed as though she is an angel of the Lord in truth rather than in the metaphor of her title.

“She is here to bring retribution?” Menodora shakes her head. “To give salvation?” A nod.

“Sister, can’t you just write down what you want to tell me?” Another headshake. Lack of facility with the written word or some other impediment: the gesture is not specific.

Menodora adds another figure behind Anoushka, Panthida herself in startling detail. A woman of slight build—here most of them have to be, with meals pared down to the last calorie—in black and white, face upturned in defiance and cradling white roses in her hands. An expression as resolute as stone, as what might have been on the face of the Saint of Orleans. It is nothing like her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t understand. I can’t help you.”

She turns. She walks away, away from this chamber of gorgeous manuscripts, the images of forbidden perversions between women, the truth of what has been done to Sister Menodora. Inextricably linked, now, in Panthida’s mind. The world is ash, as ever it has been.

The next morning her skull is thick and her forehead tight—every light is too bright, every sound too loud—but it is not the first time Panthida has gone on little sleep. She watches the dawn (how ruby, how scarlet); she joins in prayer.

After breakfast she meets with the new orphans, showing them where they are to bathe, to eat, to learn. At this juncture it feels nearly normal, like in any creche or school: they are afraid, in a new place, search for any sign of comfort and protection they can find. And most are very young, having much less memory of before than she did. They will ask fewer questions, lack a basis for comparing this life to one where they are loved and not taught to fear that every misstep would send them into the arms of demons, and they will have an easier time—she has seen before the difference in treatment received by orphans like her who ask too much, and orphans who do not remember and therefore ask nothing. Malleable children become malleable novices, the favorites of senior nuns, the favorites of the Mother Superior.

In a small classroom, she points them to small desks and seats, gives them stationery. They stare at her wide-eyed and alert, and even at that age they must already be making the calculations she herself did: how to survive. They don’t ask where their parents are or when they can go home while she asks them if they’ve heard of God.

One child replies, singsong, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.”

She smiles at that child, though it is an automatic expression: nothing behind it. She is as empty as they are, a mannequin parroting scripture, less than an animal. “Correct. Your name?”

The child gives her baptized name, having already memorized it, having already absorbed that part of the survival arithmetic. Not all children learn so fast. Panthida has no access to any data from before, no idea as to what this child’s parents named her or from where she was taken. In looks the child is Indian or Sri Lankan, not unlike Eshim Anoushka or her charge Numadesi.

Halfway through the class, Sister Numadesi enters and asks if she may observe. Panthida can’t manufacture a good excuse to say no, too exhausted and too tense. She tells the children about the Garden of Eden and the first sin of woman while Sister Numanesi watches on, unobtrusive and placid.

A senior nun takes the children to their next lesson. This leaves her alone with Numadesi. Panthida makes a show of gathering her papers, her folder, her pens. Her copy of a child’s Bible, with bright images and simplified prose.

“I don’t think I have seen a class taught with pen and paper before,” Numadesi says. Her voice is sweet and pleasant; in a choir she might sing soprano—almost certainly she would, Panthida has already heard how her voice sounds in exertion, at its higher notes. “That must take a great deal of forbearance, Sister Josephine.”

“It’s the way I was taught.” Panthida keeps her gaze averted. She pours all her effort into not remembering Numadesi spread across Anoushka’s lap. My lord, please . . . “How may I serve you, Sister Numadesi?”

“The Abbey of the Pale Mother is famous for its virtue.” Numadesi inclines her head. “There are areas even the Revered Eshim may not set foot upon, for she hasn’t taken the same vows you or I have. Would you do me the kindness of showing me the sacred cloisters? I’ll be living in them, after all.”

Another request for which she can summon no justification to turn down: life is service, and service to sisters in Christ most of all. “It would be my pleasure, Sister.”

They walk side by side, two figures dressed alike. The outward shells indistinguishable, at a distance. Numadesi has a much fuller figure between the two of them—no malnourished childhood, not her, the grand scope of her hips scandalous despite her habit. She is ten centimeters shorter than Panthida but occupies space with much greater ease, at one with her skin, at peace with it in ways that have nothing to do with prayer or the sublimation of Mass.

“I’ve never met an Eshim before,” Panthida finds herself saying. Dangerous territory, to profess she is curious. She knows how to walk the tightrope, however, to steer clear of the lethal drop. She will not admit to bearing witness; she will pretend she never saw. “Have you been acquainted with her long?” What a flat understatement, acquainted, next to the carnal reality.

“Our association began quite some time ago. Yes. I’ve traveled the galaxies in her company for many months, close to a year now. The Eshim do the Lord’s work unlike any other, the Psalms expressed in bullet trajectory, in the swiftness of justice meted out. There is beauty to it, Sister, just as there is in liturgy.”

What she feels toward Numadesi, Panthida realizes, is not disgust. It is envy. For a nun to have seen more than a convent’s insides, to have explored the galaxies’ anatomy rather than the confined capillaries of corridors and the shuttered atria of chapels. To have been anointed by the radiance of distant stars and not merely the glare of a single sun. “There is beauty in all things. The Lord’s making is without flaw.”

“And we rejoice at every dawn, as the angels must have when light was brought into the void and ignited the universe.”

It is poetic but wrong, though she doesn’t argue. Numadesi has a way of speaking that makes it seem uncouth to correct her, and perhaps she learned the Bible through a different avenue, an imprecise translation that she must now clumsily convert back to English. Her diction can be gently guided toward propriety—at least that is something Panthida can tutor her.

She shows Numadesi the inner chapel, a place of white marble and dark pews lined in green runners, a small altar presided over by the Virgin Mary piled high with roses, yellow and pink: the novices have been here today. A spot for contemplation, though sometimes it is for other things. This is where Panthida received her first flogging. The importance of doing so under the Virgin Mary’s gaze, her head bowed, her mind keeping count.

“Are you content here, Sister Josephine?”

“I am content,” Panthida says, “pledged to the Lord.”

“Of course.” Numadesi is smiling. “I meant, have you thought of outreach work? Missions are protected by the Eshim themselves. That is how I met the Revered, she showed me the truth of creation and it was as though a veil lifted from my eyes. Instantly I longed to yield myself to the Lord.”

A frisson knifes through Panthida. Anger. Resentment like poison. “You didn’t grow up in a convent.”

“Indeed not, that is why I must beg your indulgence if I misspeak or misstep. I spent most of my life in a tiny city, on a little world, governed by no one. I’ve not met the Mother Superior herself—the Revered is taking charge of the introductions—but she strikes me as most compassionate.”

Strong, even at her age, at wielding canes and crops. Arms corded from years of this practice. “She is the picture of compassion.” Panthida stares at the roses, bends to collect petals that have fallen astray. “As for missteps, Sister, if I may—on your conduct? There are things you can do outside the Abbey that you cannot do in here. The Mother Superior is loving but she is also strict, she has expectations of our behavior.” She meant to pretend blindness, yet it seems wrong to give no warning. Numadesi’s back must be like satin.

Numadesi kneels beside her, gathering up a fistful of roses. “Such as the prayer I shared with the Revered?” Her hands wrap around Panthida’s, their skin separated by a thin layer of petals.

“I’ll speak nothing of it to anyone, Sister, but—”

A rose petal is pressed to her lips. Through it, Numadesi kisses her, gentle and slow and all Panthida’s thoughts flee, her blood roaring in her ears and her mind turned to supernovae. She does not move, does not resist; the rose petal bruises between her mouth, pink darkening to mauve. Its fragrance fills her lungs.

“It is the purest act,” Numadesi whispers against her mouth. “To find unity with another woman. To hear your pulse beat in synchrony with hers, and to drink of her as from a consecrated chalice.”

Her nerves are fire. Red, red. The rose petal falls. Her crucifix has gotten tangled up with Numadesi’s. “You’re a demon—a succubus. The serpent in the garden.”

“Not at all.” The woman teases the silver chains apart, link by link. “Nothing of the sort. I’m a woman, just like you. The human skin is a hungry thing and you are far lovelier than these roses, far more eternal. I will leave you be now, and pray you’ll forgive me for having disturbed you so.”

She watches Numadesi leave. Realizes, then, that Numadesi does not need a guide after all—she appears to know where she’s going, to navigate the corridors with surety. The woman is here to look for something, Panthida is almost certain. Whatever that might be, she has not found it in Panthida.

That evening, Sister Menodora does not join Panthida for jewelry-making. She continues her work regardless but it is perfunctory now, no longer glazed with the idea that this might somehow serve as a remote line to the world without: that her work has any meaning at all. Now that she has seen what might have been, now that she’s learned other paths could have been open to her but were not. And never will be. For nuns who came up through reeducation, the perpetual cloister is the only present and future available, the only path to heaven.

For most of her life that seemed reasonable. She did not love the sisters, did not find them merciful, but the physical brutality of these eighteen years seemed a fair price to pay to avert her soul falling into hellfire. What is flesh but temporary. You are far more eternal than these roses.

Several dawns come and go. No catastrophe occurs: no one reports the Eshim or Sister Numadesi and neither is cast out. She sees them at Mass once, and at meal times. They don’t approach her and despite herself she is struck by a sense of bereavement, of emptiness. They were something and they acted as though she was something too.

Menodora seems to have disappeared entirely. She asks Ruth, but the younger woman doesn’t know either, and she always has her finger on the pulse of convent gossip. “Maybe she’s in seclusion,” Ruth suggests. “That’s happened before. Being less earthly than the rest of us and far more refined of soul. Practically a living saint, is our Sister Menodora.”

She shushes Ruth. “When has she done anything to you or anyone?”

“She hasn’t,” the girl concedes. “I’ll give her that.”

Panthida’s days settle back into routine, into the gray. She pictures herself growing frail and old in the Abbey because under the teachings of God, suicide is another sin, the urgent exit is denied. All things are sins, save what is done by those with power.

When she is summoned to the Mother Superior’s office, it comes almost as a relief.

She has not been there for quite some time, the austere room that is furnished by almost nothing, a single window that looks out to the convent’s narrow garden. One of the walls might serve as a display, but Panthida has never seen it switched on. A single chair that, contrary to the convent’s strictures on humility, has always looked to Panthida like a throne—broad-backed and tall, hewn from a single boulder and decorated in segments of agate. As a child she thought it wondrous; as an adult she has come to think of it as a display of hypocrisy.

The Mother Superior herself is a shrunken woman, shoulders stooped. Her face is deeply scourged by time, her eyes a milky blue veering toward the white of cataracts, and if her hair had once been auburn or blonde there is no trace of pigment left. It is fogged white, the hue of bleached straw. But there’s still authority to her, and she holds onto her cane as though it is a scepter and she the monarch of a kingdom.

“Sister Josephine,” she says, gesturing with the cane. “It has been eighteen years since you came into our care.”

This is not a question. “That is so, Mother.” There was a time when her mispronunciation of this simple word, Mother , got her caned: the calves usually, that was a favorite spot. Now she pronounces it perfectly.

The diminished eyes meet hers. “Have you thought about your future?”

“My future is here, Mother.”

“Indeed.” Something in those cloudy eyes turns sly; it makes Panthida think of small, wizened monkeys. “I’m curious as to what you might have been . . . doing, yet one cannot deny such a petition as I’ve received. Revered Eshim Anoushka has requested your society. She finds it soothing to pray with a nun when she travels. Her charge will be left here—we ought to baptize that girl properly, what kind of name is Numadesi—and you will replace her for, oh, three months. That’s the most we will concede, even to an Eshim.”

Panthida stares not at the Mother Superior but at the onyx-tipped cane, at the glint of agate in the throne. “Did she say why, Mother?”

The stick taps against the chair. “Who can tell? The Eshim have their reasons and their whims, and because of who they are and what they do we must humor them. You will not disgrace the Abbey’s name and before you leave, I’ll be sure to remind you of that. For now go to the Eshim, she’ll want to interview you. Three months, Josephine, and no more.”

No option has been offered to say yes or to say no. It is assumed she will obey. She goes through the corridors as though somnambulant, reaching the Eshim’s room by coincidence.

“Come in.”

She does. Wordlessly, Numadesi pushes a chair against the door once Panthida is inside.

“I’m not used to doors that don’t lock, as you’ve seen for yourself.” Anoushka gestures to a stool by the shuttered window. “The Mother Superior has spoken to you?”

The Eshim wears jewelry, Panthida realizes belatedly, a tiny stud in each ear. Citrine and palladium. The material of her cassock seems unusually fine too, and the stole gleams like well-maintained silk. As if the fact of her priest’s vestments, a man’s costume, does not already transgress enough. “I’m to accompany you for three months.”

“Unless you’d rather not.” The Eshim flicks her hand. “I only offered it because you seem to chafe under the cloistered life. Numadesi will enter these walls in any case, and I do find it spiritually nourishing to have a holy woman’s presence when I do my work.”

“To be your plaything.”

Anoushka and Numadesi exchange a look, then a laugh. “No,” the Eshim says, “I never lay a finger on any woman who doesn’t want it—I’m absolute in that. And you can remain in the Abbey if that’s what you prefer, it’s not as if the Mother Superior is eager to turn any of her daughters over to my care.”

Panthida looks from one woman to the other. Very quietly she says, “And if I don’t want to come back here?”

“Then that is an exigency rather than mere chafing, mere discontent. In three months we may be anywhere, across the galaxy or just the next star over, who can forecast the vagaries of my duties? The Lord alone knows. Maybe I’ll get stranded in the middle of nowhere and it will be five months rather than three.”

“Sister Numadesi—”

“I’ll be fine.” Numadesi sits in the chair she has propped against the door. “I’m much more resilient than I look, Sister Josephine.”

Can it be that easy. Fortune that arrives in the unlikeliest form, descending upon her like a seraph’s message. She has no reason to trust—the only person she trusts is herself—but the risk of this woman’s company, the wild unknown that she carries with her, is preferable to the flatness of a future in the convent. The slow withering, until she accepts entirely that what goes on here is right and becomes its enforcer in turn. Staring at the floor, knowing she consigns Numadesi to Mother Superior’s tender mercies, she says, “I’ll go with you, Revered.”

“I will depart tomorrow. Bring your things here.”

“I don’t have anything. The Abbey provides.”

Anoushka blinks, surprised, as though she is unfamiliar with the asceticism of those who take vows—which she may well not be: those luxurious wingtips, that bespoke cassock. Panthida’s habit is extruded, interchangeable with any other nun’s of her size. “That makes things easier, certainly. Say farewells if you would and this night sleep in this room—I’ll brook no delays, and I don’t want to wait to rouse you from your cell.”

Her cheeks warm. Then, seized by impulse, she meets the Eshim’s gaze. “My name isn’t Josephine. It’s Panthida.” They have kept their names.

“Panthida,” the Eshim repeats. “How iridescent. It fits you much better than Josephine.”

There are few to whom Panthida needs to say goodbye. She says it to Sister Ruth, who receives it with thoughtful solemnity, filing the concept away, perhaps in the event of another Eshim’s visit now that there is precedent. Panthida gives farewell to a few children, who will not remember her in any case. She looks for Menodora, who remains nowhere in evidence, as if in these last few days she has evaporated into mist and seafoam.

She takes her supper with Anoushka and Numadesi and it is the first time in her life—the life that she can remember—that she eats in so small a company, in relative privacy. The food tastes no better, but the Mother Superior’s eye is not on her for a change. She nearly enjoys the gruel and the dry bread, the cup of salty protein slop.

“I will be glad,” Anoushka says, “to have real food again, in fact I will be famished. I’ve got something to ask, Panthida—I understand there are women here so virtuous they seclude themselves from all eyes save those of other sisters.”

It petrifies her, at first, to be addressed by this name: this is sacrilege nearly equal to what Anoushka does with Numadesi. But once she has strayed from the Mother’s path already, the rest comes more easily. The sisters are right about one thing—the first act of trespass is the hardest. “You mean Sister Menodora?” Panthida catches herself, frowning. But it is not as if her existence has ever been a secret.

“Is that her name? I didn’t see it on the convent’s registry.”

She doesn’t ask how or why Anoushka was able to access said registry. Another special dispensation: if Ruth is right, the Eshim may investigate any monastery or convent, overturn every stone. “She has always been around. I’ve seen her since I was a child.” She pauses, trying to remember. Those early days are blotched, the obliviating force of trauma. “She hasn’t changed much.” Even the Mother Superior has aged far more evidently.

“Ah.” A monosyllable but weighted deeply.

They sleep on separate cots, all three arranged in parallel. The light goes out. Panthida stares at the ceiling, thinking of how this will be her last night here for months, or maybe her last night here forever. She cannot sleep. Many hours lie yet between now and sunrise, that crimson event.

“Revered,” she says. It seems loud in the dark.

“Yes, Panthida?” The Eshim sounds entirely alert.

“Why does the Lord consider matters of the flesh a transgression against Him?”

A soft laugh. “It is theology that keeps you awake? Then I’ll tell you this—it is no transgression. Were you to peruse the texts that form the backbone of this convent’s faith, you would find scant evidence that God has given it any thought. It stands to reason that an omnipotent being cannot be tarnished by what people choose to do with each other’s body. The sole rationale for these rules is to establish and reinforce discipline, and discipline has a use when it brings result . To train the mind and sharpen the will, to forge a person into a machine capable of killing.”

And what has been done to her, Panthida knows, brings no result at all. “The Bible doesn’t forbid congress between man and woman—”

“I hear,” Numadesi murmurs, to Panthida’s left, “that a lost version speaks of a woman who arose first in the Garden of Eden and she was called Lilith. In that version it is she who seduces Eve, not the serpent, and so one could say the first act of union in Creation is between women. Wouldn’t that make it the holiest of all?”

“I’ve never heard of that, Sister.” She pulls her covers up to her chin, though neither of the women could possibly see the hue of her cheeks. In any case she’s forged this far, has admitted to Panthida rather than Josephine, has conspired with them so much. “How would it—between women—I mean the mechanisms of . . . ”

“Do you want to be told, or be shown?”

“Numadesi,” the Eshim chides.

Panthida draws her covers all the way up, wishing she could disappear beneath them. Surely this is too far—surely now she will fall, and the yawning void below her is full of fire and brimstone. But Anoushka is not wrong; God is numinous, and Providence cannot possibly be affected one way or another by such trivial acts. She is merely another woman in a universe full of them, another body in a Creation full of the same. A grain of sand in a desert, a drop of water in an ocean. It does not stand to logic that anything she does, willingly and with others as willing, can exert pressure on the weave of the cosmos.

A rustle of fabrics. “Are you still awake, Panthida? Pay Numadesi no mind, she’s more mischief than is good for anyone. Get some rest.”

The silence drags. She could simply pretend to have fallen asleep, lost to dreams. Instead she mumbles, “What if I want to be shown?” For a moment she thinks—hopes—that neither has heard her.

Bedframes creak—both of theirs. Numadesi takes her hand and says, “Shown on whom, Panthida?”

Her pulse percusses like a mad thing; her blood must be rising like a tide, sweeping through her arteries. She is a sea, a red sea, parting and overflowing. “I want—” She imagines that apple, the fruit of knowledge, glistening in her hand. Sweet of aroma, the flesh as scarlet as its skin. “I want to know.”

There is a confusion of bodies, of limbs and hands, but there is certainty: she is held by both, between sculpted stone and sumptuous silk, their bodies so unalike. Her head is already bare and so there is nothing there to remove, she is already open—a mouth presses against her throat and it is as if she has been seared by lightning.

When she finds purchase, it is to kiss Numadesi, resuming that moment from the chapel, now without the membranous barrier of a rose. And this time it is nothing alike, this time there is teeth, there is a tongue lightly tickling her own.

“Tell us to stop,” Anoushka murmurs behind her, “any time you want us to. And at once we will cease, and will not touch you again.”

Panthida feels one last twinge of—what? Conscience. Fear that she has gone too far, that any further and there will be no crossing back to the realm of her vows. But she rejects it, remembering once more that what she has been taught is truth that suits the Mother Superior, truth that suits making her forget that she’s ever been anything but Josephine. She holds up her arms, and the Eshim draws her habit off.

The dark gives her protection, but still she whispers, “Don’t look at my back, Revered.” Absurd in the light of what she is doing—what is being done. Not a stitch is covering her upper body, only a shapeless underskirt remains.

Anoushka’s hand hovers above her shoulder. “We won’t if you don’t want us to. But I will show you my scars, Panthida. They are evidence of battles fought and won; they are evidence of survival.”

“And you are very beautiful, I have told you that. Everywhere and every part.” Numadesi cups her left breast, then lavishes the other with her mouth.

Panthida whimpers, understanding now why Numadesi was making those sounds under the Eshim’s attentions—an understanding that magnifies when Anoushka’s hand snakes between her thighs and begins to administer what feels more sharply divine than any sacrament. The Eshim was right all along that this is closeness to God, this is what it means to experience the saint’s rapture, to be swept up in prophecy.

Much later she is spent, a cup passed between and emptied by two mouths, and she falls limp between them. They might have caressed and kissed each other, but they do it so gently that she sleeps through it, aware only of motion that pushes against her like a quiet sea.

When she wakes, it is to muted conversation and the fact of their nakedness: the floor is strewn with clothing, black and gray and white, a slash of red. The cots have been pushed together and in the damask radiance of pre-dawn, Anoushka’s physique is a vision. Its sheer solidity, its sheer presence. Scars, as she promised, starker than Panthida’s own—across her back, her hips, her stomach are faded welts, as though she has been mauled by ferocious beasts. Numadesi meanwhile is a painting of golden idyll, as glorious to touch as Panthida imagined.

“You’re up,” says Numadesi, twining her fingers through Panthida’s. She grins. “How was it, Sister? Did you rest well?”

In this light it is impossible to hide. Panthida knows her face must be entirely red. “Yes.” She pulls the covers around herself, never mind that it is pointless. The Eshim and Numadesi must have seen all there is to see while she was asleep.

Anoushka takes her wrist and kisses it, lips passing over her palm then up to her fingertips. “Never let anyone shame you for anything. But we should get dressed. There’s much to do.”

Panthida is adjusting her veil when the door is kicked in, the chair propped up against it flying. On her part the Eshim is calm when the convent’s security step in, two women in secular clothes, both with gun drawn. “Revered,” one says, “we’ll have to ask you to come with us.”

“Technically I outrank you both.” Anoushka’s expression is as slate. “I dislike the vulgarity of bullets, but sometimes that is the only language spoken by one’s audience, as it were.”

The Eshim’s gun is long-barreled, tinted white like new ivory. It flashes as it catches the light: two shots ring out, deafening in this small room. The women fall, wounds precisely placed between their eyes.

“We’ll need to move quickly.” The Eshim’s voice is even, calm. “There will be a couple fires, equipment failures in the kitchen and dining hall. The convent will be evacuated and that will be our opportunity. Panthida, can you locate this Sister Menodora and bring her to the inner chapel?”

She clutches at her veil, then at her crucifix. Its points bite into her palm. “Her. It was her you came for all along.”

“I came for her and for you. That doesn’t diminish anything, does it?”

Numadesi elbows the Eshim. “Say please to her, my lord.”

Anoushka raises an eyebrow. “Please, Panthida. I’ll ensure you are safe. I stake my name upon it.”

There is no time. And she owes Menodora something, who deserves to be out of here too, who may deserve it far more than any other sister. Panthida knows herself a coward but even a coward can show rare courage. “Give me a weapon, Revered.”

The Eshim asks no questions and hands her a folded silver knife, and a small glittering ziggurat she is to show Menodora. “Call her by her real name,” the Eshim instructs, “and she’ll know to come with you.”

Klaxons rip through the air as they run through the corridors, these familiar arrangements thrown into disarray. Children and sisters file through doors, caught mid-breakfast or mid-prayer, panicking. None of them have had practice at reacting to crisis, save those private ones administered at the Mother’s hands.

She remembers, jolted less by present circumstances and more by the randomness of synapses, her back freshly lacerated and then the pouring of wine. How she felt certain then that she was in hell, had been condemned there after all despite the Mother’s conscientious efforts. Her flesh a conflagration, her existence a purgatory. This, the Mother Superior said, purifies .

On the way to Menodora’s scriptorium, she crosses path with Sister Ruth. Their eyes meet: no words are exchanged, and then Ruth is gone, shepherding the youngest children into the garden. Panthida wishes, then, that she had asked Ruth’s real name. That they had exchanged notes in the dormitory. That they had deciphered each other’s history. And perhaps Ruth has done that with someone else—each day small revolts might have broken out, accruing toward a slow avalanche without her ever knowing or hearing. Until the Eshim arrived, she was a worse coward than anyone.

She turns the corner and there, before her like a ghost promptly summoned, stands the Mother Superior. Who is upright, despite her cane, little changed from Panthida’s first day at the Abbey when she inspected the new intake. She stood straighter then, there was still color in her hair. But the expression is the same, that precise blend of disgust and loathing. The Mother has hated them all along, Panthida is struck by the thought. Somehow she has been able to believe otherwise, that there was stern love in the beating. But now the fog dissipates and Panthida receives the world with clarity.

“Where are you going, Josephine?”

“A sister told me one of the orphans is missing, Mother.”

The woman snorts and the noise is porcine, how has she not noticed before, these mannerisms and noises of a swine. “Not likely. I’ve called for reinforcement and they are apprehending the false Eshim as we speak. Fortunate that we uncovered her before she spirited you away, hmm? Go join the others, Josephine, and I’ll overlook this. I’ll even overlook that you must’ve been corrupted by that creature—a minion of Satan, to steal into this holy place and wreak havoc on the purest. Well, no more of that now.”

I’ll ensure you are safe. I stake my name upon it. Her nerves jangle and she can nearly feel the roil of her intestines, the shift of her stomach clenching in fear. “What’s being done to her?”

The Mother Superior’s chuckle is low. “She will be interrogated by actual Eshim and she will burn in a great furnace, Josephine, and you will burn with her if you don’t obey me this instant.”

She stares at the Mother a moment longer and then she is flying, she closes the distance between them, screaming wordlessly: she too is wild, she too is animal, the bestial self tearing at the seams of humanity imposed by the Church, by the razor-blade Bibles. The Eshim’s knife clicks as it unfolds, and makes no sound at all as it sinks into that place hidden by veil and wimple. Fabric provides no shield against the blade, which must have been honed to impossible keenness, the way it goes right through meeting no resistance.

Panthida pants and rises from the body, from the blood dyeing the marble red, that color again—the color of her fixation now overwhelming the Catholic white. She wipes the knife on the Mother’s habit. Madness thrums in her mouth, buzzing behind her teeth. She stops thinking: runs.

The scriptorium is locked. She pounds the marble, shouting, “Emprex of Roses! I’m here for you!”

The door opens. Menodora stands over one of the manuscript displays, running her fingers over it as if the glass is her lover.

“I’m with Eshim Anoushka.” Panthida holds out the ziggurat, which sits in her palm like jade ice. “Emprex of Roses, I’m your new owner.”

Menodora’s expression lights up, beatific. She nods once. They make their way to the chapel in short order, where they wait outside its walls in a red morning marching toward golden noon. By now the alarms have stopped. Panthida clings to Menodora’s arm and wonders what it will be, if they wait and nothing occurs, if the Mother Superior succeeded in her final act of spite and Anoushka has been captured. What if what comes next is convent security, and then the furnace, just as has been promised to her, the fate of a soul tainted by Lucifer.

Then it comes, a small silver ship descending like an angel’s palanquin, the roar of its engines drowning out all else. Its brightness fills the sky.

“The person you think of as Menodora isn’t a woman.” Anoushka pauses. “Or a human at all. She—or they or ey or xie, to them pronouns are just for interfacing—is an AI called Emprex of Roses who was captured and bound to the Abbey of the Pale Mother. She managed their surveillance, energy distribution, communication and security. My client requested her extraction.”

Panthida stares at Menodora, who sits in profile, gazing out at the black around them. The ship is not large, a sleek silver thing from the outside, close quarters inside but not without luxuries: the furniture is softened and sculptures of particulate light revolve on the walls. They have broken through the atmosphere, speared through a relay like a shark through black waters. Where they are now, Panthida can’t tell. Away from the Abbey, that is all which matters. “I thought—” She inhales. “You said you came for me as well.”

“Have you heard of the Armada of Amaryllis? No? Fair enough, we are obscure around these parts. Suffice to say that I am its commander—I am, indeed, no Eshim and not even Christian—and I’ve recently taken on two very different commissions. One to find Emprex of Roses. Two to find a young woman who was kidnapped about two decades ago. What do you recall of your parents?”

“I don’t.” She looks down. “I couldn’t have been younger than eight or seven. But I don’t remember anything. I was told they died and the Eshim rescued me from a failing ship. A lot of the orphans were taken in that way.”

Anoushka thins her mouth. “The Vatican has a supreme hunger for converts. They draw their clergy from the poverty-stricken, the refugees, but even those don’t quite satisfy the papal appetite for swelling the holy ranks. So sometimes when the Order of the Eshim comes across stranded ships or children lost on stations, they abduct them and send them to monasteries. You have two mothers, one parent, and one father. Quite a number of cousins and siblings, mostly alive and well, they’re a big family. They’ve been looking for you a very long time.”

“Oh.” Panthida breathes out. Her throat is a pinhole. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry that you had to kill someone. But once you’re outside Vatican jurisdiction, no one can persecute you for the fact. The Vatican’s sphere of influence has receded of late—I was surprised they still had that convent running.” Anoushka pulls off her stole, tosses it over the back of a divan. “Your family waits for you on Krungthep Station, where you were born. I’ve contacted them.”

She undoes her wimple and shrugs aside the veil. It seems ridiculous to keep her hair covered. How did she ever believe showing her hair was a sin. On her part, Numadesi has long changed into a dress in violet and lavender, the material of it flowing about her like smoke. Panthida has never seen anything like that, either. “I don’t even speak their language anymore.”

“Language can be relearned. Your overlays will need rearranging but they can be reintroduced to your neural implants little by little. You are young. There’s a lot of life ahead of you.”

“And,” Numadesi says, “my lord will help you in any way she can. The Armada has fantastic doctors. Neurosurgeons, cyberneticists who can remake your body entire if that’s what you want. All scars healed, made as though they never were.”

“Numadesi, that’s beyond the scope of my commission—”

The woman—not a sister, has never been one—smiles and kisses Anoushka’s hand. Her bracelets click, tiny replicant birds attached to them bursting into song. “But we can afford to. You can afford to, Admiral. What do you want, Panthida?”

“To be made whole.” The sentence tumbles out of her seeming of its own volition. But it is correct, it articulates what she desires: she wants to regain the language, she wants her overlays severed from the Vatican’s, she wants . To not be this husk that the Vatican has hollowed out, whose substance has been devoured between Bible pages, whose dreams have been rewired by the Mother Superior’s cane.

Anoushka eyes Numadesi. Sighs. “The Armada is not a place of healing.”

“Then teach me to fight.” Her fingers knot in the skirt of her habit: she feels a sudden urge to tear it all off, rip this coarse cloth apart. She is teeth; she is razors. That she has already proven. And in how Anoushka acts, she has proven there is sublimation in violence. “I’ll go to my family a whole person or not at all.”

“You already are whole.” Anoushka puts on a haptic glove and runs her hand across what must be the ship’s controls, plotting a destination, steering the ship toward the next relay. Toward the unknown. “This isn’t the most orthodox recruitment strategy, but in the Armada I’ll expect a degree of discipline. Numadesi will take care of you, and I’ve let your family know to expect a small delay. I’ll send them images of you, with your permission. Welcome to the Armada of the Amaryllis.”

“Thank you, Admiral.” She tugs at the string of her crucifix once, twice. It snaps. “And I will keep the scars.”

About the Author

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. She has lived in Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Her short fiction has appeared on Tor.com, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and year’s best collections. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her debut novella Scale-Bright was nominated for the British SF Association Award. She can be found blogging at beekian.wordpress.com or on twitter at @benjanun_s