Epilogue
In the dead house, the bodies lay on the floor, wrapped tightly in linen sheets, awaiting a spring burial.
The nun entered first, holding up a lantern that threw shadows across the stone walls.
Idris didn’t need one. Saint Vivia’s atlas vertebra hung from the cord around his neck, next to the metal cylinder inside which he carried a piece of paper, rolled tightly.
His father had given it to him when he was only a boy of fifteen, leaving his home for the first time to study at the most prestigious relic academy in Europe.
On it, a Qur’anic verse was written in small, crowded letters.
They stepped between the rows of bodies until they found the one they wanted. Idris lay down the plank he’d brought and made to move the wrapped body onto it.
“Wait.” The sister stopped him. “Remove something first.” She thought for a moment. “The right arm will do.”
“The entire arm…”
“Yes. Do it. We’ll give her a stronger one.”
Idris set his satchel on the floor, unwrapped the torso, retrieved the catlin knife.
“Wrap it back up and leave it here.” She pointed at a stone mantel. “We’ll give it to the earth as soon as it thaws.”
Right arm removed, Idris slid the corpse onto the plank. Together, the two of them carried it outside, across the courtyard, to a side building that had been emptied and repurposed.
There was one room, deadly cold. Shelves on the walls, filled with books on anatomy, medicine, and alchemy.
Some of them held darker themes – material that had no place behind the walls of a convent.
But then again, neither did the jars displayed in neat rows on the worktables.
They were of various sizes, holding organs that floated in spirit of wine.
Among them, a single glass box contained a beating heart enveloped in a pattern of stitches and bone shards.
They heaved the body onto an empty worktable.
“I can’t promise you anything,” Idris said.
The sister nodded. She paced for a few minutes, studying the specimens the surgeon had harvested in the past month at her request. She brushed her fingers over the hard leather cover of a ledger she’d read so many times that she knew it by heart.
Unfortunately, it was mostly dates, lists, and vague notes, not instructions.
“Do your best,” she said.
Her gaze moved over the wrapped body, slowly and carefully, from head to feet, as if she wanted to remember every detail before it became something else.
She kept her back straight and chin up. She gracefully clasped her hands together inside the wide sleeves of her habit.
She was trying to look composed, but Idris knew a storm brewed inside her.
Was she doing the right thing? It was blasphemous.
But was it the right thing? This wasn’t a mere experiment. It was her own daughter.
“Yes, Mother Superior,” Idris said.
She left him to work.
THE END