Ellie #2
Breakfast in the dining hall—long wooden tables, ceramic plates, food that shows up made by hands I’ve never seen.
The porridge is grain the Ordained bring in on the monthly shipment.
The honey’s from hives the sisters keep in the garden.
Everything in the Cage is provided. The word the lessons use is sustained.
We are sustained by the Ordained’s grace.
Clothed in their care. We eat what we’re given and learn what we’re taught and get ready for the day we serve our divine purpose.
The purpose is the Nethershades.
I know the shape of it the way I know the shape of the bars.
The teaching never changes: we’re chosen women, gathered and kept safe so that one day we can be given to the divine instruments, the things that came out of the asteroid’s wreck, huge and winged and driven by an instinct the lessons call the sacred bond.
When a Shade claims a woman, it’s holy. She carries the next people into the world. The children are the future.
The theology is tidy. It’s as old as I am, built in the years after the sky fell by Eunuchs who needed a story that made sense of what had been done to them.
They built the story, then they built the Cages.
The women came after. Some chose it. Some didn’t.
Thirteen years in, that line’s worn down to nothing.
The men are the part the lessons touch lightly.
The sky fell hardest on them; everyone knows that much.
The asteroid took the men—most of them it killed, and the rest it changed.
The strongest and the wholest it made into the divine instruments, the winged ones the whole Cage is built to serve.
The others it softened into the gray-robed brothers who carry our trays and keep the gates, the gentle sexless ones I’ve called Eunuchs my whole life without ever once wondering what the word meant.
Only the oldest men stayed men—Brother Cassian and the few like him, already too old, when the sky came down, for the change to take them.
The women it left whole. The lessons say that’s the mercy in it: the world needed remaking, and we were the ones left able to carry it.
I’ve never thought to ask why a mercy needs walls.
I eat my porridge. The honey’s sweet, not the wild, tangled sweetness of a thing that grew on its own, but the careful sweetness of hives kept by people who know exactly what they’re doing.
I eat slow. The spoon’s ceramic, smooth, warm from my hand.
The women at my table talk about the jasmine blooming, about the cloth shipment due next week, about whether Ireth’s new embroidery is too much for the silk she’s working it on.
“She’s trying chevrons,” says Pria, twenty, round-cheeked, her dark hair pinned in the fancy coil the sisters taught us last month. “On silk. With that thread. It’ll pucker.”
“Let her try,” says Lissa, across the table.
Lissa’s loud the way sunlight is loud—she fills a room without meaning to.
Copper hair that won’t take the sisters’ pins, wild curls springing loose inside an hour of any style.
She eats with the spoon in her left hand because she broke her right wrist falling off the garden wall as a girl.
The bone set crooked. Nobody here knew enough to break it again and set it right.
The Cage gives you everything except anyone who knows how to fix the things that matter.
“If it puckers, she’ll pick it out. She always does.”
The talk is warm. The talk is the same talk we’ve had in a hundred different shapes for thirteen years.
I listen to it the way I listen to the fountain, as background, as proof the place is still running, that the world inside the walls is the world it was yesterday.
The hall smells of grain and honey and the herb soap we wash with, a mix so familiar I’ve stopped being able to smell it at all.
The light through the high windows falls across the table in bars.
Always bars. Even the light gets divided up in here.
The scratch on the wall isn’t part of this talk.
The scratch doesn’t belong to any talk I’ve ever heard in the Cage.
It belongs to the outside—the green, wet, moving thing past the walls I’ve never touched.
Something out there put its hand on us last night.
Something with claws and reach and a reason.
I finish my porridge. I wash my bowl. I go to theology.
After the lesson—Brother Cassian’s careful voice laying out the holiness of giving yourself up, the same lesson in new words, always the same lesson. I find myself in the east corridor.
I’m not supposed to be here on my own. The east corridor runs to the outer wall, the stretch closest to the thick canopy, where the ironwork’s been pushed out by the weight of the trees.
The sisters never call it forbidden. They say there’s nothing to see.
They say the east corridor’s drafty, that the stone sweats there, that the footing’s bad.
They say it the way you say anything you’ve said so many times the truth of it got replaced by the saying.
The corridor’s narrow. The stone is sweating—Mora had that part right.
Damp beads on the surface, catching the light from the one window at the far end.
The air’s different here. Cooler. Heavier.
The smell of growing things pushing through the stone—wet dirt, bark, something green and alive the rest of the Cage’s clean air never carries.
My skin prickles. The hair on my forearms stands up.
The wall at the end of the corridor is the outer wall. I put my hand flat against it.
Warm.
Not sun-warm—the window faces north here. Not pipe-warm—there are no pipes on this side. The stone is warm with something else. Something on the other side of it. Something big enough and close enough that its own heat is bleeding through two feet of rock.
My fingers spread on the surface. The warmth pulses. Or I make it pulse, in my own head, and I can’t tell the difference. My hand is flat on the stone and on the far side of it there is something breathing, something that’s been here long enough to warm the rock, and I don’t move.
I just stand there. Palm on the wall. The warmth soaking up into my hand. My heart’s doing something it doesn’t usually do, beating up in my throat instead of down in my chest, the pulse of it ticking in my wrist against the pale stone.
I don’t have a word for what I feel. It isn’t fear, and it isn’t quite curiosity either. Something under both of those, something the Cage never gave me a name for. Something with weight, that sits in the space between my ribs and waits.
A door opens behind me. Footsteps. I pull my hand off the wall and turn.
Sister Mora. The tray again—afternoon tea, the same floral warmth.
“There you are.” She smiles. She doesn’t ask what I was doing. She doesn’t look at the wall. “Come, love. Your tea will go cold.”
I follow her back to my room. I drink the tea. The warmth fills my mouth, my chest. Whatever I felt in the east corridor—the pulse, the weight between my ribs—dissolves like sugar.
I sit on my bed and watch the light move across the floor, and I don’t go back to the wall.
Not today.