Chapter 58
Elegy isn’t sure when, exactly, she realized what she has to do.
Maybe it was right when she walked into the room and realized that if the augur wasn’t here, and she wasn’t in the Cenobium, she was probably dead. Or maybe it was when Theren successfully negotiated for Elegy to go free while he walked right back into his own personal hell.
Or when she remembered, like it was something out of a dream, biting her fingernails the day after she first went to the Cenobium. The taste on her tongue.
One who has tasted Cenobium salt. Those fucking augurs.
Either way, when she parts ways with Theren and Nyx, a promise to meet him at the pickup point on her lips, she’s sure he knew she was lying. He always does, doesn’t he? But he lets her go. He trusts her.
She watches him walk away, his shoulders back, his posture so straight it almost looks painful.
Trying to steel himself to face Rava, and Elegy has never hated anything more.
She has to grip the stone wall to keep herself from going after him.
To remind herself that for all the pain she might cause him, Rava Vidar won’t kill Theren. She can’t.
Elegy pauses at the end of an empty hallway to gather herself, and to try to remember Orda’s map.
His hand moved in quick, confident strokes as he sketched it, and then the map spread wide on the kitchen table as he pointed out significant points on it: the south entrance, the north entrance, the probable location of the augur, Fenn’s sleeping quarters, the central hallway, the temple.
The temple, she said to him, as if it was a question, and he told her that was where people were infected with Fever.
From ritual bath to exposure in a room made to look like a church, and Orda’s long, scarred finger traced the path, careless, as she thought about the fact that he and Theren had both passed through those hallways days before they died.
She starts to walk. Her footsteps are quiet and quick.
And as she goes, she remembers the day her father was killed.
Tax Day. Their next--door neighbor grumbling about the government as she swept the hallway with her old broom, the strawberry yogurt Elegy ate for breakfast, the way she ran out of faux coffee grounds and her mug was still half--full when she got the news that his body was found.
He was killed trying to help a Talusar child flee Vidara so she wouldn’t have to be exposed to Fever.
A child just like Hela, in desperate need of help.
Sometimes there are no choices—-one of her father’s favorite phrases. She never understood why he said it to himself like a pep talk.
She understands now.
She goes down the steps to the first floor, and then around the corner to a small corridor with a vaulted ceiling.
One of the stained--glass windows depicts a woman in a blue robe, her hand over her mouth and a mark on her throat—-a priest. Beneath her is a set of stone steps leading down into the basement.
At the bottom of the steps is a heavy wooden door. At eye level is a little window the size of her palm, covered by a decorative screen.
She pounds on the door and waits. This part of the monastery is silent as a tomb. Which seems fitting, given what she’s about to do.
There’s a scraping sound as someone on the other side of the door slides back a shade. She meets the creased eyes of an older woman.
“My name is Elegy Ahn,” Elegy says. “I’m here to meet your god.”