I glance up at the sculpted ceilings and consider what it costs to run this place for a month, and sigh. I’ve combed the cathedral back to front. No better than when I started. It’s the third day, I only have a couple of hours until sundown, and I’m tired.
There have been no more phone calls from the mystifying woman under the bridge, no more clues. I’m on my own, and in mere hours, this will all be over. And unless I find a way to passthis test, I won’t figure out who she is or what she intends to do with what she knows.
I slip the note card out and read it for the hundredth time.When dusk is high and sun is low, the icon shines, and stakes will grow.
The icon shines… The iconshines.
My eyes scan the enormity of the domed space. A skylight rains day glow over the black-granite dais, illuminating the altar at its center, fair as crushed pearls. But no envelope lies atop it with my name written in metallic ink. And once the sun sets, that altar will be cast in shadow, not shining as it is now. The magnificent stained glass windows, the statuary, even the baptismal font—all are dependent on the sun to show off their finery. By sunset, they’ll have lost their sparkle. There must be something I’m missing.
I watch a black rat emerge from behind the dais like a disembodied shadow. It picks its way across the floor to the wall where it cowers against a baseboard. A tiny white marking on its back looks like a crescent moon.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper.
Rounded ears twitch in my direction, glassy little eyes gleaming.
“You better hurry along,” I tell it. “They aren’t fans of Mother Nature in God’s house. Far too base and disorderly.”
It rises up on hind feet as if sniffing at my words with a nose full of quivering whiskers, before scurrying toward the entrance doors and slipping impossibly between them.
I watch it disappear, twisting in my seat, feeling more wonder at the antics of a rat than the important buildings I’ve visited today. Turning back, I deflate, alone once more. When I close my eyes, I can feel the sun drifting in the sky, my time running out.
I’m going to fail.
I could stay here until nightfall. But if I’m wrong and this isn’t where I’m supposed to be when that sun sinks below the horizon, I’ll have blown my chance with the Fathom. And whoknows where that will leave me? The information she hinted at knowing—the dark-haired woman under the bridge—in the wrong hands, that information could bury me. Which I deserve. But call me a coward: I can’t bear to face my crimes publicly. It’s enough carrying them around inside like cherry pits baked into a summer pie.
And being here makes my skin crawl. Because of who I am, what I can do, I’ll never know comfort before a pulpit, never feel peace within the walls of a chapel or joy from the hard press of a pew. I haven’t stepped inside a church since I left San Francisco. This grandeur is nothing like the Ionic columns or shining porticoes of Solidago, where even the peacocks were white, but it repulses me just the same. The false front of it. And that revulsion feels strangely like home, as if the old me is waking up inside, stretching to her full length, opening her eyes.
I look down at the note card in my hand. I need to focus, to stop revisiting the past even as it seems to visit me. I squeeze my eyes shut. What am I getting wrong?
The word rings through me like a gong, reverberating across my cells in a wave of electricity, striking a single, discordant note—wrong.
My breath hitches. It sounds again, the same tactile noise, the same auditory touch.
Wrong.
My eyes spring open, the altar flashing golden before them, the blur of tears creating prisms of light all around me. It might just be a fucking miracle.
Wrong!
I jump from my seat, scramble back several steps, feel the meaning drip down my bones and seep into the soles of my feet. The sound is untried and hoarse, grating across my consciousness, but unmistakable.
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
One half of me is giddy with rapturous energy as I back swiftly out of the cathedral, the other half grave with dark concern.
Against all odds…
After seventeen long, silent years…
The voice isback.
I follow the rat’s path toward the doors. I’m in thewrongplace.
Wherever the Fathom expects me at sunset, this cathedral isn’t it, and I have less than two hours left to figure it out.
6ICON SHINES
This can’t be right.
