I nod and choose silence, because it’s safer than speaking. If she asks me a direct question, I can’t lie to her, and there are things I can’t afford for her to know. It’s better to let this conversation die.
Jessa is progressive, and she has strong opinions about religion, what constitutes a sin and what doesn’t, about the distance between right and wrong. I know she’s right most of the time, if not all of the time, but that doesn’t mean her logic can rewrite my core values. Beliefs don’t surrender to arguments, not when they’ve been part of my code for five hundred years.
I have to confess that I craved her body and helped myself to it, that I did things with her I was never supposed to do, things that violated the fifth commandment in every possible way. A total purge of those sins will probably never be possible, and that knowledge is what made my decision for me. When this is over and she is safe, I will ask the MSA director for deactivation. It’s the only clean ending left.
I hope she won’t ask me anything that forces me to tell her about my plan, because if she asks, I will answer, and if I answer, she might try to talk me out of it, and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to refuse her.
Fortunately, she turns to the altar.
“No point in delaying the inevitable,” she says. She looks back at me over her shoulder. “I’ll do my best to pass the test. I’ll answer truthfully, of course.” She pauses. “But truth is a tricky thing.”
She kneels and pulls the piece of parchment toward her.
I stand behind her, body tense, sensors alert, ready to catch her if she falls.
Chapter Nineteen
Jessa
The quill floats in the air, dips into the ink pot, then presses its tip to the parchment. My eyes widen as it starts writing on its own. At this point, magic shouldn’t surprise me anymore. I just slept in a perfectly preserved medieval bedroom and ate food that was centuries old. Honestly, I can’t wait to be done with all of this and go back to the real world.
The quill finishes writing and drops next to the parchment. I lean forward and read the words aloud.
Why do you seek the fortune?
I look up at Castien and see that he’s fully focused on me, ready to intervene if needed.
“Well, this is an easy question,” I say.
“Don’t treat it lightly,” he says. “When I confess, the program that runs makes me dig deep. It doesn’t allow me to lie, not even to myself.”
“Of course. It sounds simple, but maybe it isn’t. Let me think.”
I turn back to the altar and stare at the question. Why do I seek the fortune? The obvious answers line up in my mind like a neat little list. I seek it so my mother and I won’t be poor anymore. So I can pay off the college debt that’s been strangling me, pay off the loan I took out to hire the MSA, so I can open the practice I’ve dreamed about.
I could answer with any of these reasons, and it would be true.
But it wouldn’t bethetruth.
I shift on the kneeling platform, adjusting my weight. My knees already hurt. I need to think harder than this. The magic in this place isn’t going to accept surface-level bullshit. If Castien’s confession protocol forces him to dig deep, then this will force me to do the same.
Why do I really seek the fortune? So I could be rich and stop worrying about money forever. I could buy a house, maybe two. One for me and one for my mother, so she doesn’t have to live in that cramped apartment anymore. I could use the Holloway fortune to rebuild the generational wealth my ancestors squandered through centuries of stupidity and corruption.
These are all true. Every single one of these things is something I want.
But wanting things isn’t the same as seeking them. When you seek something this hard, when you risk your life for it, there’s always something deeper. I know this from my training. I’ve studied human motivation for years. When someone does something truly difficult, something that could kill them, it’s because they want to prove something. Either to someone else or to themselves.
I dig my fingernails into my thighs, grounding myself in the physical sensation. I need to apply my own techniques to myself, strip away the layers, and get to the core motivation underneath all the practical reasons.
What do I have to prove? And to whom?
The answers start coming, and they’re not comfortable.
I think about all the people in my life who told me to give up. My college advisor, who said psychology was a noble field, but I should consider something more lucrative. My ex-boyfriend, who said I was wasting my time trying to help people who didn’t want to be helped. Our already rocky relationship didn’t last long after that. Family members, who whispered that I should let the vault go, that I’d die or get maimed just like all the others before me. And my mother herself, who begged me to give up so many times that I’ve lost count.
People who cared about me. People who wanted me to be safe and smart, to lower my expectations and accept an average life. I hated who I was around them. I hated the person they wantedme to become. Someone smaller, who accepted limitations and stayed in her lane. Someone who played it safe and never reached for anything extraordinary.
I lost friends over this. Real friends and people I genuinely liked. But I couldn’t stay in their orbit, because being around them meant shrinking myself down to fit their vision of what was possible. They wanted me to be realistic, to stop talking about opening my own practice, and stop obsessing over the family vault that had killed better people than me.
