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I straighten and wipe my hand on my robe, smearing blood into old stains until none of it looks fresh anymore.

“She won’t leave,” I say. “Not intact. Not silent.”

Thunder cracks overhead, close enough that dirt shakes loose from the ceiling and dusts Cass’s shoulders like ash from a burned altar.

“She will speak,” I continue calmly. “And her sister will answer.”

I turn toward the door.

Behind me, Cass sobs—not weakly, not brokenly, but in short, furious breaths like she’s counting time.

I pause.

“Oh,” I add, almost as an afterthought, “keep her awake. If she sleeps, the signal softens.”

The door opens. The storm breathes in.

As I step out into the rain, I feel it clearly now—the wrongness spreading through the dark, the way the Hollowborn hold back instead of advance.

They do not remember Selah’s voice.

They recognize what her voice carries.

Defiance. The old kind. The kneeless kind. Cass carries it poorly, through blood and terror and a throat never meant to hold it, but even distorted, the truth remains.

She doesn’t transmit scripture.

She alters it.

They remember what happened the last time something like her refused to kneel.

Good.

Let the rot deepen. What survives decay is always the truest thing left, and Selah Crow hasn’t decayed the way she should.

XXVIII

She Can Be More

Lucas goes still. Not surprised—just recalibrating. That alone tells me he already suspected. You don’t survive long out here if you wait for proof before you start counting graves.

“So,” he says finally, low. “They have Cass.”

The way he says it scrapes something raw.

“Don’t,” I warn.

He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t whistle. He crouches instead, fingers brushing the edge of the butcher block where blood has pooled too dark, too thick, refusing to run clean. The rain hasn’t washed it away. The storm outside feels like it’s listening. Even rain doesn’t wash scripture off a butcher block.

Lucas drags two fingers through it, rubs them together. “They’re turning the Veiled Choir now,” he mutters. “Sloppy.”

“Desperation rots doctrine,” I say. “Makes men think speed is the same as certainty.”

Lucas hums. “Pressure does that.”

It does much worse. It makes zealots believe the clock is holy.

“I warned her months ago,” I add. Because the first time the Gospel looks at you, it’s already counting your exits.