“Come on,” I say to the screen, trying in vain to hurry it. “Come on come on come on.”
“Marina!” a voice barks from the open doorway. I jerk around and see Sister Dora, a portly woman who’s the head cook in the kitchen, staring daggers at me. This is nothing new. She stares daggers at everyone who walks through the lunch line holding a tray, as though our needing sustenance is a personal affront. She presses her lips together in a perfect straight line, then narrows her eyes. “Come! Now! And I mean right now!”
I sigh, knowing I have no choice but to go. I clear the browser’s history and close it, then follow Sister Dora down the dark hallway. There was something new on that screen; I just know it. Why else would John’s face have taken up the entire page? A week and a half is long enough for any news to turn stale, so for him to command so much of the screen means there’s some significant new piece of information.
We walk to Santa Teresa’s nave, which is huge. Towering pillars lead to a high, vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows line the walls. Wooden pews run the length of the open room and can seat nearly three hundred people. Sister Dora and I are the last to enter. I sit alone in one of the center pews. Sister Lucia, who opened the door to Adelina and me when we first arrived and who still runs the convent, stands at the pulpit, closes her eyes, lowers her head and presses her hands together in front of her. Everyone else does the same.
“Padre divino,” the prayer begins in somber unison. “Que nos bendiga y nos proteja en su amor . . .”
I tune it out and look at the back of the heads before me, all of which are bowed in concentration. Or just bowed. My eyes find Adelina, sitting in the very first row six pews in front of me and slightly to the right. She is on her knees, deeply meditative, her brown hair pulled into a tight braid that falls to the middle of her back. She doesn’t look up once, doesn’t try to find me at the back of the room like she used to during our first few years here, a covert smile on each of our faces as our eyes met, acknowledging our shared secret. We still share that secret, but somewhere along the way Adelina has stopped acknowledging it. Somewhere along the way the plan to bide our time until we felt strong enough and safe enough to leave has been replaced with Adelina’s desire to simply stay—or her fear to leave.
Before the news of John Smith, which I’d told Adelina about when it broke, it had been months since we last talked about our mission. In September I had shown her my third scar, the third warning that said another Garde has died and that she and I are one step closer to being hunted and killed by the Mogadorians, and she had acted like it didn’t exist. Like it didn’t mean what we both know it means. Upon hearing the news about John, she merely rolled her eyes and told me to stop believing in fairy tales.
“En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo. Amén,” they say, and everyone in the room makes the sign of the cross in unison with this last sentence, myself included to keep up appearances: forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder.