me sink to the ground, allowing my defeat—but not my freedom. Lev’s boots cross the floor, coming to a halt in front of me.
“Where”—my voice breaks—“is my sister?”
“We walk by faith, Lo, not by sight,” he tells me softly, disappointed, “and when I accepted you into The Project, I knew that yours was weak but I made the choice to trust in your path, that you should shut your eyes and walk it. But that didn’t work.” He crouches in front of me. “So now you must shut your eyes and walk mine.”
He tells me to stand.
They put me in the Reflection Room.
They lay me on the floor, binding my arms and my hands, and I fight them, but it makes no difference in the end. They turn off the light and leave me in the dark. I stare out the window, watching the moon move across the sky, its light slowly crossing my body. I cry. The salty, sick taste of my tears in my mouth. I wait.
The door opens.
Lev’s silhouette fills its frame. He’s holding something in his hands, but I don’t get a look at it before he closes the door gently behind him. Whatever it is, he sets it on the small table in the corner. He looks down at me before kneeling at the center of my body, then reaches forward and begins to unbutton my shirt.
“No,” I moan.
“It’s good that you’re afraid,” he says quietly. “Fear of God is the beginning of knowledge. The foolish despise wisdom and instruction…”
“You’re not God,” I tell him.
He stares at me for a long moment, then brushes my hair away from my face, as though to comfort me. I try to twist away, but the bindings limit me, making me feel like a writhing, dying animal.
“I need you to understand suffering, Lo,” he tells me. “You think you know it, but you don’t. Those who suffer faithlessly are perverted by it. They are consumed by it. Their hurt becomes a reason to hurt others and that leads them to sin. They turn their face from the glory of God. But if you are faithful, at suffering’s end, God will strengthen you and settle you and make you whole. That’s what happened to me. He won’t leave you in pain, he’ll walk you through it. When I went to Indiana and stood in front of my mother’s hate for the last time, God walked me through it. And He made me perfect.”
He reaches into the back of his jeans and pulls out what I first mistake as a marker, but it’s larger, thicker. He uncaps it, and two small wires twist into a perfect point. He pushes a button and they glow. He lifts the edges of my shirt, pushing it up, and inspects the skin, where I have more scars from the accident, less pronounced than my face, but still there. Without warning, he presses the cautery pen to my abdomen and for one moment there is nothing and then—a hot, furious sear against my flesh that my body does everything to get away from. I twist and spasm; Lev pushes my shoulders down until I’m still so he can mark me again and again, and a dead, sweet scent fills the air. I don’t understand, at first, that the smell is me.
I’m burning.
I’m panting by the time it stops, his mottled abdomen in my head.
Rob’s mottled abdomen.
My own.
He sets the pen down.
Tears stream down my face. He wipes one away, his fingers tracing the line of my scar.
“I know it hurts, Lo, but I’m not asking you to endure more than I was made to endure.”
I close my eyes, swallowing back bile, trying to get my breathing under control.
“Did you do this to Bea?”
He doesn’t answer and I begin to cry again because the idea of her going through this is more unbearable than living through it myself because I know, now, she went through it thinking she was alone. She was so alone …
Lev reaches for the table, for the other thing he brought, and I see it now: a kettle.
He sets it on the floor next to him and I feel the heat of it reach for me.
“Oh God. Please, please … please don’t—”
He brings his face close to mine, pressing his forehead to mine. “This is nothing I’m doing to you. It’s something I’m doing for you. I’m laying your soul bare as mine was laid bare, and in the next thirty hours, God