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Thomas could feel the percussive roll in the soles of his feet, slow as thunder. He stood in the center of the tiny reconciliation room, staring down at his hands where—minutes ago—he’d let Vivienne Farrow slip through his grasp like water. The chime of the bell still reverberated between his ears, setting his teeth on edge. He didn’t know how long he stood there, frozen. Defeated.

One minute? Ten?

A sound at the door brought his head up. Jesse Grayson stood in the hall, his hair shoved beneath a surgical cap and his scrubs freshly pressed. His mouth thinned at the sight of Thomas.

“She promised me you wouldn’t be here,” he said, reaching for a box on a nearby table.

“I go where she goes,” said Thomas. “What’s in the box?”

“Nothing good.”

The box was cardboard. Thin. Barely large enough for a pair of shoes. Jesse cradled it with caution, as though it contained a biohazard. “Look, I’m going to do you a favor. It’s going to take me a while to finish setting up down there. You should leave while you can.”

“You’re kicking me out?”

“I’m saving your life,” said Jesse. “There’s an audience for this—did you know that? A handful of lucky pledges who think they’re about to witness an exorcism in real time. It’s the kind of thing they fantasize about.”

“What’s your point?”

“I don’t know how familiar you are with Vivienne’s altered state. It manifests primarily in reflective surfaces. Mirrors. Glass.”

“I knew that,” Thomas said, though he hadn’t. More pieces of the puzzle slotted into place. He pictured Vivienne’s vanity, the mirror shattered. The way she’d driven him out of her bathroom in a tearful fit. He’d sat outside her bedroom door all night, listening to her weep.

“Yeah, well, it’s gone,” said Jesse. “Since we arrived to the church, it’s been missing.”

“What do you mean, missing?”

“What do you think I mean? She doesn’t have a reflection, genius. When she looks in the mirror, there’s nothing there.”

“How is that possible?”

“I can’t say for sure. Believe it or not, they don’t exactly cover this topic in medical school. But if I had to guess? It’s hunting.”

His words were a stone dropped into a lake. They sank slowly between them.

“We’re fish in a barrel,” said Jesse. “And we’re all going to die. If it were up to me, you wouldn’t catch me within a mile of that ambulatory.”

“Wait, back up,” said Thomas. “You don’t want to do this?”

“What, perform a highly illegal, completely unproven surgical procedure on something that has the power to strike me dead the second I get too close?” Jesse’s laugh was bitter. “Hell no, man. I don’t want to do this. Did Vivienne tell you it was my idea?”

“She didn’t tell me anything, actually,” Thomas admitted.

Jesse scoffed. “Typical.”

With another glance at the box, he turned to go. Thomas followed, stalking him out onto the landing, where the nave spilled away from them in an endless fall of gray stone and sunlit tracery. The call of the clarions clung, ghostlike, to the silence.

“Whatever she has on you,” called Thomas, “I can make it go away.”

Jesse stilled, his heel scuffing stone. It was a heartbeat before he replied, and when he did, he spoke carefully. “Something tells me if you knew what Vivienne has on me, you’d make my life a hell of a lot worse than it already is.”

Thomas’s chest caved at the implication. “Did you hurt her?”

“No,” Jesse said, turning to face him. “But I wish I had.”

Thomas moved without thinking, snatching up Jesse’s scrubs in his fists. With a gratifying smack, the med student’s spine collided into the railing. The box jutted between them as Jesse lay half bent out over open air, dust glittering in the bald light of the drum lamps.

“If you think I’m going to let you near her with that attitude, you’re insane.”

“Save the hero act,” said Jesse. He seemed utterly resigned for a man pressed over a precipice. “You’re not her knight in shining armor, Walsh, you’re just an accessory.”

In the transept below, a crowd began to gather. Thomas ignored them.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I?” Jesse’s brows climbed toward his cap. “Look, my sympathies, man. I’ve been there. You want to know why we’re not dead yet? Why we lucky two have been spared? It’s because she still needs us. So, yeah, I wish I’d hurt her when I had the chance. I wish I’d buried her. Because when this is over, I’m dead. And so are you. You’d better make your peace with that.”

He shoved at his chest and Thomas fell back, yielding a step.

“Look in the box, asshole,” snapped Jesse. “What do you think that is?”

Thomas looked down. Inside the shoebox sat two glassy white orbs trailing woven filaments. His stomach pitted at the sight. Not because they were eyes, plucked clean, but because they were his.

“How is that possible?” he asked, his voice hollow.

“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it,” said Jesse. “Ever since we got here, Vivienne’s been having a tough time separating out one state of mind from the other. There’s less of a distinction between Vivienne the girl and Vivienne the creature. She’s been ripping all sorts of things from her hallucinations. This morning, she thrashed awake with these.”

Thomas didn’t say a word. His thoughts ran a mile a minute, churning through one impossibility after another.

I dreamed about you , she’d told him. It was horrible.

“If I had to put money on it,” said Jesse, “I’d say the creature has a disproportionate interest in you, specifically.”

Thomas glanced up from the box’s gruesome contents and found the surgeon watching him, a humorless light in his eyes.

“Still want to stay? I wouldn’t.”

With a pat on the shoulder, Jesse departed, leaving him alone on the landing.

···

By the time Thomas made his way down to the second-story transept, a crowd was already masked and waiting. He took one when it was offered, snapping the straps into place as he crossed to the pew where Colton sat with Eric and Delaney. They’d snuck in the dogs, and they sat by the bench with ears erect, each of them as tense and watchful as gargoyles.

“What’s the plan?” asked Colton as Thomas slid into the empty space beside Eric.

“We stay and watch,” said Thomas. “If she survives, she survives.”

“You’re being very levelheaded about this,” Eric noted.

Colton looked less convinced. “And if she dies? What’s the plan then?”

“If she dies,” said Thomas, “so does Grayson.”

Below, the crux of the ambulatory was lit silver beneath the pop flare of drum lights. A clear modular tent had been constructed over the operating table—likely to strive for some semblance of sterility. It felt like a laughable precaution.

A hush fell over the room as Jesse entered, followed closely behind by Vivienne. She looked unusually small from this distance, birdlike beneath the crinkled paper of her gown. Her chin lifted toward the transept, dark eyes darting from face to face before landing on his. His stomach settled into a knot. Next to him, Judd let out an excited woof.

The sound brought Jesse’s focus skyward. “Is that a dog ?”

“It’s two dogs, actually,” said a boy several rows away, casting a dark look in Thomas’s direction. “We tried to keep them out, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“You’re contaminating my operating room, Walsh.”

“It’s not an operating room,” Thomas fired back. “It’s a sacrificial altar.”

Stop , signed Vivienne, and he did. Gritting his jaw, he sank back against the pew. Jesse fired off one last scathing look before guiding Vivienne into the clean room’s outer module, zipping the door shut behind them. There came a blast of an air shower, and then they entered the main cube. The sanctuary was flooded immediately with the soft crackle of static. Over the former diocese’s sound system came Jesse’s voice:

“Testing, one, two, three. Am I coming through?”

Several pledges held up their hands in a thumbs-up.

“Good.” He slid a wheeled tray bearing several tools toward him as Vivienne climbed onto the table. “Per request, I’ll be talking through my process. The first several steps are standard. I’ll be administering two milliliters of ketamine via intravenous tube and following with a saline flush.”

It took him several tries to insert the IV. Thomas was on his feet before the end, his stomach tangled. Eric dragged him back down just as Jesse began to administer the ketamine. On the table, Vivienne lay with her hair splayed around her in a halo of dark.

“I’m going to push it in slowly,” said Jesse. “Over one to two minutes. She should be out by the end.”

“Should,” echoed Colton disdainfully. “Is he telling us, or is he reassuring himself?”

“Pretty sure this is his first procedure not performed on a cadaver,” said Thomas as Vivienne’s eyes fluttered once, twice, three times. They didn’t open again.

Asleep, she reminded Thomas of a page from one of his sister’s old storybooks—Snow White in the forest, slumbering under glass, the soft curl of her lashes dark against her cheeks. A ventilator whirred steadily beside her—a clear, clinical reminder that none of this was a fairy tale. Oxygen pumped steadily through the CPAP mask Jesse had fitted over her face.

Stuffed into the crowded transept, Thomas began to sweat. A thought had occurred to him, much too late to do anything about it.

“Everyone in this room is going to die,” he murmured.

“Excuse me?” Colton hooked an elbow over the back of his pew and skewed a dubious glance in Thomas’s direction. At his side, Delaney peered between the mask-clad faces.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s happening?”

Colton tugged his mask down to his chin and turned to face her. “Walsh has just made a less-than-reassuring announcement.” Turning back to Thomas, he said, “You feel like explaining?”

But there was no time.

“He needs to bring her out of it.” Thomas rose to his feet. “Grayson! Call it off!”

Jesse didn’t look up from his tray. Thomas wasn’t even sure if he could hear him through the barrier. He got his answer seconds later, when Jesse’s voice crackled over the speaker.

“Easy, Walsh. You’re causing a scene.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” He cupped his hands to his mouth in a desperate effort to amplify his shout. “I said call it off!”

“Sit down, asshole,” said someone from several rows back. “I can’t see.”

Eric tugged Thomas back into his seat, hooking an arm around his shoulder. “Remember what I said about you being levelheaded? I take it back.”

“You don’t understand,” said Thomas. “Vivienne’s altered state manifests in reflective surfaces. But when I spoke to Grayson earlier, he said her reflection is missing.”

Delaney frowned. “Missing?”

“What if it knew what was coming? What if it’s hiding?”

“What if the ketamine put Vivienne out,” said Colton, catching on, “but not the creature?”

All four of them turned in unison to stare down at the surgical tent, where Jesse was set to begin. He stood frozen over Vivienne, his hands sheathed in latex, a scalpel glinting silver in his grip.

“I don’t know, man,” said Eric. “That’s a pretty wild theory.”

“We’ve seen wilder.” Colton swiveled to face Delaney. “Turn off your implant.”

“What?” Her brows pinched together. “What about you?”

“Lane.”

“Fine.” She slipped two fingers to the device at her ear. A pale light flickered and then died. Her voice slipped out, as thin as a ghost. “Happy?”

Ecstatic, signed Colton, tapping two fingers to the open palm of his hand. Below them, a palpable hush fell over the sanctuary. Beneath the wide drum lamps, Vivienne looked inhuman, her skin rendered silver. Feedback whined, and Jesse’s voice filtered again through the speakers.

“I initially planned to perform an electrocautery dissection of the throat, given that the greatest physical manifestation of the symbiote occurs in the patient’s larynx.” His words echoed through the ambulatory. He sounded just like a priest, proselytizing from his pulpit. In the crowd, several people jotted down notes.

“However, given new evidence, I’ve decided to modify my approach.” Gingerly, Jesse folded up the bottom of Vivienne’s gown, careful to keep her lower half covered in a thin sheet. Beneath the gown, her torso was as silver pale as the rest of her, save for a raised strip of skin that shimmered like scales.

“Holy shit,” said Eric.

“An initial workup of the site indicates the presence of hemolymph,” explained Jesse. “It’s a fluid tissue most commonly found in arthropod species. My hypothesis is that I’ll discover ventral nerve cords bundled beneath each segment. If my theory is correct, severing these cords should allow for eventual extraction of the symbiote.”

More notes were jotted. Thomas glanced up to find Colton’s attention elsewhere. He stared into the crowded transept, his expression turbulent.

“What is it?” asked Thomas.

“Nothing.” He turned back toward the ambulatory. “I thought I saw someone I knew. I didn’t.”

“Quiet,” barked a pledge.

“The device I’m using is an ultrasonic scalpel,” said Jesse. A sudden buzz kicked through the room, shivering along the oppressive stone pilasters. “This will cauterize the tissue, which should aid in the production of coagulum as I work to harvest the symbiote.”

On the table, Vivienne lay as still as a corpse, her breath fogging the mask.

“I’ll make the first incision now,” said Jesse. He sounded unsure.

The sound of splitting skin was unmistakable over the speakers as the blade met resistance against the hard shell of Vivienne’s torso. With a snap, her hand flew out and grabbed Jesse’s wrist.

On the slab, Vivienne slowly sat up. Her eyes were open, pupils distended.

“This feels bad,” said Eric as the dogs began to bark.

Jesse fell back a step, restricted by the tight grip of her hand around his wrist. Vivienne tracked his movements, her head on a swivel. Reaching up with her free hand, she pried the oxygen mask loose. Slowly, her mouth split into a wide, sharp smile.

“Hello,” she said, cheery as a lark.