Page 6 of Caelum

Merinda was lust walking. Each step she took, the way she moved her head, every inch of her screamed it. Although I’d been programmed to believe that shewas aJezebel, I didn’t judge her for it. How could I when I had eight different beings living inside me? Just as she had at my age. Just as every minor here did too.

I wasn’t alone.

That was the most winsome factor about being here.

There were others like me.

Others that were lost and had been found, just like me.

“It might be a lot to take in,” Merinda retorted, “but it’s all good news, isn’t it? You’re not crazy. You don’t have schizophrenia, and in a few years’ time, when you’ve decided what you are, you won’t be stuck on that compound popping out babies for all those old perverts.” She shuddered in revulsion, and I couldn’t blame her.

Gnawing on my bottom lip, I whispered, “Father Bryan won’t ever be able to touch me, will he?”

Her eyes softened as she shook her head, her fiery auburn hair dancing around her shoulders, as wild as her spirit. “Never,” she assured me gently, and her tone was all the reassurance I needed.

In the short time I’d known her, I’d come to learn that Merinda was tough as nails. She wasn’t very sympathetic when I cried, instead she told me to suck it up—I had no idea how to do that, and she’d rolled her eyes at me and told me to check out something calledUrban Dictionarywhen I received my phone.

I had no idea what that was either, no idea how a dictionary could be urban nor how it would teach me how to suck it up, but she said that all the kids spoke like her, and I’d soon learn how to talk like a person from the twenty-first century and not the eighteen hundreds if I checked out that website.

Most of the things she said confused me, if I were being honest, but I knew better than to reveal that, lest she think I was stupid. If Iwerestupid, maybe she wouldn’t bring me here, and after we’d escaped the compoundwhen she’d lulled the almost four hundred-strong congregation to sleep with a song that had made me cry with its beauty, there was no way I was about to return to a life of misery and drudgery.

I’d had faith that God would help me, and He had. Just not how Father Bryan had preached He would.

“Come on, Eve,” Merinda snapped when I lingered just outside the gates, feeling small as I stared up at the twenty-foot plus tall fencing. “We have to get you inducted. You’re already two years behind.”

“What damage will five minutes of dawdling do then?” I snapped, goaded when she spoke to me like it was my fault I was late. It wasn’t. I’d been busy trying to survive the New Order, and if I could have arrived here two years ago, I sure as goodness would have!

She cocked a brow and folded her arms across her chest. “The virgin sacrifice has fangs?” She laughed at her own joke, and I wasn’t even sure why. “They’re going to eat you alive in there if you don’t grow a pair.”

“A pair of what?” I asked, annoyed enough to scowl at her and stupidly reveal, “Why do you talk like that? I don’t understand half of what you say.”

She huffed. “Look, we haven’t all been tucked away in a sect since birth.” Her impatience showed as she began to tap her toe against the ground. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The second you walk through the gates, things will change for you. You’ll be among your true people.”

And there was the concern. True people? I terrified myself with my moods, so to be around a lot of people like me? That was hardly reassuring.

Everything about these past two days was terrifying in truth.

I’d had to climb into a contraption called a car, whichhadbeen in the non-urban dictionary I’d memorized when I was barely five, but my imagination and reality hadn’t collided. This particular car moved at horrendous speeds. The faster it went, the louder Merinda had hollered out her glee, whereas I’d clutched at the chair, praying God wasn’t about to smite me for escaping the compound.

After three hours of non-stop driving, we’d arrived at a field. The field was innocuous enough, except for another contraption. It was larger than the car and it was shaped like a tube. Merinda informed me it was called a plane.

I’d never seen one before but had allowed myself to be hustled into the cabin. When we’d taken off and soared like a bird in the sky, I had fainted. I hadn’t known it was possible to do something like that.

The next time I’d awoken, I’d been fed something called a burger, and the fries that went with that meal made my stomach rumble eagerly at the thought of having some more soon. We’d been on board for hours, crossingthe Atlantic Ocean until we came to an island called Paradisus Peccatorum—Caelum for short.

Such an abbreviation made no sense to me, but Merinda called it Caelum more than she did the other wordy name, so I was going to call it that too even if Paradisus Peccatorum ran along the banner above the gates I was peering up at.

As we’d begun to land, I looked out the window of the plane, and I’d seen there was only the one building here, and that it took up the entirety of the island.

It was a hodgepodge of different buildings that were all joined together. There were many different roofs in hundreds of colors, making it appear like an overlarge patchwork quilt from the sky. It was surrounded by barren land that intermittently housed tracts of vegetation before giving way to fields of black rock, but what enchanted me the most was the ocean. The way the waves tore into the cliffs as we approached was of endless fascination to me. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the sea, but it had never looked like that where the compound was.

After traveling for many hours here, we’d landed on a long tract of land that had been covered in something the color of gravel but was more tightly packed. I’d tried to bounce on it, but there was no give beneath my feet. Merinda assured me it was something called asphalt and that was what the roads we’d driven on yesterday were made of too.

It was a short walk from where we’d landed to the gates of the Academy, and as I stared at the building Merinda assured me housed my future, I knew I had little alternative but to step through them. I hadn’t come all this way to stand outside, after all.

The building up ahead was made up of a gray brick that had been weathered to a dull black over the years. There were many windows, each with a stone monster guarding it. The door was large, had a sharp arch formed from stone, and appeared carved with more of the monsters that decorated the building on its many corners. The monsters were like stone guards, and the thought had unease whispering through me.

Could they see us?

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