Lila turned twelve on a day indistinguishable from the others at St. Agatha's, save for the winter's sharper bite and the secret she'd carved into the wall behind her bed:
Lila Duval, 6 Janvier 1901.
Her wooden floor lay strewn with crudely scrawled love letters. She plucked one up, its ink blotted with boyish desperation:
"Fair lady 47, I beseech thee thy grace fall from heaven on the mortal 823."
She snorted but read them all—some barely legible, others headache-inducing in their clumsiness. One scrap halted her breath:
Adh73.
A for Sister Ava. D for dormitory. H for house. 73 for the floorboard. Elise's cipher, etched into her memory like liturgy.
Lila endured Sister Ava's six-hour sermon on Samson's divine intellect, her knees numbing against the chapel's flagstones. Afterward, she approached, her voice honeyed with false piety.
"Might I clean the dormitory today, Sister? To honour God's wisdom, as you taught us."
"Diligence pleases the Lord," Sister Ava replied, her rosary beads clacking like rodent teeth.
Lila tilted her head, a portrait of innocence. "Was Elise diligent too? I heard she was clever. Did the Lord… reward her?"
The nun's smile stiffened. "Elise serves elsewhere now. A noble calling." She gripped Lila's shoulder, her nails crescent moons. "Humility, child. The first virtue."
When the dormitory emptied—even the pockmarked boy, 823, with his greasy stares—Lila counted the floorboards. At 73, she pried it loose. Inside lay a sun-bleached postcard: Pont Marie, its stone arches bowing over the Seine. On the reverse, a smudged "Find me" bled into the paper's grain, the E dissolving into a water stain.
Lila traced the letters. Elise's hand—the girl who'd whispered of tunnels and tides before vanishing.
"Beneath the chapel," she'd murmured that final night, her voice frayed as old lace. "The grate… leads to the river. The river leads to—"
A cough had severed the confession. Sister Agnes dragged her to the attic. She returned mute, her eyes vacant as rain puddles. Two days later, she was gone.
Lila tucked the postcard into her sock, its edges biting her ankle like a kept promise. A noble calling. The phrase curdled in her gut. She'd heard it before—when girls vanished into the Headmaster's coal-shed "lessons," never reappearing.
That night, Lila sharpened a hairpin against stone. The sermon's words haunted her: Samson slew a thousand with a donkey's jawbone. She needed no weapon but her mind.
The code's H—not house, but holy water font. Elise's final gift: a clue veiled in the chapel's shadow.
The ritual began at moonrise.
While the others wept into thin pillows, Lila slid her pilfered hairpin into the dormitory lock. Click. The hallway yawned—a throat of shadows.
She crept past the kitchen (sour milk, rancid lard) and the Headmaster's quarters (port-soaked snores) to the chapel. The Virgin Mary's stained-glass eyes followed her, their cobalt shards glinting like judgment.
Kneeling at the altar, Lila pried up the grate. A sigh of wet earth rose to greet her—Elise's tunnel. It was real.
Her thefts had been incremental:
A teaspoon.
A candle stub.
The north storeroom key, plucked from Sister Margot's belt as she scrubbed psalms into the floor.
Each artifact nested in a hollowed hymnal, her reliquary of rebellion.
The Headmaster, a spectre in broadcloth, dragged his Bull Run-mangled leg like a shackled ghost.
"The world beyond is Sodom," he intoned each Sunday. "Here, you are safe. Here, you are clean."
Lila's fingers itched for the postcard in her petticoat. Sodom, she reasoned, must have peaches. And windows without bars.
The escape attempt unraveled on the eve of the Epiphany frost.
Three dresses bulked beneath her nightgown; stolen wool padded her soles. The grate groaned open. The tunnel exhaled—moss, metal, and menace.
She descended, the candle's guttering light painting goblins on the walls.
Ten paces in, the flame died.
Darkness pooled thick as treacle. Claws skittered on stone. Lila's pulse drummed. Forward. Forward.
Behind her, the grate screeched.
"Child 47."
The Headmaster's voice, oiled and venomous.
Lila exhaled, mind sparking. Think. Think.
She dropped the candle. Blackness swallowed her.
"You will confess."
Her palm met the tunnel wall—damp, cold, alive. "I was praying, sir."
A pause. Then laughter, jagged as shrapnel.
"Praying."
The cane struck her thigh, branding a white-hot star. She bit her tongue until copper flooded her mouth.
In the attic, Lila licked blood from her split lip and reshaped her plan.
Mistakes:
The candle's smoke. (Burn tallow next time.) The hairpin's gleam. (File it dull.) The Virgin's eyes. (She watches. Blind her.)
She unstitched her mattress seam and retrieved the green glass shard. Held it to the moon—then came the unforgivable darkness.
Then hunger.
For weeks, she stayed motionless.
She never wept.
She was never broken.
Then came the slumber.