It went on and on. Food seemed to lose its flavor; it was like trying to eat cardboard or grass. It got to the point where she couldn’t sleep. She would lie there alone in her bed, listening to the whispers and giggles and gentle snores that drifted around her. The lack of sleep and her poor diet soon wore her out. She dragged herself to work. But the work seemed as pointless as the rest of her weary days. In her spare time she would simply sit alone, silently loathing herself, aware of every pore in her skin oozing blood and dirt.

After a month of ostracism, she suffered violent stomach cramps. She staggered to a bathroom and endured half an hour of dry retching, bringing up nothing but acidic bile that burned her throat.

Rosa came to sit opposite her in the refectory. “I saw you in the bathroom.” Her tone was analytical, not sympathetic.

Lucia had been sitting alone, without touching the cooling plate of food before her. She tucked her hands between her thighs, head down. Over her head an elaborate mosaic design showed the Order’s kissing-fish logo.

“You know why you’re ill, don’t you? You’ve hardly eaten for a month. Or slept, by the look of you. The weight is falling off you.”

“I don’t care.” Lucia’s voice was scratchy. She couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken to anybody, exchanged a single word. It must have been days, she thought.

“You feel like you don’t exist. As if you’re not really here. As if this is a dream.”

“A nightmare.”

“We aren’t meant to be alone, Lucia. We’re social creatures. Our minds evolved in the first place so we could figure out what is going on inside other people’s heads—so we could get to know them, help them, even manipulate them. Did you know that? We need other people to make us fully conscious. So if you’re alone, if nobody is looking at you or talking to you, it really is as if you don’t exist.”

“Everybody hates me.”

Rosa leaned forward. “Can you blame them? You let us down, Lucia. The Crypt is a calm pond. You threw a great big rock into that pond, making a huge splash, sending ripples back and forth. You upset everybody.”

Lucia dropped her head.

Rosa asked, “Do you remember what happened to Francesca?”

Lucia frowned. She had forgotten about Francesca.

Francesca had been a sister from Lucia’s dormitory, neither more or less popular than anybody else, never standing out from the crowd—but then nobody did. Then, one day, suddenly Francesca hadn’t been part of the group anymore. Everybody else, including Lucia, had simply stopped talking to her.

It was just as was happening to Lucia herself.