No choice because I’m different, Lucia thought. I would never find a place outside the Crypt. And besides, there is something that will hold me here forever. “I can’t leave, because of my child. That’s why you’re letting me go outside, isn’t it? Because you know I’ll have to come back. Because you have my baby.”

A look of uncertainty crossed Rosa’s face. “There is no you and we—this conversation has been inappropriate. We should forget it.”

“Yes,” said Lucia.

“Take your phone. Go out, have a good time while you can. I don’t think we’ll need to talk again.” Rosa stood; the meeting was evidently over.

As it turned out, Rosa was right, unsurprisingly. Despite her new freedom Lucia felt very reluctant to leave the Crypt. It would have felt like an abandonment of the baby that was even now yelling its lungs out in one of the Crypt’s huge nurseries, even if she never saw it again. She returned to her studies, and considered going back to work in the scrinium. She would go back outside sometime in the future, she decided. Not yet.

Two months after the birth, though, she detected yet more changes in her body. Changes unexpected, and unwelcome. She went to Patrizia again. The strange truth was quickly confirmed.

She knew the time had come to go out. If not now, then never. She still had Daniel’s business card. It wasn’t that she’d consciously kept it, not exactly, but it was there nonetheless. It took her only a moment to find it.

Chapter 34

Chapter 34

In the last days they gathered around her bed, faces drifting in the candlelit gloom.

Here were Leda, Venus, Julia, pretty Aemilia, even Agrippina. Oval faces, strong noses, eyes like cool stone, eyes so like hers, as if she were surrounded by fragments of herself. And there beyond them, silent witnesses to her death as her life, were the three matres, her lifelong companions, the last relic of her childhood home.

She was still concerned about the Crypt, the Order. Even as the illness rose around her like a bloody tide, she thought and calculated, worrying obsessively that there might be something she had overlooked, some flaw she had failed to spot. If the Order was to survive indefinitely, it had to be perfect—for, like a tiny crack in a marble fascia, enough time would inevitably expose the slightest defect.

When a coherent thought coalesced in her mind, she would summon one of the women, and insist she record her sayings.

Thus: “Three,” she whispered.

“Three, Regina?” Venus murmured. “Three what?”

“Three mothers. Like the matres. At any time, three mothers, three wombs. Or if the Order grows, three times three, or . . . Three mothers. That is all. For the rest, sisters matter more than daughters—that is the rule.”

“Yes—”

“When a womb dries, another must come forward.”