“No control center. No bridge on this great underground submarine.” Rosa was watching my face. “How do you feel now? Are you thinking about all the rock over your head? Do you feel shut in, lost?”

“I’m in an underground city, by God,” I said. “I have to keep reminding myself that all this is dug into the ground under a Roman suburb . . . You know, I still haven’t got you in focus, Rosa.”

She wasn’t fazed. “But the Order is me. I told you, it’s my family—and yours. If you can’t see that, you can’t see anything about me.” She waved her hand. “George, do you blame our parents, Father, for my being sent away—for this peculiar gap in your life?”

I frowned. “I’m not sure.”

“I don’t blame them,” she said definitely. “They did what they had to do to enable the family to survive. I understand that now, and I think I understood it even as a child.” I wondered if that could be true. “And besides, look around you. I’ve hardly suffered by being sent here.”

Suddenly I felt resentful. I hadn’t come here to see this vast subterranean city, after all, but her. And she seemed barely perturbed by my presence. This wasn’t enough of a reaction for me, emotionally. I wanted to break down her complacency—to make her see me.

Harm may not have come to her. But harm has come to me, I thought.

I had no idea how long I had been down there. At last, something prompted me to get out of there.

Rosa didn’t protest. She escorted me back along that long corridor, back to the anteroom, and then up to the Catacombs. We climbed alone, in the perpetual darkness, up the levels, before ascending that last staircase and emerging from the Catacomb’s gloomy entrance.

It was dark, I saw, shocked. I must have been in the great pit in the ground for six, seven, eight hours. The place was deserted, the refreshment stalls shut up for the night. But the air was fresh, and smelled of the lemon trees in the scrubby parkland. I breathed deep, trying to clear my head of that leonine underground tang.

But standing there alone, out of the Crypt, I felt bereft.

I walked out of the Catacomb compound and began searching for a cab. When I found one, a couple of blocks away, I recoiled from the driver’s face—dark, eyes deep brown—a perfectly normal, even handsome human face, but not like mine.