“Tila, my child,” she intoned. “Envision the darkness flowing from you, pooling on the floor, ready to leave and return to the Earth…”

I imagined so much flowing out of me that it flooded the room to the Moroccan lamp hanging from the ceiling, but Tila and I floated on it while Mana-ma squatted at the bottom like a sunken stone. A few bubbles burst from below, then all was still. Then the darkness that had been in me carried us away from Mana’s Hearth out to the wide world, to San Francisco, dropping us off in Golden Gate Park. The darkness flowed back into me, and I was just like I’d been before.

“Have you completed the visualization?” Mana-ma asked.

I opened my eyes and smiled. “Yes.”

“What darkness must you give name to so that it may have no power over you?”

“I thought about dark and pain instead of light and goodness when I thought I would die, too. My soul wouldn’t have been Pure.”

Mana-ma’s eyes lit up. “And did you have a vision?”

“I did.”

Taema turned her head. She almost always knew when I was lying. This time she didn’t know why.

Mana-ma’s eyes shone and she took my hand. Her touch was all cool and clammy. I fought the urge to take my hand and wipe it on my shirt. “Tell me what you saw, my child.”

She bought it. I think most people in the outside world think the people at the top of Mana’s Hearth know it’s all a crock of shit—that they’ve been shrewd enterprisers since the beginning—but I think Mana-ma believes. She believes just as much as, or more than, anyone else in the Hearth. That’s why what I did next was just so easy.

“I saw a man I’d never seen before and he was yelling at me to turn back, that what lay before me was only wretchedness. That everything I’d been told was a lie. He even told me who he was.”

“Who was he?”

“He called himself the Brother.”

Mana-ma paled, rocking back from us. I think I said this before, but the mates of the Mana-ma of each generation were called the Brother. Which is kind of weird, now that I think about it. It was just what they were called, and sort of their role in the community. They were meant to support everyone, even Mana-ma. Because Mana-ma could only really be married to the Creator, for she was his voice.

Because of the whole don’t-talk-about-the-dead thing, there was no real way for me to recall that name, as far as she knew. The Brother wasn’t mentioned in the Good Book, or the sermons, and it was so many years ago now that most people didn’t have any reason to mention him, or even think about him much.