We rush to the showers, quickly bathe, brush our teeth and our hair, then dress in our Sunday best, identical black-and-white outfits that leave only our hands and heads showing. When most of the other girls have fled the room, Adelina walks in. She stands in front of me and fixes the neck of my tunic. It makes me feel much younger than I really am. I can hear the throng of people filing into the nave. Adelina remains silent. So do I. I look at the gray streaks in her auburn hair, which I hadn’t noticed before. There are wrinkles at her eyes and mouth. She’s forty-two but looks ten years older.

“I had a dream about a girl with raven hair and gray eyes who reached her hand out to me,” I say, breaking the silence. “She wanted me to take it.”

“Okay,” she says, unsure of why I’m telling her about a dream.

“Do you think she could be one of us?”

She gives the collar a final tug. “I think you shouldn’t read into your dreams so much.”

I want to argue with her, but I’m not sure what to say. So instead I utter, “It felt real.”

“Some dreams do.”

“But you said a long time ago that on Lorien we could sometimes communicate with each other over long distances.”

“Yes, and right after that I would read you stories about a wolf who could blow down houses and a goose who laid golden eggs.”

“Those were fairy tales.”

“It’s all one big fairy tale, Marina.”

I grit my teeth. “How can you say that? We both know it’s not a fairy tale. We both know where we came from and why we’re here. I don’t know why you act as if you didn’t come from Lorien and you don’t have a duty to teach me.”

She puts her hands behind her back and looks at the ceiling. “Marina, since I’ve been here, since we’ve been here, we’ve been fortunate to learn the truth about creation and where we came from and what our real mission is on Earth. And that’s all found in the Bible.”

“And the Bible isn’t a fairy tale?”

Her shoulders stiffen. She furrows her brows and flexes her jaw.

“Lorien isn’t a fairy tale,” I say before she can respond, and, using telekinesis, I lift a pillow from a nearby bed and spin it in the air. Adelina does something she’s never done before: she slaps me. Hard. I drop the pillow and press my hand to my stinging cheek with my mouth wide-open.

“Don’t you dare let them see you do that!” she says furiously.

“What I did right there, that’s not a fairy tale. I am not part of a fairy tale. You are my Cêpan, and you are not part of a fairy tale.”