dragging five-year-old Matthew Mercer by one arm. If he was crying, I couldn’t tell—he was drenched in less than a second.
“Blasphemy is an offense against the Church, an insult to your classmates, and a sin against your own filthy tongue!” Sister Camilla shouted above a roll of thunder.
Yes, Matthew Mercer was a brat, and yes, he had trouble controlling his mouth, but he was just a kid, and everything he said he’d probably heard from his parents.
I stepped out from under the awning and gasped as the freezing rain soaked through my blouse in an instant. Anabelle pulled me back before I could say something that would probably have landed me in trouble alongside the kindergartner.
“Blasphemy is a sin,” Sister Anabelle reminded me in a whisper.
Of course blasphemy was a sin. A lesser infraction than fornication or heresy, but a grievous offense a strict matron like Sister Camilla would never let slide. Even in a five-year-old.
Especially in a five-year-old who’d already demonstrated a precocious gift for profanity.
Anabelle and I could only watch, shivering, as Sister Camilla dragged Matthew onto the stone dais in the center of the courtyard, then forced him to kneel. She was still scolding him while she flipped a curved piece of metal over each of his legs, just above his calves, then snapped the locks into place, confining the five-year-old to his knees in the freezing rain.
The posture of penitence. Voluntarily assumed, it demonstrated humility and submission to authority. And contrition. Used as a punishment, it was a perversion of the very things it stood for, just like anything accomplished by force.
In third grade, I’d once knelt in the posture of penitence in the middle of the school hall for four hours for turning in an incomplete spelling paper.
I’d never failed to finish an assignment again.
Sister Camilla marched toward us in the downpour, wordlessly ordering us inside with one hand waved at the building. At the door, I looked back to see Matthew Mercer bent over his knees, his forehead touching the stone floor of the dais, his school uniform soaked. He’d folded his arms over the back of his head in a futile attempt to protect himself from the rain.
“Pray for forgiveness,” Sister Camilla called to him over her shoulder. “And hope the Almighty has more mercy in his heart than I have in mine.”
Well, I thought as the door closed behind us, he certainly couldn’t have any less.
“Okay.” I crossed my legs and angled them to one side, trying to get comfortable in a chair built for five-year-olds. On the other side of the room, one of my fellow seniors had her own group of six kids assembled at the reading center while Sister Camilla taught math to six more at a table covered with little plastic counting cubes. I was in charge of the faith unit. “Who can name one of the four obligations of the people to their Church?”
Five chubby little hands shot into the air; five eager faces stared at me, hoping to be called upon. At some point between the ages of five and fifteen, that eagerness would be replaced with indifference, but in kindergarten, they still cared. They still wanted to please and to be rewarded for their effort.
“Elena.”
All five hands sank and four frowns emerged, while Elena beamed at me from her chair in the semicircle. “Devotion!” Her brown eyes sparkled with triumph. “That means we love the Church and we’ll love it forever!”
“Good!” But on the inside, some vulnerable part of me shriveled a little more at her enthusiasm for a child’s happy lie, which would surely mature into an adult’s bitter burden. “Who else?” The other four hands shot up again. “Dillon?”
He picked at the cuff of his white school shirt. “Obedience.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means you have to do what the Church says, even if you don’t want to. Just like at home, when your mom says you have to eat your peas, even though they’re yuck.”
I smiled at him, and my knee banged the underside of the short table when I tried to uncross my legs. “That’s exactly right.” But the Church’s “peas” were usually much more difficult to swallow. “And the third obligation?” The last three hands went up. “Jessica?”
“Penti … Penna … Pen …”
“Penitence,” I finished for her. “Good. And what does that mean?”
“It means that when you do something wrong, you have to feel bad about it. Real bad. And you gotta try to fix it.”
“That’s right. And—”
“Like with Matthew.” Elena’s smile faded and her little forehead furrowed. “He didn’t feel bad about what he said, so Sister Camilla made him feel bad.”
I glanced at Matthew Mercer’s empty chair, at the end of our semicircle. The rain was coming down so hard that I couldn’t see him through the window. I could only see gray misery and the steady pelting of rain against the glass.
“Okay, there’s one more.” I dragged my attention back to the kids in front of me, in their white shirts and navy pants, smaller versions of my own uniform. “The people owe the Church devotion, obedience, penitence, and what? Robby? Can you tell us?”
“He got the easy one …,” Jessica whispered, and I frowned at her.
“Worship,” Robby said. “That means you gotta love the Church.”
“Good.” At their age, faith was more about memorization than anything. Fortunately, five-year-olds have great memories. “Now let’s move on to something more fun. Who can tell me what we learned yesterday about soul donors?”
Hands shot into the air, and for the next few minutes, the kids explained to me that since the Great Purification a century ago, donors were necessary because babies without souls die within an hour of their birth.
“Who can tell me why there aren’t enough souls to go around anymore?”
Robby spoke quietly. The tone of our unit had changed, and he looked scared. “Demons ate them.”
I nodded solemnly.
Actually, demons consumed the souls of those they possessed. But that distinction was hard to explain to small children.
Degenerates were easy to identify. Fresh demonic possessions were much, much more difficult to recognize, because when a demon possesses a human, it has access to its victim’s memories. Most demons are very good at impersonating their victims. They do it for years, until the soul of the victim has been completely devoured.
Once that happens, if the demon can’t find a new host, it becomes stuck in the soulless body, which begins to mutate and degrade, both physically and mentally. Eventually, those soulless, end-stage possessions become degenerates—mindless mutated monsters with inhuman strength and speed, and demonic appetites. They stalk the shadows in search of new souls, but because they’ve lost most mental function, instead of simply possessing a new host, they tear the poor victim to pieces, literally devouring human flesh in search of that vital soul.
But those details aren’t taught to five-year-olds. In kindergarten we keep it simple.
“Today we’re going to talk about the shortage of souls and the generational obligation of the people.” That was a mouthful for a five-year-old, but even kindergartners had been hearing those phrases for most of their lives. “Do you all know who your donors were?”
Robby’s