Sisters of the Forsaken Stars (Our Lady of Endless Worlds, #2)

by Lina Rather

Once they had been like a binary star system, conjoined by gravity, and now she had pointed out how starkly that had changed.

They had not cured many of the sick. Many of them still lay where they had fallen on Phoyongsa IV, their flesh returning slowly to the earth and their atoms to the churning pot of God’s creation.

This was a relic; she had expected to touch it and feel holiness reaching back, despite everything she knew. Some scripts were just bound up deep in humans, she supposed. If a thing looks holy, is wrapped in the presentation of godliness, you expect to find a god inside.

“I understand you’re grieving. Quite deeply, I’m sure. But do not come here and tell me that the loss of a ship-beast and a woman who never told you a true thing in your whole time with her is the same as watching the door close on the only life you had ever wanted, the life you had molded yourself for until it was the only shape you fit.” She stood abruptly and Mother Lucia leaned back, even though the idea that Terret would lay a hand on her was inconceivable. The woman radiated rage. No—righteous fury. Just like a saint. This could be a scene in a hagiography—Mother Lucia saw it in her mind’s eye as clear as anything, the righteous woman confronting the disbeliever wearing the mark of religious authority. It knocked her back in her seat. It made it hard to breathe. Suddenly she was tilted and spilt out of her body, watching this whole scene as history, as another twisted story rewritten to prove a moral that real life would never be clean enough to fit inside.