Rome did not so much announce itself as accumulate. St. Peter's Square opened out ahead of the car in stages — the first glimpse of the colonnade curving away on either side like open arms that had been open for four hundred years and had never once lowered, then the obelisk, then the dome itself, pale against a sky the same gold-white as Birmingham's had been three days ago and belonging, somehow, to an entirely different category of light. Pilgrims and tourists moved through the square in the same unhurried current, the weight of centuries pressing down from every stone regardless of who was looking up at it or why.
Abigail barely saw any of it. She had slept perhaps ninety minutes on the flight, in fragments, and the jet lag had settled behind her eyes like sand.
The office they brought her to was built on a scale meant to remind you of your own smallness — high ceilings, dark wood gone nearly black with age, sunlight cutting through tall windows in sharp, deliberate beams, dust motes suspended in the light like something caught mid-thought. Everything in the room was old, and everything in the room knew it, and wore that knowledge the way old money wears a coat that's never needed replacing.
Bishop Graves sat across the table from her — sixty-something, broad through the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with build and everything to do with bearing, a man who wore authority the way other men wore suits, tailored to him so completely it no longer looked like something he'd put on. Beside him, Father Ferrara — leaner, younger, precise in a way that read as watchfulness rather than fastidiousness — studied Abigail the way you study something you haven't yet decided is safe to turn your back on.
"Thank you for coming on such short notice, Dr. White." Ferrara's voice, in person, carried the same careful formality it had over the phone, softened now by something almost like nerves. "How was your flight?"
"Long." A silence. Abigail let it sit exactly as long as it needed to before she filled it herself.
"I've had time to think," she said. "You told me the Vatican didn't build the program. You just found it. You also can't shut it down." A beat, her eyes moving from Ferrara to Graves and staying there. "That means whatever built it has been operating under your surveillance for — how long?"
"Several years," Graves said, measured, giving up the number the way you hand over something you've already decided you can afford to lose.
"Several years. And you just watched it recruit people?"
Graves didn't flinch from the silence that followed, though something in the set of his jaw suggested he'd absorbed the accusation whole rather than letting it slide past him.
"We monitored it. We attempted to trace its origin. We were unsuccessful."
"You let it run."
"We had no evidence of direct harm." His voice stayed level, a man defending a decision he'd made peace with long before this conversation. "The program appeared academic. Theoretical."
"Until Pluckley."
"That is correct."
He slid a folder across the table. Abigail opened it, and the room's grandeur receded into something entirely beside the point.
Photographs. Villagers, a dozen of them at least, arranged in the flat clinical light of whatever camera had documented them — eyes gone black from lid to lid, mouths held in expressions that belonged to no recognizable emotion, skin the pale, waxy color of something that had stopped bothering to circulate blood the way skin was supposed to.
"Taken over the last three weeks," Graves said.
"We initiated standard rites immediately," Ferrara added. "They failed."
"All of them?"
"Every one."
"How many people?"
"Currently," Graves said, "roughly half the village."
Abigail's eyes stayed on the photographs, moving face to face with the same scanning attention she'd once turned on seventeen images of Linda Marsh in a conference room that felt, now, like it belonged to a different version of her entirely.
"And the first case?"
Graves and Ferrara exchanged a glance — brief, but not brief enough that she missed it.
"A family," Ferrara said. "Four members. On the outskirts of the village. All presenting simultaneously."
Something in Abigail went very still, in the particular way it had gone still in the conference room three days ago, over a burned book with symbols on the cover.
"All four. Same night?"
"Yes."
She looked back down at the photographs — at a woman's face, gone blank and black-eyed, that she would later learn belonged to a mother of two who had, on an ordinary Tuesday evening, turned her head toward a window at the exact same instant as her husband and her children, for reasons none of them had been able to explain to anyone since.
"Four people," she said, quietly, mostly to herself. "Same night. No sequential spread from one to another." A beat, the shape of it assembling itself even as she spoke it aloud. "That's not how any documented case of this kind works."
She looked up.
"Something turned on. All at once."
Graves watched her say it. Whatever theological language he'd absorbed over the past three weeks trying to make sense of Pluckley, turned on apparently wasn't among it — she saw the phrase land somewhere she hadn't intended to aim it, somewhere underneath his composure.
"You're treating this like containment," she said, not unkindly, but with the specific certainty of someone who had stopped worrying, some time ago, about softening things for the comfort of the person across the table. "You're documenting it. There's a meaningful difference."
Graves' jaw tightened. "Careful."
"I'm not trying to be provocative." She held his eyes. "I'm trying to be useful. Both require honesty."
He sat back. The room seemed to gather weight around the silence that followed — not hostile, exactly, but recalibrated, a negotiation that had just quietly changed terms.
Graves looked down at the photographs again. Something shifted in his posture — barely, a degree or two, the kind of adjustment a body makes when a mind has privately conceded a point it isn't ready to say out loud yet.
"We would like your assessment, Dr. White."
Abigail looked down at the photographs one more time. Then up.
"Then send me to the village."
Ferrara exhaled — a long breath that carried relief and fear in roughly equal measure, tangled together so thoroughly she doubted even he could have separated them. Graves nodded once, and the decision, whatever it had cost either of them to reach, was made.
Hours later, long after Abigail had been shown to a small guest room to sleep off what remained of the jet lag before the flight north, Bishop Graves sat alone in the Vatican Apostolic Library's restricted archive.
After hours. Empty. The silence in a room like this had a texture to it, thick as the dust it settled on. A single lamp burned over a long wooden table, illuminating a manuscript older than the room around it, older than the building the room sat inside of, older — Graves had come, over the last several years, to privately suspect — than the Church that had spent centuries guarding it without fully understanding what it was guarding.
His hands, as he turned a page, were steady only because he willed them to be.
The parchment crackled softly under his fingers. His eyes moved across text that mixed symbols with diagrams with marginalia in the hands of men who had died centuries before either could have imagined a world with electric light in it, let alone a digital lecture streaming into a psychologist's laptop in Alabama.
Something in the manuscript shifted his expression. Recognition first. Dread arriving close behind it, the way dread always did with him now — not as a surprise anymore, just an expected second guest.
He stopped on a page.
A symbol. Faint, the ink gone brown-gray with age, but unmistakable all the same. The same shape — he was certain of this in the way you are certain of very few things at his age, in his position — that Abigail White had described seeing flicker beneath the interface of a digital lecture she'd insisted, at the time, wasn't real.
He closed the manuscript carefully. Placed both hands flat on the cover, as if the gesture might hold something inside it that wanted out.
He sat back. The room felt enormous around him, the way rooms only feel enormous when you have just understood how small your own certainty actually is.
After a long moment, he opened a drawer. Removed a small plain card — a phone number, written in handwriting that wasn't his own, that he had carried, folded into the back of this particular drawer, for longer than he was willing to examine too closely.
He did not call it.
He returned the card to the drawer and closed it with a quiet, deliberate finality, the kind of gesture a man makes when he needs the sound of a decision even if the decision itself is only not yet.
Graves sat alone in the dim light a while longer, the weight of what he knew — and the much larger, much darker weight of what he suspected but had never said aloud, to anyone, in years — settling over him like the dust on everything else in that room.