Page 119 of Thunder's Reckoning
My heart slammed hard against my ribs, the photograph burnin’ hot in my pocket.
Ash’s voice broke the silence. “Father,” he said. “This is Zeke.”
The man’s gaze didn’t soften. Didn’t break. Just bored into me like he was weighin’ every choice that’d led me here.
My throat went tight.
I’d come huntin’ answers. Instead, I’d found ghosts with my face.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
THEY DIDN’T TELLme where we were going,and they didn’t have to. The moment the hallway veered left instead of right, away from the bathhouse, away from the Flame Hall, my stomach dropped, the dread settling like a stone in my chest. My feet slowed on instinct, but the hand gripping my elbow tightened, guiding me forward whether I wanted to move or not.
The floor changed first. The warmth of worn tile gave way to stone, colder and sharper beneath my bare soles, and with it came a shift in the air, stripped of incense, stripped ofherbs, stripped of everything that pretended at holiness. What replaced it was a sterile tang, metallic and bitter, and though faint, it carried a weight I knew too well. It smelled of vinegar and rust, of medicine twisted into ritual, of something clinical masquerading as divine.
I had walked this corridor before. I remembered the hum of the overhead lights, that low electrical buzz that sank into your jaw until your teeth ached. I remembered crying here once, years ago, when they first dragged me through these walls after I was accused of “looking too long” at a boy during morning prayer. I had been nine. Too young to understand the cruelty of suspicion, but not too young to feel its mark.
They called it the Room of Assurance.
It was not a place for healing. It was a place where obedience was measured in flesh. Girls were examined, stripped, proved. Whatever innocence or fear we carried in with us, we left behind. The body became evidence, not a self.
When the door opened, my pulse quickened. The room was as I remembered, white walls scrubbed too bright, a steel table gleaming dully under the light, a basin of water that carried the burning sting of vinegar, clean linen folded so precisely it felt like a mockery. It was arranged to suggest purity, but the more it tried to look clean, the more it reeked of corruption.
Two older women stood waiting, veils shadowing their faces but not their eyes. I didn’t know their names, but I remembered their hands—unyielding, practiced, reverent in their cruelty. Behind them lingered a younger woman, her head bowed, her silence heavier than speech. I did not look at her long enough to wonder who she was.
The door closed with the weight of finality, and one of the wives spoke. “You were once consecrated,” she said, her voice soft as silk dragged across glass. “And now you return… touched by the world.”
They did not ask permission. They never did. They did not offer comfort, nor explanation. They simply moved toward me with certainty, guiding me to the cot, loosening the ties of my shift with hands that neither trembled nor lingered. My chest rose and fell with mechanical steadiness, the kind of practiced control I had learned as a girl: here, stillness was survival.
“Lie back.”
I obeyed. The cloth beneath me was chilled, the ceiling above cracked in the corner, and I counted the fracture lines as if they were rosary beads, something to cling to when there was nothing else.
“This will not take long.”
It never did, and yet every second stretched until it felt eternal.
Their hands were cold. Precise. They pressed against my thighs, my hips, my belly, as though I were a vessel to be measured for damage. When one woman pressed her palm low across my abdomen, searching for the telltale signs of conception, my breath caught and stilled, and for a terrible heartbeat I feared she would feel something that could possibly be there. My mind raced ahead of her touch, spinning out possibilities I could not bear to imagine, what it would mean if she claimed my womb had been seeded, what punishment would follow, what the fire would make of me then.
The other wife scribbled notes on a page I could not see, her movements neat, detached, efficient, as though my body were no more than a ledger to be tallied.
The third woman, the silent one, turned her head away when they reached the most private parts of me, and in that small gesture I recognized the truth: she wasn’t here out of devotion, not really. She was here because Gabrial trusted no one, because he wanted eyes and ears in this room, because he demandedproof. Proof that I had not been touched, that no man outside his Flame had defiled what he believed was his.
They didn’t ask if I had been safe. They didn’t ask if I had been forced, if I had been frightened, if I had bled from pain or from grief. Their only concern was whether I was still pure enough to be displayed before him.
When it ended, they offered no word of comfort. They redressed me like a doll, tugging fabric into place, leaving the wrinkles their hands had made as though they were part of me now. The older woman who had done the most intimate part of the exam lifted her hand to my cheek.
Her touch startled me, not for its gentleness but for the flicker of something in her eyes. For just a breath, I saw it, the same spark I had glimpsed in the girl with the burned hands. Not cruelty. Not obedience. Defiance, small and fierce as a blade hidden in plain sight.
“The Prophet will be pleased,” she murmured, her thumb brushing my skin before she withdrew.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I didn’t know if I had imagined it, if the look in her eyes had been real, or if I had conjured it in desperation.
I stood when they told me to. My legs trembled from more than the cold, but I forced my back straight, my steps steady, and I let them lead me out of the Room of Assurance. Back toward the bathhouse I went, where I would be scrubbed, veiled, and dressed for ceremony, as though nothing had happened.
But something always happened in that room.
And no matter how many times they tried to strip me down to faith and bone, no matter how many times they claimed to cleanse me, I could not forget what it meant to be handled as flesh instead of spirit, as property instead of a person.
