Adel's dead name sat in the center seat.
There was no body.
Only the letters on the backrest raised their head.
`Adel Venati.`
All three thousand inside the cathedral opened their mouths at once.
"I consent to treatment."
Their voices pushed beyond the lockdown.
Patients in the outer hospital clutched their wounds.
The protection tags of six hundred one refugees flipped around their necks.
Sins appeared on the blank reverse sides.
Theft upon those who had never stolen.
Abandonment upon those who had never borne a child.
Murder upon those who had never held a blade.
This was the road by which the capital's sins gathered in the cathedral.
Three thousand people sat in the middle of that road.
Adel reached toward the center seat.
The White Line burned her fingertips.
"That is my name."
"A dead person's name," Cassian said.
"You killed it."
"I left the body."
"Do you think that comforts me?"
Cassian did not answer.
He had not said it to comfort her.
He had merely confirmed a fact.
But he could not remember why that was the only fact he had chosen to say.
The emotional void Oath Severing had taken shifted inside his throat.
Adel saw the silence.
"You truly forgot."
"What?"
"Even the fact that you do not know."
Ria opened the first treatment ledger.
The white mission-fragment of the Recovery Saint trembled in the ink on the floor.
Each time the ledger opened, it crawled a little closer to Ria.
"We have to take this inside."
"Then it will follow."
"That is why I cannot take it."
The Recovery Saint retrieved original ledgers and undiluted saintblood first.
If Ria lost her name or memory while crossing the White Line, the original would return to Church ownership.
Cassian caught the ledger with his left hand.
"Don't take it."
Ria pulled the chain.
"I'll copy it."
With the nail of the relic right hand, he cut his own chest.
The arm moved once.
The sixth complete movement.
One cathedral cleric forgot his first confession.
A vertical wound opened in Cassian's chest.
Ria pressed the ledger against it.
"Do you know what you are doing?"
"You wrote it."
"Reading it and writing it into your body are different."
"That is why I'm writing it into my body."
Cassian pressed the ledger harder.
Blood soaked between the pages.
The first patient's wounds appeared on his body.
Fever.
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White threads grown inside the joints.
Delusions that made another person's sins feel like one's own confession.
The second patient.
Saintblood pooled in the lungs.
Every breath released someone else's prayer.
The third.
A treatment-fee ledger carved inside the eyelids.
Every sinmark in the ledger copied itself into Cassian's body.
The pain of thousands who had received treatment overlapped.
Cassian did not kneel.
His right arm was not his own.
His left hand was aged, its fingers broken.
Now the diseases of strangers entered what remained of his body.
Still, he stood.
The Recovery Saint's mission-fragment changed direction.
From Ria's ledger to Cassian's chest.
The white mass climbed his boot.
"Recover the original."
"I'm a copy."
"More contradictions than the original confirmed."
The Recovery Saint judged the more complicated object to be the original.
A human body contained pain no ledger could hold.
Cassian walked toward the cathedral.
The white mission followed.
"I'm going in too," Ria said.
"Guard the ledger."
"If you change the order inside, who records it?"
"Ask me if I come out alive."
"And if you die?"
"Write whatever you like."
Ria did not loosen the chain.
Adel stood beside Cassian.
Elodie came as well.
The sinmarkless princess held a paper copy of the lily seal from before her birth.
Hassan stopped the three before the White Line.
"When you cross, you can take only two of three things."
"Which things?" Elodie asked.
"Body, name, and memory."
Hassan pointed to the white line.
"One must be left behind."
Adel crossed first.
Her body passed.
Her memory passed.
She already had no name to leave.
The White Line could take nothing from her.
Cassian went second.
Leave the body and he died.
Leave the name and the cathedral would not recognize its execution target.
He had to leave memory.
The moment he stepped on the line, the relic arm rose by itself.
The seventh complete movement.
One cleric's memory entered the arm.
Cassian left that man's memory at the White Line instead of his own.
The cleric had discarded one thing.
The name of a woman he had falsely condemned.
The White Line consumed that name.
Cassian entered with body, name, and memory intact.
In exchange, one victim vanished from the world.
"Seven," Ria wrote from outside the line.
Elodie crossed last.
Body.
Name.
Memory.
All three remained.
The White Line demanded nothing.
Hassan's face hardened.
"No toll for someone without sin?" Cassian asked.
"No."
Hassan looked down at his relic fragment.
"The line already considers Her Highness someone inside."
Elodie wrote her name on her palm.
"This is my first time entering."
There was no trace of a lie.
Elodie went no farther into the cathedral.
She turned and crossed the White Line again.
Hassan's relic remained silent.
The princess's body, name, and memory remained whole.
Elodie crossed back and forth three more times.
Each time, the White Line opened before the hem of her dress.
"It is not a road. It is a door."
"For whom?" Adel asked.
"For the person who made me."
Elodie caught Cassian's blade in her bare hand.
Her palm split deeply.
Keeping the edge in her grasp, she let one drop of blood fall on each side of the White Line.
The blood outside remained on the snow.
The blood inside unraveled into white thread and crawled toward the cathedral's center.
The `Adel Venati` in the center seat briefly turned toward Elodie's blood.
"My blood does not return to me."
Elodie closed her fingers one joint farther down the blade.
The point touched beneath her throat.
The pulse under white skin beat against the steel.
"Kill me here and we could learn the answer."
"To what?"
"Whether I am someone inside, or the door of this building."
Cassian did not pull the sword free.
Elodie did not release the blade.
One more inch from either would stop the princess's pulse.
"I won't kill you yet," Cassian said.
"I need the door open."
Elodie's lips curved by the smallest degree.
"You preserve the use before the person."
"That is why you're alive too."
Elodie opened her hand.
Her blood remained in a long streak on Cassian's blade.
Adel raised a bandage.
"May I treat you?"
"Not until I see the result."
Blood continued to fall from Elodie's fingertips.
Adel lowered the bandage.
She did not treat the princess's curiosity as a patient's delusion.
"That makes me want to die even more."
The cathedral doors opened.
Three thousand chairs stood in a circle.
One cleric was bound to each.
There were no chains.
The confessions of citizens held their arms and legs.
Some prayed.
Some cursed.
Some did not know who they were.
Seven seats were already empty.
Bodies still sat there.
Without names or memories, they looked like vacant places.
The places Cassian's arm had consumed.
"They're alive," Cassian said.
"Biologically," Adel answered.
She sat before the first cleric.
"Tell me your name."
The man answered.
It was not his name.
It belonged to one of the ninety-three citizens linked to him.
The second was wrong too.
The third could not open his mouth.
The signatures of citizens overlapped across his tongue.
Adel questioned them one by one.
"What is your name?"
"Do you consent to treatment?"
She marked those who answered both questions by their own will.
Ten.
Twenty-one.
Thirty-eight.
Forty-seven.
Of three thousand, forty-seven still possessed both their own names and consent.
Adel looked at the center seat.
Her dead name was connected to those forty-seven.
"If I remove my name from the center seat," she said,
"I can get these people out."
"How long?" Cassian asked.
Adel examined the connected vessels and prayers.
"Fourteen seconds each."
"For forty-seven?"
"Eleven minutes."
"And the city during that time?"
The grand inquisitor's voice came from above the altar.
Odric had not been seen crossing the White Line.
He stood as though he had been inside from the beginning.
"The probability of rupture rises."
He raised a hand.
A map of the capital appeared on the ceiling.
The sinmarks of two hundred eighty thousand citizens shone as tiny lights.
Leave the center seat closed: execution success, one hundred percent.
Remove forty-seven: ninety-two percent.
Pictures showed what happened in the remaining eight percent.
Sin returned to citizens' bodies.
People blinded.
Lungs sealed shut.
People who remembered their own family as murderers.
It did not mean the entire city died.
No one could know who would be ruined or how badly.
"Eight percent," Cassian said.
Adel looked at him.
"You think that is low?"
"As a number."
"As people?"
"They aren't dead yet."
"Neither are the forty-seven."
Odric descended from the altar.
He brushed White Line dust from Cassian's shoes.
"I will declare the guilty verdict."
"Whose?"
"Yours, once you choose."
Odric opened the clock beneath the center seat.
Sand began to fall.
Eleven minutes.
Adel took the first salvageable person's hand.
"Do you want to leave?"
The man nodded through tears.
The second did too.
The third.
All forty-seven spoke their names in turn.
Names accumulated inside the cathedral.
The Recovery Saint's mission-fragment climbed over Cassian's heel.
It opened a mouth toward the ledger copied into his body.
Cassian did not raise his new right arm.
Not yet.
The first grain of sand touched the bottom.
The time in which they could be saved began to shrink.