This is Part 2 of my ongoing sci-fi dystopian serial. New chapter every week.
Previously: Lucia awakens in the infirmary, haunted by flashbacks to the Upheaval. Sister Portia secretly offers modern medicine, hinting at hidden rule-breaking in the convent. When V arrives devastated, the blood sisters argue. Lucia accusing V of not caring about her convent life, V insisting she’s her sister. After V storms out, Benedict reveals the brazier wasn’t found, meaning someone else cleaned up Lucia’s evidence.
The Nun Who Hacked Heaven
Part 2
Chapter 10: Brain Chemistry
Lucia felt her heart burn, as if stomach acid had crawled its way up to her chest. It wasn’t the food she ate, or the lack thereof. It was fear, pure and simple, augmenting every minute she spent thinking about the cleaned-up brazier. The evidence of her crimes had been wiped from the convent, not by her, not by V, but by someone else entirely.
Someone she didn’t know.
Benedict had been kind enough to tell her that V had disassembled the entire rebel package in her room. Multiple energy sources, plasma guns, modern tools, supposedly all humming inside Lucia’s small quarters that otherwise saw nothing out of the ordinary for convent life.
“It’s glowing blue again. I told her to at least cover the windows,” Benedict whispered as she fed Lucia soup Clarence had brought from the kitchen for dinner. Cathy was dozing in a chair, folding Lucia’s old bloodied clothes, washed and dried separately that morning, while Clarence struggled to cut fruit in the corner, the knife clearly dull but her patience already gone.
Lucia gulped her soup and looked to Benedict. “Thank you for keeping an eye on her.”
Benedict sighed. “All she wanted was to come see you this morning, but now she’s refusing to come back in here again.” She lifted another spoonful. “Whatever happened between you two, you need to figure it out…”
Lucia felt her heart sink. V had looked stripped of her protective shell when Lucia had laid everything out to her earlier.
“…Figure it out like sisters.”
Benedict’s words made Lucia stop. She looked into her quiet mentee’s eyes. Words so sage, so…Teresa. Words that came easily to Benedict, natural, as if it were obvious that the two of them were sisters.
Cathy suddenly snorted awake, as if she’d been chased by a mechanical bear. “Ah—” She blinked at everyone, then groaned when she realized where she was.
“Go home, Sister Cathy,” Clarence said, approaching Lucia’s bed with the mangled fruit.
She shouldn’t have said that. Clarence had come straight back after her shift to tend to Lucia, who had been left with Nancy and her conspiracy theories on how Teresa may have been abducted by aliens all afternoon.
“You should go too,” Lucia said, grabbing the plate from Clarence with her good hand. “I can eat on my own, you know.” She looked at all of them gathered at her bedside. “All of you out.”
It took a while, but eventually the sisters bid her goodnight and left. Clarence snuffed out most of the candles, leaving one at Lucia’s bedside before reluctantly closing the infirmary door behind her.
The infirmary felt familiar and strange all at once to her tonight. Despite being a regular visitor, this was Lucia’s first time here bandaged and partially immobile. Portia had advised her to take her painkillers and sleeping agent after dinner.
She almost did, after finishing her fruit, chugging the painkillers, snuffing out the bedside candle, and finally lifting the vial containing the sleeping draft. The glass glistened in the moonlight streaking through the windows. It was the same vessel Portia had found earlier, similar to Teresa’s. Remembering how Portia had offered to get modern medicine for Lucia from outside to ease her pain, she wondered if Teresa was taking something disguised as a sleeping agent. Or she had been forced to?
The courtyard bell rang ten times. The night grew cooler. A window left cracked open at the far end of the infirmary let cold air creep inside, but Lucia couldn’t reach it. She could limp there, maybe, but Portia had been explicit about not testing her injured leg.
Her eyes drifted back to the vial.
Maybe she shouldn’t take it. What if she froze to death in here?
Just then, the echo of footsteps outside caught her attention.
Maybe she should call out, ask whoever it was to close the window.
Lucia craned her neck, clutching the vial, breath drawn in to shout when the doorknob twisted, and the infirmary door creaked open.
Darkness swallowed the figure in the doorway.
“Clarence?”
The name barely left her lips before she froze. The door shut softly, and the figure stepped into the moonlight.
Roman, partially disappointed, stood there studying Lucia’s fate on the infirmary bed.
Lucia startled, then forced herself still. “Leave,” she said. “While you can. Before anyone sees you in here.”
But Roman only sighed before crossing the room to the open window. Cold air slipped in as he pulled it shut and latched it tight.
“I saw it open from the outside,” he said. Nonchalant. Stern.
“Quite the trip,” Lucia snapped. “Coming all the way here just to close it.” The painkillers loosened her tongue.
Roman turned, a quiet laugh escaping him. “Yes. I didn’t want you freezing to death before explaining your magically healed hands.”
Lucia rolled her eyes. “Oh, I see. That’s why you’re here.”
He stepped closer, arms crossing over his chest, his expression somewhere between curiosity and calculation. “Of course. You think I didn’t notice your pristine palms when you refused my hand before the ladder fell this morning? It must have meant a great deal to you, choosing severe injury over your safety.”
Lucia paused for a second then shrugged. “I thought maybe you were here for different reasons.”
His brows knit, confused. “Like what?”
“I hear from the sisters that there’s a rumor,” she said flatly. “That you and I are somehow…something. Perhaps you are wanting to add fuel to the fire.”
Roman paused, caught off-guard, his eyes blinked heavily lingering on Lucia before they looked away. A smile fighting to break from his pursed lips.
“I haven’t heard this rumor,” he said, composing himself. Realizing Lucia was trying to divert the conversation.
“I’m surprised,” Lucia replied. “You somehow know everything—though you pretend not to. Quite the opposite of what you present yourself to be.”
At first, Roman took it as a jab. Then something in her tone settled in. His jaw tightened, and he stepped closer.
“Opposite of what I present myself to be?” he said quietly. “Doesn’t that describe you better than me?”
Lucia’s eyes flared. She clenched her fists, already anticipating what he would do next, but Roman moved faster. He seized her unbandaged wrist. She tried to pull free, but his grip didn’t budge.
Slowly, deliberately, he pried her fingers open, one by one, like a toy that had no will of its own, until her palm lay exposed, completely healed. No trace of last night’s burns.
Roman studied it as if reading a text line by line. The cold of his touch sent shivers up Lucia’s spine. When his grip finally loosened, she yanked her hand back.
“Where’d you get it?” he asked.
“Get what—”
“Unless there’s a readily available stash of stream-relief injectables hidden in an analog convent’s infirmary,” Roman cut in, “you got it from outside. How?”
“I don’t answer to you.”
“Then maybe you’ll answer to the Mother Superior,” he said evenly. “And eventually the High Priest, when you’re called into court—”
“I’ll answer to them,” Lucia cut in, her voice steady. “But not to you. Not to someone who isn’t human like he pretends to be.”
Roman’s expression faltered. For the first time, something unreadable crossed his face before his eyes found hers again.
“What makes you say that?” he asked quietly.
Lucia scoffed. “It’s obvious. Your strength. Your impossibly cold touch. And your eyes…” She hesitated, remembering them. “…Do they even know who you are? The Brothers? The Faith? Your beloved High Priest?”
“What does it matter if they know?”
“The Faith doesn’t allow anything remotely digital into its heart,” Lucia pressed. “You would’ve had to trick them to get in.”
“Trick them?” His voice sharpened, a growl slipping through.
Fear curled in her stomach. Perhaps Lucia was making a mistake accusing someone of being not human when she was injured, half immobile, alone in the dark.
“You don’t get to accuse me of something I did not do,” Roman said, stepping closer.
“Then how else would you have entered the Faith?” she challenged. “You’re not human.”
Those words ticked Roman off like an animal. He grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her toward him. His breath hissed between clenched teeth.
“I am as human as you are.”
“Then explain it,” Lucia demanded, false confidence blooming. “Why are you—a sub-human—in here? Who do you work for? I can only think of one you’d serve.”
His grip tightened. His eyes flared, and there it was again. The faint purple swirl beneath them, purple flash of electricity confirming it wasn’t a trick of the light.
“You have so little faith in your own religion,” Roman said. “Do you know how I know you’re from the outlier regions?”
Lucia’s heart slammed.
“The records in the Head Nun’s office list you as a Southern recruit,” he continued. “With three asterisks. They never explain what that means, anywhere…My records say the same, as with anyone that survived.”
Lucia went still. Roman, raised in the outlier regions like her? She looked back at him, shock cutting through her suspicion. Images of the Upheaval flashed through her mind.
“Do you know what happened to most of the children who survived the Upheaval?” Roman asked. “You are one of the lucky ones to have escaped unscathed. I was found unconscious the following morning with my arm torn off.” His jaw tightened. “I was given a choice. I assume you know which one I picked.”
Lucia gulped. “Arm torn off?”
Buried memories of survival camps the morning following the night of the Upheaval flashed in her mind. She remembered halls packed with displaced families, families weeping over deceased children, children estranged, parents dead. The air thick with grief and rot. Oceans of blood-soaked injured hauled from beds once their time ran out, the space needed for someone who might still live.
She remembered walking through it all hollowed out, a soul wondering about the chaos. She even remembered how the doors to the halls slammed open. Sub-humans entering, panic rippling instantly. People fled with no plan, no order. She was knocked to the ground, clutching her head as boots and legs thundered past her. It was a strong grip that pulled her to safety. She looked up to see the face of a woman, her tunic stained red, her eyes lit with concern. That was the first time she met Teresa.
“They took you?” she asked softly, “The sub-humans?”
“They called it ‘Saving the future generations’,” Roman said. “We didn’t have a choice. Either surrender…or bleed to death.” His voice tightened on the last words.
Yet Lucia wasn’t convinced. Her gaze drifted to the arm gripping her elbow, hidden beneath Faith’s robes, concealed from the world.
“They wouldn’t have let you go,” she said. “Not after making you one of them.”
Roman exhaled and released her. “Again,” he said quietly, “you have very little faith in your religion. The elders fought for us back then. Harder than you think. They fought for humans, even those enhanced against their will. Just like how you found your way here, I found myself leaving for a new life.”
Something in Lucia eased. She remembered the catastrophe and knew the implications of refusing to obey. Besides, the Faith did recruit and provide homes to hundreds of displayed children at the time, giving them names, beds, futures.
She was one of them.
They were both part of that history. Bound by it.
Still, confusion lingered.
“Then why are you here?” she asked. “You’re not here to train the brothers. We both know that.”
Roman’s posture relaxed. A faint smile tugged at his lips, like he was pleased she’d caught up. “If I hadn’t been so busy covering for someone, perhaps I would’ve had the time.”
Lucia’s eyes widened. Realization dawning. “It was you?”
He smirked and shook his head. “You think I wouldn’t investigate after seeing those burned hands? And a once-in-a-blue-moon fire alarm at the same time?” He scoffed lightly. “It was obvious you were trying to burn your own home down.”
“I wasn’t trying to—” Lucia started, ready to defend herself, until she realized he wasn’t accusing her. Just stating it. She frowned.
“You’d left the evidence everywhere.” Roman continued calmly. “Mud tracks, soot all over, took me hours to clean up by myself. The Agents would’ve figured it out easily, you know…”
Lucia froze stunned, very much confused for the non-accusatory fashion in which Roman said so. “…Thankfully,” he added, “they ruled it a false alarm. Debris in the sensor. All thanks to me, of course.”
“And?” she asked when he stopped, surprising him by her tone. “Why did you do that?”
Roman waited there, gazing into her eyes, studying her in silence. “I know you have your secrets…” His gaze flicked briefly to her healed palms. “And I clearly have mine. But I believe you are, right now, the best person I can work with.”
“To do what?”
“It concerns the Faith—”
“Is this about Teresa?”
Roman smiled, something like pride in it, and nodded.
Lucia breathed in slowly, steadying herself.
“Best person to work with, you say?” she echoed. “Even after you said I was the last person you should be talking to? Clueless as anyone in here?”
The words slipped out before she could stop them, echoes of what she’d overheard him say to Ilya.
Roman blinked, momentarily confused. Then realization dawned. His eyes crinkled with amusement. “I suppose I was a bit late to realize it then.”
And there it was again. That softness in his features. Enough to make her second-guess herself.
Lucia looked away, grounding herself, before meeting his gaze again.
“I have to think about it…about helping you,” she said, sharper than she intended to.
Roman nodded immediately, “Of course, I wouldn’t have taken you as one to just simply agree.”
Strange he mentioned so. Lucia had always been a yes-man even when she wanted to be anything but. Was it Roman who made her hesitate? Or had the past week of chaos simply changed her brain chemistry?
She looked at him again. His confrontational edge had faded, replaced with something almost inviting. He wasn’t the dismissive man she’d met days ago.
And to know they had one thing in common, a past haunting them both clutching on to their neurons, firing them reminding them of the world that no longer existed.
“You should take it,” Roman said, gesturing to the sleeping draft in her hand.
She clutched it closer. “After you’ve left.”
He chuckled softly. “Of course.”
He lingered a moment, pacing as if weighing his words, then turned toward the door.
Lucia watched his back shift from moonlight into shadow.
“Thank you,” she blurted suddenly, remembering she never thanked him for cleaning up after her.
Roman paused. She couldn’t see his face clearly, but she saw the nod before he disappeared into the dark.
Author’s Note
Hope you enjoyed this chapter! 💖
One step closer for Lucia and Roman.
Thank you so much for reading!
See you next Friday ✨
Note: This story is a work of fiction, set in a fictional world and explores imagined systems of belief, technology, and power. While it may echo real-world themes, it is not intended as commentary on any specific religion or culture.
I just love Roman and Lucia!