Rosa laughed. “It needn’t be so bad. Here.” She went to her desk, opened a drawer, and produced a cell phone.

Lucia studied the phone. It had gone dead. “It is my cell. Patrizia took it.”

“Have it back. Use it as you like. Look at the Internet, if you want. Would you like to go outside again? There’s no reason why not. I can talk to Pina—”

“I thought you didn’t trust me.”

“You mustn’t turn this into some personal conflict between the two of us, Lucia. I am not your monitor. I am merely reacting to how you behave, in the best interests of the Order, which is all any of us do.

“Lucia, things are different now, for girls like you. You saw the pictures in Maria Ludovica’s apartment — scenes like the Sack of Rome. Once a girl growing up in the Crypt had no realistic choice but to stay here. The world outside, chaotic and uncontrolled, was simply too dangerous. Now things have changed.” She pointed to Lucia’s phone. “Outside is a bright and superficially attractive world. Technology has liberated people in a way that could not have been imagined a couple of centuries ago. People are free to travel wherever they want, to speak to whoever they want, at any time, to call up any information they like.

“And all this penetrates even the Crypt. It is all shallow, of course.” She snapped her fingers. “The great information highways could break down tomorrow, just as the Roman aqueducts once fell into ruin. But the world outside looks attractive. That’s my point. You feel you have a choice, about whether to stay on in the Crypt, or seek some new life outside. But the truth is, you have no choice. Perhaps you must see that for yourself.”

No choice because I’m different , Lucia thought. I would never find a place outside the Crypt. And besides, there is something that will hold me here forever. “I can’t leave, because of my child. That’s why you’re letting me go outside, isn’t it? Because you know I’ll have to come back. Because you have my baby.”

A look of uncertainty crossed Rosa’s face. “There is no you and we — this conversation has been inappropriate. We should forget it.”

“Yes,” said Lucia.

“Take your phone. Go out, have a good time while you can. I don’t think we’ll need to talk again.” Rosa stood; the meeting was evidently over.

As it turned out, Rosa was right, unsurprisingly. Despite her new freedom Lucia felt very reluctant to leave the Crypt. It would have felt like an abandonment of the baby that was even now yelling its lungs out in one of the Crypt’s huge nurseries, even if she never saw it again. She returned to her studies, and considered going back to work in the scrinium. She would go back outside sometime in the future, she decided. Not yet.

Two months after the birth, though, she detected yet more changes in her body. Changes unexpected, and unwelcome. She went to Patrizia again. The strange truth was quickly confirmed.

She knew the time had come to go out. If not now, then never. She still had Daniel’s business card. It wasn’t that she’d consciously kept it, not exactly, but it was there nonetheless. It took her only a moment to find it.

Chapter 34

In the last days they gathered around her bed, faces drifting in the candlelit gloom.

Here were Leda, Venus, Julia, pretty Aemilia, even Agrippina. Oval faces, strong noses, eyes like cool stone, eyes so like hers, as if she were surrounded by fragments of herself. And there beyond them, silent witnesses to her death as her life, were the three matres, her lifelong companions, the last relic of her childhood home.

She was still concerned about the Crypt, the Order. Even as the illness rose around her like a bloody tide, she thought and calculated, worrying obsessively that there might be something she had overlooked, some flaw she had failed to spot. If the Order was to survive indefinitely, it had to be perfect — for, like a tiny crack in a marble fascia, enough time would inevitably expose the slightest defect.

When a coherent thought coalesced in her mind, she would summon one of the women, and insist she record her sayings.

Thus: “Three,” she whispered.

“Three, Regina?” Venus murmured. “Three what?”

“Three mothers. Like the matres. At any time, three mothers, three wombs. Or if the Order grows, three times three, or … Three mothers. That is all. For the rest, sisters matter more than daughters — that is the rule.”

“Yes—”

“When a womb dries, another must come forward.”

“We need rules. A procedure for the succession.”

“No.” Regina grasped Venus’s arm with bony fingers. “No rules, save the rule of three. Let them come forward, and make their own rules, their own contest.”

“There will be conflict. Every woman wants daughters.”

“Then let them fight. The strongest will prevail. The Order will be stronger for it …”

The blood must be preserved, kept pure, for the blood was the past, and the past was better than the future. Sisters matter more than daughters. Let them remember that; let them obey it, and the rest would follow.

And: “Ignorance is strength.”

This time Leda was with her. “I don’t understand, dear.”

“ We cannot survive. We old ones cannot run the Order forever. But the Order must be immortal. This is not a little empire and it never must be so. There must be no leader to fall, no traitor to betray us. The seniors must step back into the shadows, the Council must abdicate whatever powers it can. The Order itself must sustain its own existence. Let no one question. Let no one know more than she needs to perform her tasks. That way, if one fails, another can replace her, and the Order will go on. The Order, emerging from us all, will prevail. Ignorance is strength. ”

Leda still didn’t understand. But in the corridors of her failing mind, Regina saw it clearly.

To survive into the future you needed a system: that was the one indisputable lesson she had learned since arriving in Rome. The Romans had had a genius for organizations that functioned effectively for generations, despite political instability and corruption and all the other failings of humanity. Though the army was shamelessly used by pretenders to the throne and other adventurers for their own ends, it had always remained a military force of unparalleled effectiveness; and even though senators and others would misuse the legal system for their own ends, throughout the Empire, normal and competent processes of justice had served enormous numbers of people in every aspect of their daily lives. Even the city itself had sustained its own identity, its own organization, across a thousand years of unplanned growth, forty or fifty generations of people, for the city, too, was a system.

Systems, yes. And it was a system that she had been trying to establish here, following her instincts, bit by bit, as the years wore away. A system that would endure. A system that would work, even when the people it sustained had forgotten it existed.

The Order would be like a mosaic, she thought — but not of the kind her father used to make. Imagine a mosaic assembled not by a single master designer but by a hundred workers. Let each of them place her tesserae in harmony with those of her sisters. Then from these small acts of sympathy, from sisters simply listening to each other, a greater and enduring harmony would emerge. And it was a harmony that would survive the death of any one artisan — for the group was the artist, and the group survived the individuals …

You didn’t need a mind to create order. In fact, the last thing you wanted was a mind in control, if that mind belonged to an ambitious idiot like Artorius.