The Repeater

- Chapter 10 -

Mother Adriel did not work out of a church.

That bothered me for reasons I could not have explained politely.

Not because holiness requires stained glass or pews or men in bad ties speaking too loudly into microphones that smell faintly like other people’s breath. I knew better than that. But when a federal woman in a dark suit tells you she wants to take you to somebody who can read the sacred side without getting stupid about it, some underfunded part of the American imagination expects at least one of the following:

A sanctuary. A chapel annex. A rectory. A tired folding chair in a fellowship hall with a pot of coffee trying not to taste like cardboard.

Instead, by 2:11 that afternoon, Mara Voss was driving me toward a narrow brick building tucked between a shuttered print shop and a legal office with peeling gold letters on the window.

No steeple. No cross out front. No marquee giving upcoming sermon times.

Just a small brass plate beside the door that read:

ADRIEL HOUSE

No title under it. No institution. No denominational logo. No effort to explain itself to strangers.

Which, I would later learn, was very much in character.

Mara parked at the curb and shut the engine off. Neither of us moved right away. The windshield held the late-afternoon Hampton light in a dull gray-blue wash. Rain had gone through earlier again, just enough to leave everything reflective and faintly irritated. Utility wires. Curbs. Windows. The whole city seemed to be operating under a low hum of unfinished thought.

Mara kept both hands on the steering wheel for a second. Then she said, “A few things before we go in.”

“Always reassuring.”

She ignored the line on principle. That was one of her better habits.

“Mother Adriel is not on agency payroll.”

“That’s your first selling point.”

“She is not clergy in any formal denominational sense.”

“That’s your second.”

“She is also not interested in being treated like a spectacle, an oracle, or a cleanup service for federal uncertainty.”

I looked over at her. “Now that sounds like somebody worth meeting.”

Mara turned then, finally, and fixed me with that clean, measured gaze of hers. “Do not perform for her.”

That one landed. Harder than I liked.

“Do I seem like I’m performing?”

“Yes,” she said.

No emphasis. No accusation. Just clean delivery. The sort of truth that arrives in a dark suit and leaves no fingerprints because it doesn’t need them.

I looked away through the windshield at the brick front of Adriel House. A single lamp by the door. Narrow windows. No curtain movement visible from the street.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Mara took a second. Not to invent something. To choose which part of the thing to let live in public.

“You are still trying to control the room by deciding how much of yourself counts as quotable.”

I almost denied it. Almost. Then I let the sentence turn over a little and found the ugly piece in it that matched.

“That’s not performance,” I said. “That’s survival.”

“Yes,” she said. “But it’s still curation.”

I let out a breath through my nose. Outside, a car rolled past too fast for the street. Somewhere farther down the block somebody shut a door with excessive commitment.

Mara continued.

“She is not interested in your polish. She will know the difference between your experience and the version of it you believe sounds intelligent.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It usually is.”

There it was again—that almost-human edge of dry humor she let surface only when the world had gotten too absurd to file politely. It made her easier to tolerate. Not safer. Just more three-dimensional.

I studied Adriel House another second. “You trust her.”

Mara looked forward again. “That’s not the word.”

“No?”

“No.” She paused. “I have seen her be right in ways I dislike.”

That was a better endorsement than trust. Trust can be romantic. Accuracy is harder to fake.

We got out.

The air smelled like damp brick, old paper, and tide turned somewhere beyond the local streets. Mara crossed to the door without hurry. I followed half a pace back, which annoyed me immediately because I could feel the symbolism and had no current access to a better arrangement.

She knocked once. Not loud. Not timid. The knock of somebody announcing presence to a place that does not need convincing.

We waited.

No footsteps. No “just a minute.” No drama. The door simply opened.

Mother Adriel was smaller than I expected.

Not frail. Not delicate. Just spare in the frame. Late sixties maybe, maybe older, though some faces stop cooperating with arithmetic once they have spent enough years carrying seriousness cleanly. Her skin was deep brown and fine-lined, her eyes dark and level and so profoundly unstartled by my existence that I felt overdescribed before anyone had even spoken.

She wore a charcoal dress beneath a long dark cardigan, soft house shoes, and a thin silver chain with no visible symbol on it. No theatrical robe. No prophet costume. No extra flourishes to help the spiritually insecure identify the character class.

Just a woman in a doorway looking at us like she had already heard the first three false versions of the meeting before it arrived.

“Mara,” she said.

Her voice was low and steady and almost private, the kind that makes a listener lean in without ever feeling invited to do so.

“Mother Adriel,” Mara said.

Then the older woman looked at me. Not at my clothes. Not at my posture. At me. All of me at once in a way I was already too tired to enjoy.

“This is Enoch,” Mara said.

Mother Adriel gave the smallest nod. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

Something in that answer moved wrong through my chest. Not because it sounded mystical. Because it sounded accurate in a way that didn’t require ceremony.

She stepped back from the door. “Come in.”

The inside of Adriel House did not look like a sanctuary either. It looked like intelligence had moved into a domestic structure and refused to let either half dominate the other.

Bookshelves along the walls. Not decorative books. Used books. Open-spined, marked, lived with. Theology, history, languages, a stack of composition notebooks, and one whole shelf of government reports or declassified material boxed in plain binders like somebody had decided reverence required cross-training.

A wood table near the window. Two lamps with yellowed linen shades. A kettle on a small sideboard. No television visible. No clutter. No performance pieces. The room held itself the way some people do after they have suffered long enough to discard anything that doesn’t carry weight.

Mother Adriel motioned to two chairs facing the small table. Mara sat. I waited, which earned me one look from the older woman that said she noticed the hesitation and had already priced it correctly. I sat too.

She did not. She crossed to the sideboard, poured hot water into three mugs waiting there like the choice had already been made before we arrived, and brought them over on a tray. Tea, not coffee. That too felt like a decision from another operating system.

She set one mug in front of Mara, one in front of me, and kept the third. Only then did she sit.

No one spoke at first. The room had its own pace and it was not going to rent that pace out to federal urgency or my private panic.

I looked down at the mug. No brand. Just ceramic. Dark blue. Heat moving through the sides. The tea smelled clean and a little medicinal. Not bad. Just serious.

Mother Adriel watched me look at it. “You may drink it,” she said.

I looked up. “That wasn’t fear.”

“No,” she said. “It was suspicion pretending to be wit.”

Mara looked into her tea and did not smile. Cowardice on her part, really.

I picked up the mug. It was hot enough to be undeniably present. That helped.

Mother Adriel took her first sip, set the mug down, and looked at Mara instead of me. “Tell me your version first. Then I’ll ask him for his.”

There was no hostility in it. No deference either. Just structure. She wasn’t going to let the agency control the narrative just because it arrived in a dark blazer.

Mara nodded once and gave what I had to admit was a disciplined summary. Missing time event. Weights and Scales. Five hours twenty minutes absent. Reappearance. Intrusive recall. Internal phrasing. White-room anomaly. Petition-response incident. Semantic instability. Reflective secondary line.

Mother Adriel listened without interruption. No notes. No performance of concentration. Just that still, deep attention of somebody who has spent enough years hearing impossible things to know that reaction burns time and time is usually the first thing a frightened truth can’t afford to lose.

When Mara finished, the older woman turned to me.

“Now tell me the part she cannot.”

There it was. No warm-up. No soft landing. Just straight into the wound with a clean blade.

I looked at Mara. “She said most of it.”

Mother Adriel shook her head once. “No. She said the parts a government room can tolerate.”

That got me. Not because it was poetic. Because it was true.

I looked down at my mug, then back at her. The room did not pressure me. It also didn’t rescue me. Which, I was learning, is often a holier thing.

“All right,” I said.

And I told her. Not every beat of the alley. Not every filed sequence from Room 7B. Those things mattered, but not first. I told her about the feel of the air going conscious. About the silence in the alley that sounded full instead of empty. About the pale forms that did not sit in the world correctly. About the return at 4:37 and how ordinary the brick looked afterward, as if reality had committed the rudeness of continuing without needing to explain itself. About the line in my mind.

You were taken up.

Then the later line:

Residual witness confirmed.

And finally the yellow note. The prayer. The hidden reflected answer.

Then stay.

When I said that one, Mother Adriel’s gaze changed. Not wider. Not startled. More focused, as if a second lens had quietly rotated into place behind the first.

She did not speak for a while after I finished. The room held the silence like it knew how to keep it from collapsing into performance. The kettle gave one small settling click behind her. Somewhere outside a truck shifted gears too hard turning the corner.

At last she said, “You were right not to trust it.”

The relief that moved through me at that sentence was so immediate and so ugly I hated myself for it. Because I had not come to be validated. I had come because the day had become too strange to continue under one vocabulary. Still, there it was: the small animal gratitude of hearing one clean sentence from somebody who didn’t sound dazzled by the phenomenon.

“Why?” I asked.

Mother Adriel folded her hands around the mug. “Because holy answer and useful answer are not the same thing.”

Mara did not move. But I felt her listening harder.

Mother Adriel continued.

“If a man prays for help and receives instruction, that is not automatically false. But if the instruction fits the machinery of the environment better than the burden of the soul, caution is wisdom.”

I sat back. There it was again—that same distinction I had felt but not fully articulated. She had the language for it without dressing it in fog.

Mara said, “He described it as ‘instruction shaped to the room.’”

Mother Adriel looked at me. “Good.” Then to Mara: “That was his phrase?”

“Yes.”

The older woman nodded slowly. “Then he is not spiritually stupid. Only destabilized.”

I found I preferred that diagnosis to almost all the federal ones.

Vale would have hated that sentence. A shame he wasn’t there to suffer productively.

Mara asked, “What do you think answered him?”

Mother Adriel took her time. That, more than the content, is what separated her from the white room. She did not rush to colonize uncertainty just to preserve authority.

“There are at least three broad possibilities,” she said.

Her fingers lifted one at a time from the mug as she counted them.

“One: the phrase emerged from him. Not divinely, not demonicly, not externally—simply as a pressured cognition seeking structure inside a hostile interpretive environment.

“Two: the room, meaning the people and systems around him, shaped the answer knowingly or unknowingly. Monitoring expectation is a liturgical force of its own if applied with enough confidence.

“Three: something heard the prayer and answered operationally because operation, not mercy, is its native language.”

The room shifted on the third one. Not visibly. But Mara’s silence developed weight. Mine did too.

I asked, “You mean something unholy.”

Mother Adriel looked at me over the rim of the mug. “No,” she said. “I mean something uninterested in your wholeness.”

That landed harder than unholy would have. Because evil often gets described too theatrically for its own benefit. A thing that is merely uninterested in your wholeness can do far more damage while sounding practical.

Mara said, “Can you define the distinction?”

Mother Adriel set the mug down. “Not in a way your building will enjoy.”

“Try me.”

A tiny silence. Then the older woman gave Mara one of those long, patient looks older serious women reserve for competent younger ones who still occasionally mistake resilience for comprehension.

“Unholy is a moral category,” she said. “Operational indifference is an ontological one. One concerns rebellion. The other concerns use.”

Mara held that. To her credit, she held it seriously.

“You think he is being used?”

Mother Adriel’s gaze shifted to me. Not harsh. Not soft. Precise.

“I think he has returned from an event that altered the relation between his petition, his attention, and the surrounding field.”

There was Mara’s language, but older. Less sterile. More dangerous.

Mother Adriel went on.

“That does not yet tell me whether he was chosen, tagged, opened, bruised, indexed, or merely frightened into a state of heightened symbolic association. It does tell me he should not continue testing inside an architecture that already assumes the answer belongs to itself.”

Mara absorbed that without visible defensiveness. Another point in her favor.

I asked, “So what am I supposed to do?”

Mother Adriel did not answer the question directly. Which irritated me exactly enough to prove she was probably worth listening to.

Instead she asked, “Tell me about the first line. Not the reply. The line that came before it. The alley.”

I knew immediately which line she meant.

You were taken up.

I felt Mara go still beside me. I looked at Mother Adriel. She nodded once.

“That one,” she said.

I took a breath. “It came after the officers left. Not out loud. In my head. Clear.”

“Tone?”

I frowned. “Not warm. But not cold the way the white-room voice was.”

“Weight?”

That question surprised me. Not because it was mystical. Because it was exact.

“Heavier,” I said slowly. “Deeper maybe. Like it was placed lower in me.”

She nodded. “Direction?”

“Direction?”

“Did it arrive as accusation, recognition, instruction, announcement, or naming?”

There it was. The second language. Not agency jargon. Not church cliché. A sharper taxonomy for spiritual contact that refused both stupidity and spectacle.

I closed my eyes once. The breeze by the empty lot. The police cruiser gone. My phone in my hand. The alley behind me pretending innocence. The words entering thought closer than sound.

“Naming,” I said.

Mother Adriel leaned back. That was the first time in the whole meeting she looked in any way satisfied. Not comforted. Satisfied. Like a key had finally been cut to the right depth.

“Yes,” she said.

Mara asked, “Important?”

“Crucial.”

“Why?”

“Because naming and instruction are not the same class of speech.” Mother Adriel looked at me, not Mara, when she said the rest. “The first line may have told you what happened. The second line tried to tell you what to do.”

I sat very still. The room seemed to contract around the sentence just enough to make its edges ring.

Mother Adriel continued.

“When the sacred names, it often clarifies the event without flattering the self. When something else instructs too quickly inside a compromised environment, caution is not lack of faith. It is obedience to a higher standard of discernment.”

Mara’s eyes moved once to me and back. “You think the lines came from different sources.”

Mother Adriel did not answer immediately. Then:

“I think they carried different signatures.”

There was another term. Not the same as authorship. Not exactly. Signature implied pattern, character, manner of arrival, the weight and taste of a voice without collapsing that complexity into one neat named being. I could work with that. Or at least fear it productively.

Mara asked, “And the room?”

Mother Adriel finally drank again. Calmly. No urgency. The kind of composure that makes other people feel the poverty of their own haste.

“The room is the room,” she said. “But rooms can be trained. So can people. So can expectations. Build a space to log prayer long enough and eventually even silence begins behaving like a monitored event.”

I looked at her. “So you think Room 7B is contaminated.”

“No.”

The answer came fast enough to matter.

“I think Room 7B is biased.”

That was somehow worse. Contaminated sounds accidental. Bias can be engineered. Or inherited. Or ritualized.

Mara took that one personally enough for me to see it, but not so personally that she lost usefulness. “Meaning?”

Mother Adriel turned to her.

“Meaning your room has already decided prayer is a trigger, not a relation. It does not wait to see what prayer is doing. It logs for response. That is a profound interpretive violence, Mara. It teaches the event to behave like an experiment.”

Silence.

Then, unexpectedly, Mara nodded. Not full concession. But enough.

“That’s fair,” she said.

That sentence did more for her in my estimation than an hour of procedural competence. Not because she agreed. Because she could still hear correction without translating it automatically into attack.

Mother Adriel stood. The rest of us remained seated, which changed the room at once. She wasn’t tall, but she carried verticality the way some people carry rank: naturally, without interest in decoration.

She crossed to the bookshelf nearest the window and pulled out a narrow black notebook. No title on the cover. No label. She opened it not to the front, but somewhere well inside, as if the book and she already had an arrangement.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A bad habit,” she said.

Then, after a beat: “And a useful one.”

She returned to the table, sat, and turned the book so it faced her, not us. She scanned a page once, lightly, with one fingertip.

“In the last eleven years,” she said, “I have seen seven people who described post-event petition response phenomena in language close enough to yours to matter.”

Mara’s posture changed without moving much. Interest hardened. Good. The federal room had finally encountered older data without a badge.

I asked, “What happened to them?”

Mother Adriel looked up. “Mixed things.”

That answer had begun to follow me around like a bad hymn.

She continued.

“Two stabilized after removing themselves from monitored environments and ceasing all deliberate testing. One deteriorated because he confused discernment with fear and refused all contact of any kind. One became convinced every interruption in his day was direct revelation and made a ruin of his life by obeying operational noise as if it were sacred command. Two remain uncertain. One disappeared.”

Mara and I exchanged the briefest glance. Repeat returnees. Renee Calder. The white-room file. Different source, same wound shape.

Mother Adriel saw the glance and did not ask what passed between us. She probably didn’t need to.

“What do they have in common?” Mara asked.

Mother Adriel answered without consulting the notebook. “They all learned too late that response is not legitimacy.”

There it was. The rule. Maybe the first one that felt worthy of the story.

I looked down at my tea. It had gone cooler. Still drinkable. Still real. I took a sip and realized my hands had stopped shaking at some point in the meeting. Not because anything had become safer. Because some part of me had finally moved from panic into orientation. Even bad maps are maps.

Mother Adriel closed the notebook. No showmanship in it. Just sequence.

“Do you know where the repeated one is now?” I asked.

She looked at me for a long second. Then at Mara. Then back at me.

“That depends how much the two of you think today can survive.”

I set the mug down. Very carefully. Somewhere inside me a colder curiosity stood up.

Mara asked, “Meaning?”

Mother Adriel folded the black notebook once under both hands.

“Meaning,” she said, “the repeated one is not a file to me.”

No one spoke.

The older woman continued.

“She is a person. She came here three times. The fourth time she did not come inside. She only stood across the street and watched the window for almost twenty minutes before leaving.”

A pulse of cold moved up the back of my neck.

Mara’s voice stayed level. “You know her.”

Mother Adriel held her gaze. “Yes.”

I asked, “Renee Calder?”

There it was. No use pretending we were operating from cleanly separated knowledge anymore.

Mother Adriel did not look surprised I knew the name. That alone was unsettling.

“Yes,” she said.

Mara said nothing. I could feel her recalculating beside me. Not whether to act. How much the action was going to cost.

Mother Adriel reached for her mug again. “Do not rush,” she said.

That one was for Mara. Not me. I knew because the federal woman’s jaw tightened by half a degree and no more.

“You asked me for a second language,” Mother Adriel went on. “Here is the first sentence in it: not every repeated contact means the same thing.”

Mara leaned forward. “Explain.”

“Some are pursued. Some are porous. Some become attached to the fear of recurrence and begin assisting it. Some are simply easier to locate once opened.”

I said, “Opened.”

She nodded.

“There are states of personhood that behave more like houses after certain events. Doors, thresholds, permissions, invitations, leaks. This is why your white room makes me nervous.”

I asked, “Why?”

Mother Adriel turned to me fully now.

“Because a room that logs prayer without understanding address may accidentally teach the house to open the wrong door.”

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed incorrectly enough for me to catch. The whole meeting had narrowed to a point.

Then Mara asked the only question left that mattered.

“Where is Renee Calder?”

Mother Adriel looked at her. Then at me. Then at the black notebook.

When she answered, her voice was still low. Still steady. But now it carried the faintest trace of warning, not as emotion, but as form.

“There is a place off Terminal Road,” she said, “near the flood basin and the old service cut behind the closed produce warehouse.”

My chest tightened instantly. Terminal road flood basin. The phrase that had struck wrong in the room. White reflected light in standing water. Not local. Not right.

Mother Adriel saw the reaction hit me. She did not flinch from it.

“She waits there sometimes,” she said.

Mara went still. I went colder.