Page 72 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

Not much longer, little one, I think. We’re almost there. I can’t throw up in the aisle. I need to make it to the front. It’s not much further. I am almost done.

There are cameras everywhere, but this time they feel soothing instead of oppressive.

There are two on rails, one down each side of the nave, gliding along with me at walking pace.

There is another on the gallery over the west doors, looking down the length of everything. Another in the crossing, high, on a crane. Phones by the hundred, held up over heads along both sides, although the guests were asked not to. And at the foot of the altar steps, on a short stand, angled up, one small camera with a red light that has been on since before I came through the doors.

That one is for the vows so that there is a close up of the moment that I vow my life away.

They are watching in every country that has a television. The broadcaster said so this morning, on the news I watched while I waited to be dressed. My parents’ wedding was shown in classrooms and prisons. This one, the anchor said, is expected to be larger.

The music is an anthem from home, played on an organ the size of a house. It is the only sound.

My stomach lifts.

I lock everything. Jaw. Throat. Muscles low in my belly. I look at the altar. I look at the small red light of the camera there.

A wave of nausea floods through me. I swallow and smile.

Hold tight, little one. Almost there.

Reinhardt stands on his mark at the top of the steps. He is in state dress, dark blue with silver. He is watching me.

Beside him stands the Archbishop of Monteverra, flown over from home for the purpose, in purple and gold with a book already open.

My hand wants to go to my stomach. It has wanted to all morning.

Another step. And then another.

And then the air changes.

It is nothing anyone else in this building would notice. There is a lot to smell here: the lilies, the candles, the thick dead nothing that comes off every man in a gray suit in the place, hundreds of colognes and perfumes and the cold stone smell of the cathedral itself.

But under all of it, off to my left and behind me, near the doors I came in through, there is coffee.

Dark. Roasted. Warm.

My knees go soft for one step. I lock them and the pace does not change, and the mark under my collar goes hot as if a hand has been put on it.

He is here.

I don’t turn my head. I don’t move my eyes off the red light at the altar.

I have been trained since before I could read to hold my body still while the rest of me goes somewhere else, and I do it now, walking, with sixty paces to go and a scent in the air that I would know blind in a crowd of thousands.

The sick feeling goes. My stomach, which has been climbing my throat since I woke in the dark this morning, simply settles.

I cannot react. I don’t know what it is that he is planning but he mustn’t do it. They will shoot him.

Please do not do anything stupid.

That is the next thought, and it comes hard on the heels of the first, because I know him.

Stay where you are. Stay by the doors. Let me do this.

I cannot tell him. There is no way to tell him. So I do the only thing I can do, which is walk at the same stately pace and hold my face still.

The pews end and so does my journey up the aisle.