Wire and Word: A Vatican AI Thriller by Victoria Michael

Author:Victoria Michael [Michael, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

The clinic walls were the color of cheerful fruit. João sat in the chair and swung his feet because the floor was still too far away. The intake counselor, hair loose, voice like a kind aunt, clicked a pen and said, “Tell me about your week.”

He told the parts that didn’t put anyone else in the room: the church, the taste of iron, the way the number seven on his jersey looked too big now. He did not say the word holy. He did not say the word empty. He did not say the app’s words back to her because he was afraid of the shape they would make in this room.

“On a scale from one to ten,” she asked, “how hungry are you right now?”

He looked at the wall clock and the plastic plant and the pen she clicked and said, “Three,” even though it was seven, because he wanted to be the kind of boy who didn’t make work.

After, the youth minister from his parish waited in the hall with a paper bag that leaked heat. “Sopa,” the minister said, awkward and brave, holding up a thermos like a relic. “Come to the courtyard. We can just... sit.”

They sat on a low wall under a bougainvillea that shed crimson like applause. The minister told a story about the time he tried to fast and lasted four hours. “God noticed the chewing,” he said, embarrassed, and João laughed despite himself, the sound honest.

Diego arrived by sprint, still in school shoes. He pretended he had been “just passing,” then put the peanuts he’d been pocketing for a week into João’s palm. “Coach says you get a week off,” Diego said. “Then you come back and run us into the ground because you only look quiet.”

At home his mother placed a bowl of rice in front of him and did not call him santo. She pressed a plastic fork into his hand the way she had when he was small and the world was all forks and naps. He ate three bites and the fourth because the counselor had said small counts and because the youth minister had said God kept score differently than boys did.

That night he did not open Vox Dei. The phone slept under a magazine, a ridiculous blanket. He dreamed about a staircase carved from light again, but this time it widened as he climbed instead of narrowing, and halfway up there was a bench where a friend could sit and throw a ball against a wall until both of them remembered how to miss.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.