Take a picture. You need to take a mental picture.
She blinked, again and again, but for some reason the image wouldn’t stabilize, wouldn’t fix in her brain. I’m focusing, Ella thought desperately. I’m doing what Dix told me. Why isn’t this working?
A crackle in Ella’s skull became a voice. Gabriel’s voice. In her confusion she must have somehow allowed his signal back in.
‘Ella. Where are you? They’re looking for you, they’re leaving. You must get out. Get out of there, NOW.’
‘Marta!’ Fatima’s voice was closer, more insistent, a sound from another world. ‘Marta, for God’s sake. We have to go!’
Ella blinked again, furiously, her eyes dry and apparently useless, just when she needed them most. Meanwhile, the disfigured nun made no attempt to cover herself and seemed every bit as fascinated by Ella’s face as Ella was by hers. Was it Ella’s youth and beauty that transfixed her? Or something else? Something more … personal?
She was cocking her head to one side, her eyes narrowed, like someone trying to figure out a puzzle. And that was when Ella saw it. Those eyes! Cat-like and dancing, the eyes that had hypnotized an entire generation of the world’s most powerful men. The eyes Ella had first seen on the plane to Greece, staring out at her from Athena’s file. Eyes that no fire could melt, and no surgeon’s knife disfigure.
Ella’s breath caught in her throat.
It’s her. It’s definitely her.
It’s Athena.
The moment the thought came to her, she watched, horrified, as the nun’s melted face contorted into a smile, at once gloating and repellent.
She knows. She knows I know.
Every fiber in Ella’s being screamed at her to do something. To scream Athena’s name out loud. To lunge at her and throttle the life from her evil body with her bare hands. But that smile and the burned skin and the unflinching gaze all combined to paralyze her in some awful way, freezing Ella to the spot in an agony of indecision and immobility.
‘MARTA!!’
Fatima’s voice broke the spell, but it was too late to act. Instead Ella turned and ran, out of the room, back down the stairs, so quickly she felt dizzy, then back towards the kitchens where Helen emerged and grabbed her, her chubby fingers closing around Ella’s skinny arms with surprising firmness.
‘Marta! Where the hell have you been?’ Picking up an empty crate she shoved it into Ella’s hands. ‘Didn’t you hear Fatima calling? She’s been yelling the place down looking for you.’
‘Sorry, I … I got lost,’ stammered Ella.
‘Well, lucky I found you because we were about to leave without you. Fatima’s probably halfway down to the beach by now. The boat’s waiting. Come on.’
In a trance, her mind racing, Ella followed Helen out of the convent, back through the iron gate, past the elderly nun, and down the steep steps they’d ascended less than an hour earlier. Since then the sun had risen fully in the sky and it dazzled now, its light blinding Ella and making her squint like a mole emerging from its burrow.
I saw her. I saw Athena Petridis. And she saw me!
She scanned the horizon for the boat she’d seen earlier, that she’d assumed was Gabriel’s ‘eyes on’ her, but it was nowhere to be seen. Ella’s heart sank.
I saw her, but I didn’t get the picture.
I failed.
Would Gabriel believe her, without proof? Would any of them?
They had to. Ella must make them. Even without the precious mental picture, she could describe what she’d seen. The charred wreck of a woman. Those eyes. The way she looked at me!
She would describe the man too. The giant who’d sounded so threatening, yet whom Ella had found kneeling at the monster’s feet, like a supplicant before a saint.
‘There you are!’ Fatima rolled her eyes at Ella, relieving her of the empty crate and tossing it into the boat before helping her and Helen aboard. ‘We were starting to think you’d decided to stay for good. Take Holy Orders and be done with it
.’
‘Bless me, Sister Marta, for I have sinned!’ giggled Helen.
Ella forced herself to laugh, slipping back into her cover character as she’d been trained to.