INTERLUDE THREE

Her parents had been killed.

Many a twist and turn had followed, but in the end, that was the catalyst for Agnes Sanctis beginning her life on the streets.

Food wasn’t that difficult to come by, as long as she didn’t care about the quality. It was hard on her until she accepted restaurants’ discarded dumpster trash as food. More dreadful, though, was the frigid winter. Whenever a continental cold snap came over Europe, the chilly skies transformed into a harbinger of death.

She had resided in the business area of Milan as a young girl. The townscape, where everything was arranged a little too perfectly, never saw even a single newspaper or rag fall on the street, nothing that could serve as protection against the cold. The afternoon warmth from the centuries-old stone buildings and thick asphalt roads never lasted by nightfall, and the days would slowly turn the world into a hard, sharp freezer.

Even scavenging through trash cans would sometimes yield only “food” so stiff you could hammer a nail with it.

That was what the Roman Orthodox Church had saved Agnes from.

She thought many others besides her, of all sorts—adults and children, men and women—had been taken in as well. Each had his or her own reason, but none of them seemed to have been embroiled in incidents like Agnes or lived on the streets, where every day was a battle for survival. It seemed to her that the greater portion of them had been living normal lives and felt lucky to have been chosen by the Church.

There was no way for Agnes to have known at the time, but the Roman Orthodox Church was the largest religion in the world, with over two billion followers. For many reasons, it was “just quicker” to take in people with talent from the beginning than average people with no talent and groom them into professionals. Calculations suggested that one talented person out of ten thousand would allow them to secure two hundred. Perhaps that was a numerical victory.

Many conditions seemed to govern whether a person was chosen, but it was difficult to ascertain what they were.

“Wh-what will happen to us now?”

A girl named Angeline spoke those words. She said she used to live in France, but her parents had taken her to Milan, then abandoned her. It seemed possible for her to return home if she wished, but when asked, she would simply respond with a pained smile, saying, “What good would that do?” She’d been better off than Agnes, but she had a relatively severe past among the group, too.

“There is no need to question. If the Lord says something is necessary, it is the duty of His followers to answer Him.”

The stiff, formal words came from the mouth of a girl called Lucia. She was a few years older than Agnes and Angeline and apparently had worked of her own volition to be chosen by the Church. Agnes had also become acquainted with two other girls, named Agatha and Catherine.

“I don’t know,” said Agnes.

She certainly believed in God. But God wasn’t the sort of being who would come to you as soon as He was called. Her father had been a priest, and he’d died praying. The murderer had killed him and flung him off before Agnes could ask what his name was. If God had been nearby, that wouldn’t have happened.

“More importantly, I’m worried about dinner tonight.”

In the present time, Agnes came off as rather rough because of the peculiar way she had learned Japanese, but in her mother tongue of Italian, she spoke properly.

On the other hand, Lucia responded, “What do you mean ‘more importantly’? There is nothing in this world more important than the Lord…”

“I-I’m worried, too. The secret ingredient has been olives for the last twelve days. I’m tired of it. Or…Ors…I can’t remember her name. The really nice apprentice sister. She’s definitely forgetting about it when she plans her repertoire. And our baths are strange. They’re a little too hot. Don’t you agree, Miss Lucia?”

“The secret ingredient doesn’t matter! And our baths are only a bit lukewarm!!”

“R-really? Come to think of it, it doesn’t seem to bother the grown-ups much…Umm, which means, with your age…Miss Agatha and Miss Catherine over there are older, and they were saying it was really hot. Does…Does that mean you’re…even older than—”

Lucia sent a chilling glare where Angeline pointed. The girls over there hastily looked away.

With the sounds of bickering in her ears, Agnes narrowed her eyes and just faintly smiled.

It didn’t seem like God was nearby.

He wasn’t a handyman who would come to help as soon as you called.

But…

Lucia, Angeline, Agatha, and Catherine—if the Roman Orthodox Church was to thank for her chancing upon people like them, Agnes felt like she could give genuine thanks to God. And start trying to believe in the teachings of Crossism.

Not only that…

If her only blessing was that she was given the chance to meet them, she would protect that blessing with her own two hands.

No matter what happened.

She would make the absolute most of the chance God had given her and use it to prove her faith in her own way.

“What’s the matter? You look strangely serious.”

“M-Miss Lucia, Miss Agnes is trying to say she can’t put up with how hot the baths are, either. I-if you want to negotiate with them, I’ll go with you! See? Miss Agatha and Miss Catherine stood up, too!!”

“Yes,” said Agnes with a curt nod to the mistaken assessment.

If this was going to be her home from now on…

…then first, maybe she should try to make it a place she could call comfortable.