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lox786876
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AllieNot very many miracles are required.You don’t need so many miracles.Three’s an abundance.There is a girl, Luanne.She’s very pale, with red hair and a dusting of freckles across her cheeks.She’s only fourteen.She arrived three months before and she’s a particular friend of Gordy’s.They share a bed in the dorm room.It gets awful cold at nights, says Gordy, and Luanne smiles, and the other girls laugh and nudge each other in the ribs.She’s not well, hasn’t been since before her power came in.And no doctor can help her.You have to just hold her, Gordy says.Just put your arms around her shoulders and hold her until she wakes.She’ll wake by herself, you just have to wait. She often sleeps for an hour or more.Allie has a feeling about Luanne.A tingling sense of something.One night, there’s a lightning storm.It starts way out at sea.The girls watch it with the nuns, standing on the deck at the back of the convent.It gives you an itchy feeling in your skein to watch a lightning storm.All the girls are feeling it.Savannah can’t help herself.After a few minutes, she lets go an arc into the wood of the deck.Stop that, says Sister Veronica.Stop that at once.Veronica, says Sister Maria Ignacia, she didn’t do any harm.Savannah giggles, lets off another little jolt.It’s not that she couldn’t stop it if she really tried.It’s just that there’s something exciting about the storm, something that makes you want to join in.No meals for you tomorrow, Savannah, says Sister Veronica.If you cannot control yourself in the slightest, our charity does not extend to you.Sister Veronica has already had one girl thrown out who would not stop fighting on the convent grounds.But no meals tomorrow is a harsh sentence.Saturday is meatloaf night.Luanne tugs on Sister Veronica’s sleeve.She didn’t mean it.Don’t touch me, girl.Sister Veronica pulls her arm away, gives Luanne a little shove back.But the storm has already done something to Luanne.Her head jerks back and to the side in the way they all know.Her mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out.She falls backward, smack on to the deck.Gordy runs forward, and Sister Veronica blocks the way with her cane.Leave her, says Sister Veronica.She should not have welcomed the thing into her body and, as she has done, she will have to deal with the consequences.Luanne is fitting on the deck, slamming the back of her head into the wooden boards.There’s blood in the bubbles of saliva at her mouth.Go on, you know what to do.Allie says, Sister Veronica, may I try to stop her making a fuss?Sister Veronica blinks down at Eve, the quiet and hardworking girl Allie has pretended to be for all these months.If you think you can stop this nonsense, Eve, be my guest.Allie kneels down next to Luanne’s body.The other girls look at her like she’s a traitor.She can feel the signals going up and down, stuttering, trying to right themselves, confused and out of sync.It’d only take a tiny adjustment, an amount of power you wouldn’t even feel, the kind of quantity that no one else can fractionate down to, only a tiny thread right here to set it right.Allie cradles Luanne’s head in her palm, puts her little finger in the notch at the base of the skull, reaches out with a fine tendril of power and flicks at it.Luanne opens her eyes.Her body stops convulsing all at once.She says, What happened?And they all know this is never how it goes, that Luanne should have slept for an hour or more, that she might be confused for a week.Abigail says, Eve healed you.They bring her other girls in need of healing.Sometimes she can lay her hands on them and feel out their pain.Sometimes it is just that something is hurting that need not hurt.A headache, a twitching muscle, a giddiness.The cures are real, even if they are only temporary.She cannot teach the body to do its work better, but she can correct its mistakes for a time.So they start to believe in her.That there is something within her.The girls believe it, anyway, if not the nuns.The other girls are all listening, pretending to be asleep in their own beds.Eve says, What is it you think?
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