Resurrection (Blood of the Lamb) Read Online Free Page A

stayed inside the room she wasn't sure if she could hold on till Charlie returned to set her free. There was no other option but to find some kind of receptacle to use, as he had said.
    The room was still too dark to identify all the bulky shapes piled around her, although over by the one small window she could just make out a set of cupboards topped with open shelves. On closer inspection, it seemed the shelves were laden with poorly stacked books and papers amid a jumble of boots, bottles and small boxes—nothing that obviously lent itself to aiding her now. Then on the top-most shelf she spied an empty container that looked just like the glass jugs she'd seen in the kitchens aboard Star of the Sea . That would do! She took it down, careful not to dislodge the surrounding piles of junk, then squatted over it, greatly relieved. Her urine smelt strong and acrid, nearly overflowing the top before she was done. Finally she returned the jug to its original position on the shelf, grinning as she imagined someone trying to identify this unknown liquid in the days to come.
    Outside was so silent it seemed as if the world was holding its breath right at that magical tipping point between night and day. With dawn so close, she decided to stay awake ratherthan risk oversleeping when Sergeant Littlejohn was due. She thought about him now, the squat bald-headed commander of the camp, and how he'd shown so little interest when she and Ruth and Lazarus had first arrived. At the time it had puzzled her, how someone could care so little for the trauma the three of them had endured—the storm, dear Joseph's death, the sinking of the boat—but now she knew he cared for no one: that, as the representative of the Confederated Territories, his sole responsibility was to prevent any outsiders from reaching his country's more desirable shores. It didn't seem to matter that people were desperate and fleeing likely death, this camp was designed to hold back the so-called heathen hordes, and he was the perfect man to detain them all together, as unimportant to him as undersized fish beached in a net.
    She tucked herself back up on the narrow bed but dared not close her eyes, instead running through the terrors of the last few months as though the abuses she'd witnessed could somehow strengthen her resolve. And, indeed, they did: the fury that built inside her every time she conjured up such memories stirred again. Once, she'd worried how such thoughts fuelled her fiery anger—believing it to be unfitting for a Blessed Sister—but now she'd come to recognise that without such moral outrage she'd never have the nerve to act.
    To be taken from her parents as a toddler, raised to believe that she was Chosen by the Lord to serve him in some glorious and special way, only to find that she and all the other Blessed Sisters were nothing more than sacrificial vessels for their precious blood, had mired everything she'd been raised to believe. But when she and Ruth and Joseph had defied the Apostles and escaped, along with Lazarus—the chief Apostle's son—theirdiscovery of the forsaken Marawa Island seemed to prove the Apostles’ frightening claim: that every human being beyond their own small island, Onewēre, had been destroyed.
    And when their boat was shattered by the storm and Joseph's life stolen by Te Matee Iai, she'd almost started to believe Ruth's assertion that the Apostles’ claims were true. But after they'd been plucked from their burning boat and brought to this detention camp, she'd come to realise that the wrath of power-hungry men was just as ruthless as anything the Lord would do—if there was a Lord at all. She doubted now. Would never again put faith in anybody but herself. This was the way things had to be, she decided, if she had any hope of seeing through her crazy plan. Of course, there were still kind people like Charlie and Veramina, and the woman Jo, but from now on she would take control, and use her fury as the kindling