The others repeated after her, like a sacred choir. Kat, even while crying, tried to murmur the words as well, feeling, for the first time, a faint thread of belonging amid the despair.
She was still sobbing, clinging to Ceres’s hands, while the girls continued, almost in a trance:
— Mother Ceres... who feeds us... who educates us... and who devours us...
That was when Ana broke the chorus. Her voice was dry, but firm:
— That’s right. She’s our Mother.
She crossed her arms, staring at Kat like someone facing a person who, above all, needed to accept reality.
— There’s no point running away or hiding. No one escapes her here, Kat. All of us... have already been devoured. And look at us. — She gave a crooked smile. — We’re here. Standing.
Dru slowly approached, her eyes filled with tears, almost a reflection of Kat herself.
— She’s our Mother... — she repeated, her voice tender, almost a plea. — She won’t leave you alone, Kat. Never. Not now.
Quietly, she knelt beside Ceres and touched her classmate’s shoulder.
— We’re here too. We’re all her daughters. No matter what happens... you’re one of us.
Kat choked back a muffled sob, but managed to raise her head. She saw Ana standing, with the hardness of someone who had already learned to endure. She saw Dru beside her, offering human warmth. And Ceres, cold and sweet at the same time, still holding her hands, sealing an invisible pact.
Together, in a single breath, they repeated, as if the bathroom were a chapel:
— Mother Ceres... who feeds us... who educates us... and who devours us...
Kat closed her eyes, let the tears flow, and for the first time felt that maybe... just maybe... she was not completely lost.
— Who is the father? — Ceres asked, with the serenity of someone asking what time it was.
Kat hesitated, her eyes moist.
— Gene...
Dru and Ana exchanged glances, almost in unison:
— You have to talk to him.
— Yes — Ceres agreed. — But today is the game. Tomorrow, without fail, we will all go together to the inspectors. Everything will be fine.
She placed her hands on Kat’s shoulders and, still kneeling, smiled with cold affection:
— If it is confirmed... you will perform Mother Ceres’s miracle. They say it is the best place for new mothers.
Ceres slowly rose. She raised one hand, as if in blessing, and concluded:
— Mother Ceres, who feeds, who educates, who devours us...
The others repeated in whispers:
— Mother Ceres, who feeds, who educates, who devours us.
The bathroom was calm now. A dense, almost sacred silence hung in the air like mist. Ceres remained kneeling, holding Kat’s hands. Dru and Ana, who had hated each other before, murmured the mantra in unison, like a collective meditation. It was a trance — a silent ritual that only those born beneath the eyes of Mother Ceres could understand.
Deep down, they all knew what it was like there... with the Mothers. They had all been there at least once. It was paradise on earth, they said. A gigantic womb made of tenderness and discipline, where Mothers — biological or surrogate — cared for each one of them like legitimate daughters. The soft scent of flowers, the welcoming warmth, the quiet voices reciting the mantra through white corridors. Some dreamed of that place. Others feared having to return too soon.
But they all knew that, if the time came, Mother Ceres would never abandon them.
And deep down, they knew it too: sooner or later, all children return to the Mother.
Silence settled as Kat walked away, her steps firm, carrying the weight of a world she was still trying to understand. The others, immersed in the aura of Mother Ceres, remained there, caught between fear and reverence, like believers before a deity.
Ceres, with her cutting gaze and firm voice, broke the magic of the moment. Her presence reminded them all of the price of disobedience — a silent promise that the Mother’s power would never be challenged with impunity. The mantra echoed among them, a chant that was, at the same time, promise and prison. Nourishing them, educating them, and devouring them in their very essence.
There, in that moment, they were all daughters of a merciless Mother. And the future took shape between hope and fear, entangled in the sacred mystery that only Mother Ceres could reveal.
Dru looked at Ana and Ceres, trying to break the tension:
— You two really aren’t going to try to understand each other? Now isn’t the time to fight.
Ana replied, her gaze sharp:
— Understand that one? I don’t even know how she can stand pretending to be the perfect leader.
Ceres raised an eyebrow without losing her composure:
— Perfect? Please, Ana. Do you think leading means putting on makeup and smiling for the cameras? Leading means carrying this place’s bones on your back.
Ana laughed bitterly:
— Bones? You’re just a piece in the game, like everyone else here. You only want to be in charge because you’re terrified of what is real.
Ceres took a step forward, her gaze fixed on her:
— Afraid? The one who’s afraid here, Ana, is you. Afraid of being forgotten. Afraid of being nobody.
Dru tried to intervene, the tension almost unbearable:
— Calm down... calm down. What matters is that Kat is with us. This ego fight isn’t going to help right now.
Ana: (sighs, still tense) I just don’t want to see Kat suffer. You talk about protecting people, but all I see are rules and control.
Ceres: Rules that save lives, Ana. Want to hear the truth? You’re afraid of losing your freedom. But here, there is no freedom without limits.
Ana: (quietly) So you think Mother Ceres is going to take care of us? Even when we want to run away?
Ceres: (cynical smile) Who runs away, Ana? Here, either you are Mother Ceres’s child... or you are nothing.
(Tense silence. The girls exchange glances, a mixture of resentment and fear, until Ceres breaks the ice with a sharp provocation.)
Ceres: Learn your lesson, Ana... I’m not here to please anyone, much less to play the good girl. If you want some advice: forget the act. No one fools anyone here.
Ana: (smirks ironically) Oh, really? Then tell me, little leader, how do you lead a bunch of misfits without losing your mind?
Ceres: (with cold arrogance) Easy. You simply... don’t lose it.
Ana: (laughing mockingly) I can already see this spectacle is going to be good. Just don’t forget that, in the end, even masks fall.
Dru remained there, watching Ana and Ceres walk away in opposite directions, their eyes still heavy with tension, but now with an enigmatic respect between them.
She sighed, shaking her head. “I don’t understand those two... it’s like they hate each other, but sometimes it’s as if they speak the same language.”
Dru remembered what she had seen in the bathroom — the broken silence, Ceres’s care for Kat, the almost maternal way she had assumed, so different from the cold leader everyone feared. There had been something genuine in it. “In the middle of the chaos, at least there was truth there. Do they realize that? Can they see beyond the barbs?”
With a faint smile, Dru took a deep breath and followed Ana, wanting to keep that moment as a small hope amid the chaos.
She walked beside Ana, trying to find words that could cross the cold wall the other girl had built around herself.
— Ana... — she began hesitantly. — I know Ceres seems harsh, ruthless, but I think deep down she’s just as lonely as we are. I can feel it in her. Just like you. Just like me.
Ana did not look at Dru. She only pressed her lips together, her eyes fixed on the floor.
— Stay away from me, Dru. — Her voice came out firm, cutting, leaving no room for a reply.
Dru swallowed the knot in her throat, but did not give up.
— I try to understand you. I try to find some trace... something that shows who you really are, behind all that distance. But all I see is a wall that hurts.
Ana took a deep breath, looking away.
— Maybe I’m just taking out on you what I can’t take out on Daime. He despises me, ignores me... and I end up becoming this. — She made a vague gesture, like someone swallowing her own shadow.
Dru felt the raw pain in those words, and the silence that followed only made it more real.
— I despise myself for wanting your love, even knowing you don’t want it. That hurts more than anything else.
The two remained silent, sharing a sadness neither dared to name.
Ana remained motionless for a few seconds, staring at the empty hallway ahead. Dru’s words echoed, heavy as lead. She had always seen herself as the loneliest — after all, no one understood her pain with Daime, no one knew the weight of living in Ceres’s shadow. But in that moment, looking at Dru, she realized:
Dru did not even have herself. Not her own voice, not her own ground beneath her feet. Always on the margins, begging for a love that would never come from Ana, and now about to lose Theo as well, even though she had never truly had him.
A different weight settled in Ana’s chest. Pity. A pity she did not want to feel, but it was there.
Without saying anything, she took a deep breath, turned her back, and walked away in silence. Her footsteps echoed through the hallway, dry, like a final warning that she was still there.
And when she disappeared around the corner, all that remained was the bitter feeling: despite all the theater, all the rivalry, and all the hard facade, perhaps the loneliest of them all was Dru.
Ana adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder, her eyes, which always cut like blades, lingering on Dru for one second longer. There was something difficult to name in that second. It was not affection, nor friendship. But it was not pure contempt either.
Dru, sitting on the hallway bench, discreetly wiped away her tears, unable to bring herself to raise her eyes. When she felt Ana’s gaze on her, she shrank back, waiting for the next barb.
But it never came.
Ana simply took a deep breath, lowered her eyes, and walked toward the door. Her combat boot echoed through the empty hallway. No words. No final humiliation. Only silence.
And for a moment — brief as a sob — Dru felt that the silence hurt more than any insult.
Or maybe not.
Maybe, just maybe, it was the opposite.
Maybe, within that icy stillness, there was a thread of compassion.
Ana (thought, as she walks down the hallway):
I could have said something. Anything. A “you’ll be okay,” a “stay strong,” a “you don’t deserve this.” But I know it wouldn’t be sincere. Not now. She doesn’t understand...
It’s not disgust. It never was disgust. It’s just... it’s not meant to be. Not between us.
She looks at me as if I’m the only thing she has left to hold on to, and that scares me. Because I have nothing to give. I have nothing even for myself.
Better silence. Better not to lie. Better not to drive another barb into a wound that is already bleeding.
It’s cruel, I know. But it’s what I can be.
It’s not disgust... it’s just not meant to be.
The Forbidden Pleasure
Dru did not know exactly when she began to feel ashamed. Maybe it was when she realized that the other girls did not smile as much as she did when exchanging a lipstick for a secret. Or maybe it was that day when she heard one of the Mothers say that “commerce is the root of decadence.” She saw no decadence in coloring her classmates’ lips, in perfuming their calloused palms. And yet, the shame was there.
Every time a cigarette made by her own hands discreetly passed beneath the table, along with a silent nod, something inside her contracted — and at the same time, ignited. It was wrong. But it was hers.
Dru liked being needed. She liked it when the girls sought her out in secret, as if she were the guardian of small freedoms. A cassette tape hidden in a pocket, a melted eraser that became lip gloss, a drag of relief at the end of a shift. None of it was permitted. All of it made her feel alive.
She knew Mother Ceres would disapprove. But at the same time, in her mind, it was Ceres herself who whispered to her: “Feed them.”
And Dru fed them.
Sometimes, while rolling the tobacco stolen from the plantations or diluting dye in alcohol, she felt a pang of guilt — as if she were betraying everything she had learned in the chants. But right afterward came the pleasure. A warm, almost sick pleasure, belonging to someone who knew she was essential, even through crooked means.
She loved Mother Ceres, with a devotion that blinded her. But she also loved it when a classmate smiled after trying the scarlet lipstick that was never supposed to exist. It was a selfish pleasure, and she knew it.
There were nights when she wondered if, deep down, she herself was one of the “devourers.” Not with weapons or orders, but with small scraps of freedom that she traded for a piece of herself.
And even so, she continued. Because stopping would mean admitting that she was just another obedient cog.
Dru knew she was harmless. She knew it, and that irritated her.
While the other girls trained to assemble rifles with the devotion of someone learning to pray, she preferred dissolving dyes in alcohol or mixing oils stolen from the beehives. She was not rebellious. She was useful. And that was why Mother Ceres had not devoured her yet.
Theo passed by her in the courtyard like an old breath. A taste of memory she had not completely forgotten yet. Dru no longer loved him. Not after he was designated as one of Ceres’s “arms.” He was already part of her. An appendage. And Ana? Ana was fading from her mind like a faint perfume — a memory that hurt, but had lost its color.
Love, Dru understood now, was only a transitional phase. It was beautiful while it lasted, but it had an expiration date. At twenty, whatever no longer served the system would be devoured. She would be. And there was no poetry in that. There would be no tears. Only a silent ritual, like a harvest.
But until then, she was still free to be useful.