Delaney remembered the day her mother stopped wearing her wedding ring. She hadn't thrown it away in a fit of rebellion; she had just set it on a communal table as a "gift for the children's fund."
Her father didn't realize he was being erased, either. He thought he was being "refined." He had gone from a man who loved baseball and cold beer to a man who spent eighteen hours a day transcribing the Prophet's "New Light" audio tapes. He thought he was part of a revolution. He didn't see that he was actually just a battery being drained.
By the time they reached the Virginia compound, the "application" was finished, but they had never signed a single piece of paper. They had just stopped saying "Wait a minute."
They had handed over their bank accounts not because they were forced, but because they felt guilty for having more than the "Family." They gave up Delaney's childhood not because they were cruel, but because they believed the Prophet when he said that "biological attachment" was a sin of the ego.
Delaney watched them disappear into the grey-clothed mass of the cult. She was five years old, and she was the only one who realized that the "Something Bigger" they had joined was just a mouth that never stopped eating.
The memory of her mother's "awakening" was a blur of patchouli, cheap incense, and a desperate, searching hunger.
In 1974, her mother had been a "Seeker," a girl with flowers braided into hair that hadn't seen a comb in weeks, wandering the fringes of the hippie movement in a pair of dirt-stained bells. She thought she was looking for a revolution of love. Instead, she found two men in clean white shirts who told her that her "free spirit" was just a symptom of a hollow soul. They didn't offer her drugs; they offered her a Map.
Decades later, that Map had led them to a cramped, sun-bleached house in the middle of nowhere, where the air smelled of stale herbs and the slow, sweet rot of the end.
Delaney stood in the doorway of the living room, her expensive silk blouse feeling like a shroud. Her mother sat on a low stool by the sofa, her face a map of deep, fanatic wrinkles, her eyes still clouded with that same "peace" that had terrified Delaney as a child.
On the sofa, her father was barely a man anymore. He was a collection of sharp angles and grey skin, his breathing a wet, rattling struggle that tore through the silence of the room. A tumor the size of a grapefruit was visible beneath his shirt—a "gift of correction," the cult called it.
Her mother didn't even look at her. She was busy grinding something in a stone mortar—dried lavender, dandelion root, and some grey powder they called "God's Medicine."
She leaned over and pressed a cold, wet cloth soaked in bitter-smelling oils against his forehead. Her father's eyes rolled back in his head, his fingers clawing feebly at the thin blanket. He wasn't "transitioning." He was dying in a slow, agonizing scream that he no longer had the strength to vocalize.
Delaney looked at her mother—the woman who had traded a husband's life for a dead man's promise. She realized then that her mother wasn't just brainwashed; she was happy. She had found "The Way." She truly believed that the smell of decay in the room was the scent of holiness.
Her mother finally looked up, and for a second, the "Recording Angel" saw the same cold, unblinking void she saw in her own reflection.
Delaney backed out of the room, the sound of the mortar and pestle following her like a heartbeat.
She realized with a sickening clarity that she was doing exactly what her mother was doing.
She was refusing the "morphine" of empathy to give the world the "purification" of the story.
She was letting the Fighter agonize under her lens, convinced that his pain was a necessary part of the "Harvest."
She walked out into the blinding sun, her father's rattling breath still echoing in her ears. She didn't call an ambulance. She didn't call the police. She just got into her car and started driving, the "Prophet" in her head already beginning to draft the next paragraph.