The narrator writes from her cell in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, a convent that was once occupied by an order of monks. She hides the pages on her body, under her tunic, or sometimes underneath the floorboards. The narrator can hear someone screaming in the dark. She hopes it is Lourdes; she sewed cockroaches into Lourdes’s pillowcase to torment her.

During a ceremony in the Chapel of Ascension, three of the Chosen— “beautiful” Minor Saints—approach the altar, but one is bleeding because Mariel did a bad job sewing the woman’s eyes shut. The man behind the altar, referred to only as “He,” is hidden behind a screen. The “unworthy” women have never seen Him; only the Chosen and Enlightened have. He tells them that they must “relinquish [their] origin” and rid themselves of “the nocturnal filth that drags itself slowly and invisibly through [their] blood” if they want to become Enlightened (3).

The Minor Saints sing in the divine language of God that only the Chosen are allowed to learn. They sing the Primary Hymn until they all begin bleeding. Mariel pulls out a chunk of her hair to keep from screaming. Her scalp is patchy, and the narrator wonders why she is committed to “disfiguring herself” when she arrived at the convent so beautiful and “free of contamination” (5). The narrator and other women know that Mariel will be subjected to an “exemplary punishment,” and they all smile to themselves, hoping they will be the ones to execute it. When one of the “fragile” Minor Saints faints, and the ceremony ends. Lourdes is told to punish Mariel, and the narrator is charged with cleaning blood from the Chosen off the floor. Their blood is purer, so the job cannot be done by servants. As the narrator cleans, she touches the blood and tastes it, hoping to sense its purity. Instead, she tastes “winged insects and nocturnal howls” (7) and knows one of the Minor Saints will die. This pleases her because the Chosen’s funerals are the most beautiful.

While the narrator cleans, a Full Aura, a member of the Sacred Sisterhood who has attained one of the highest spiritual ranks, comes into the chapel. The narrator knows she cannot hear her because the Full Auras’ eardrums are perforated to avoid distraction and to help them to hear God clearly. This communication often leaves them with physical wounds that won’t heal. The Full Aura orates, and the Superior Sister comes to find her and take her back to the Chosen’s quarters. The Full Aura should not be out, and the narrator knows that some servant will be severely punished.

On her way back, the narrator pauses at the door that leads to the Refuge of the Enlightened. The Enlightened aren’t “mutilated” like the Chosen, and the narrator dreams of becoming Enlightened, although she scratches these words out as soon as she writes them.

The narrator doesn’t tell anyone about the Full Aura because she knows the other women will lock her in the Tower of Silence with nothing but “bones that shine in the dark” (10). Alone in her cell, she writes with ink left behind by the monks who once inhabited the convent. If she wants to save ink, she uses her own blood or an ink made from charcoal or plants and flowers. She knows that it is dangerous to write, but she can’t remember who she was before the House of the Sacred Sisterhood. She writes to reconnect with her past. She burned some pages, like the ones that described Helena, “the disobedient woman” who is now dead.

For many days, the convent is plagued by a “cold,” “sticky” haze that comes in from “the destroyed world” (11). Some women struggle to breathe and have skin reactions. One servant is never seen again after her skin changes color. The Enlightened warn of impending “catastrophe” and tell the Sacred Sisterhood that “without faith, there is no refuge” (11). The unworthy begin making sacrifices, starving themselves, inflicting pain on themselves, or volunteering to clean the servants’ wounds and sores to mitigate the effects of the haze. They are all young and free of “contamination,” so their “sacrifices are important” (13). After three days, the unworthy start to worry that their sacrifices aren’t working. It’s so cold that the women and the servants have to build a fire in the dining hall and sleep together to keep warm. The narrator sleeps beside Mariel, who whispers that the Enlightened have their tongues and teeth removed so they can better speak God’s name. The narrator thinks she has heard screams coming from behind the door that leads to the Refuge of the Enlightened. There, “only He can touch them” (14), and the Refuge of the Enlightened protects the Sisterhood from the dangers and toxins of the outside world.

After eight days, the haze dissipates, and the narrator can go to the trees at the end of the garden to check traps for any animals. The Sisterhood calls the trees a “wood,” but the narrator scratches out that word. The Chosen and the Enlightened sometimes eat meat to protect the animals that are left, but they rarely catch anything. When they do, the animals are often deformed, and servants taste the meat for contamination. The Chosen and the Enlightened receive fresh vegetables from the Sisterhood’s garden, while the unworthy eat crickets that the Superior Sister raises for them. The traps are empty, but the narrator thinks she sees a woman’s silhouette in the trees. She thinks it could be a “wanderer” and hurries off, afraid of “contamination.” Once, a wanderer climbed the convent wall and couldn’t get down. The women brought her a ladder, but no one wanted to get close to her. The Superior Sister led the wanderer to the Cloister of Purification, but she died there, blind and with her tongue blackened. Only female wanderers are permitted to enter. “He” tells the Sisterhood that all men have died, but the unworthy know that the Superior Sister kills men who get close to their wall. Once, a woman snuck a man into the convent and hid him beneath the altar. She kept him a secret until her belly began to “swell with sin, with vice” (19). She fled to the Tower of Silence, where the women “trapped her,” and the Superior Sister tortured her until she confessed. The narrator came to the convent as a wanderer, and Helena—“worshipper of the erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother” (20)—let her in, helping her even though she risked contamination. Helena was punished for this “disobedience,” but the narrator knows that she performed her sacrifices “joyfully.”

In the Chapel of Ascension, He tells the assembled women that they must rid their bodies of “lugubrious sickness” if they are to become Enlightened. The word “lugubrious” makes María de las Soledades giggle, and the Superior Sister immediately leaps up to fasten a spired cilice around the woman’s mouth. The other unworthies look away from María de las Soledades, feeling that she doesn’t “deserve” to be there because there is “something sick about her” (22). The stained-glass windows have all been darkened with black paint, obscuring images of the “erroneous God” who left humanity “adrift in a poisoned world” (23).

The service ends when Mariel enters the Chapel of Ascension with a black paper signifying death. The women cry, but they are pleased because there will be “delicious pastries” at the funeral, and the narrator prays “with all [her] still-impure heart, [her] unworthy heart” that a Minor Saint has died (24). On the way back to her cell, the narrator sees María de las Soledades in her room with Élida, who is still learning the women’s language. María de las Soledades is stepping on Élida’s head as Élida begs for mercy in fractured sentences. The narrator cannot see María de las Soledades’s mouth, but she can tell that she takes pleasure in treating Élida like a “weakling.” Back in her room, the narrator looks at Helena’s empty bed. Helena “oozed indecency, debauchery” (24), so the narrator doesn’t miss her, but she sometimes lies on Helena’s bed and thinks about what would have happened if she hadn’t found the pages that the narrator had written about her. After Helena was buried alive, the narrator dug her up, finding her with her eyes and mouth open and full of soil. She kissed the woman and begged for forgiveness before burying her again with the small gold cross Helena kept hidden under her mattress. She made it back to her cell without being discovered, and the narrator wonders if the whole episode was a dream.

When the mourning bell tolls, the unworthy put on their veils and congregate in the garden, where He addresses them, unseen, from the bell tower. As they kneel in the dirt, He tells them they are “[u]nworthy, homicidal women” and announces that a Minor Saint has been murdered (27). The women respond with “dramatic and calculated” shock and distress (27). The Superior Sister watches their “spectacle of feigned suffering” (28) and finally stops it, telling them to take off their veils, though it is forbidden. A servant brings her a slender branch to use as a whip, and Mariel, who cared for the Minor Saints during ceremonies, is produced, her white nightgown stained with blood. Mariel screams words of a “forbidden” language, and the Superior Sister beats her. When she can no longer hold herself up, she is stripped naked and set on fire as the unworthy watch with “[feigned] horror.” The “nameless servants,” marked by “the remnants of the pustules, wounds, infections” brought on by the world’s corruption (31), whisper among themselves. The narrator visited their quarters once in the monks’ old library, but the sight of the empty shelves left her with a “sharp pain” in her chest.

Lourdes and her “weaklings” plan the Minor Saint’s funeral, and the narrator looks for cockroaches to grind up and sprinkle in Lourdes’s bed. She keeps writing, even though she sometimes runs out of ink, or it is too dark, or the Superior Sister almost catches her. The words are part of her, like her “pulse.”