By the next day, the clouds have dissipated, but the unworthy hear screams coming from one of the cells. They find Lucía surrounded by wasps, a broken wasp nest on the floor. The wasps hover around her like an “aura” as Lourdes shrieks. The assembled unworthy see Lucía lift her eyes, and the wasps “scream with their bodies” (94) as they fly after Lourdes and her associates. The unworthy scatter, and the narrator approaches Lucía. She embraces Lucía, who is smiling, and then picks the nest up off the floor. The nest spurs more memories of her mother, and she silently follows Lucía out of her cell. In the garden, they see a Diaphanous Spirit, who smiles at Lucía, surprising the narrator. She watches Lucía vanish into the trees, surrounded by her halo of wasps. At breakfast, Lourdes and her minions are covered in stings. Lucía doesn’t have a scratch. The narrator is delighted by Lourdes’s “defeat,” but she feels like crying because she can think of nothing but Circe, her “sorceress.”

The narrator met Circe after the death of the tarantula kids. She left the city, trying to escape the threat of the murderous adults, and took refuge in an old cathedral, where she saw the cat’s bright yellow eyes watching her. The narrator was too tired to attack, so she and Circe watched one another warily until they both fell asleep. In the morning, Circe was still watching the narrator. She was surprised to see a pigeon among the wreckage of the cathedral. She thought about making a slingshot to shoot it, like Ulysses and the tarantula kids had taught her, but before she could decide what to do, Circe caught the bird. She knew that the cat saw her as “a potential threat,” and she watched from a distance. Delirious with hunger, she didn’t notice as Circe approached her to share the dead pigeon. It was “an offering,” and once the narrator managed to build a fire and cook the meat, she gave Circe an offering of her own: a bowl of water purified by boiling. When it was time to leave the cathedral, Circe accompanied her.

The narrator is unable to write for several days, and the words accumulate in her like “a toxic substance” (107). She describes Lucía coming to her cell one night and asking her to come outside to talk. Since the incident with the wasps, rumors have been circulating that she is “a witch, a lover of demons, a maleficent woman, a devourer of souls, a queen of the dark” (108), but the narrator agrees to meet her. As she leaves, she hears screams from behind the door that leads to the Enlightened’s quarters. She wonders if she really wants to become Enlightened but scratches these words out. Lucía waits for the narrator in the garden, “absorbing the white energy of the moon,” (110) and leads the narrator into the trees. In the darkness of the forest, they see a firefly. The narrator has never seen one before; she only heard about them from her mother, who in turn heard about them from her father. They were “a myth passed down through generations” (114). In the light of the firefly, Lucía kisses the narrator and removes her clothes. They make love on the forest floor, and the narrator has never experienced such pleasure or vulnerability. Thousands of fireflies surround them, and when they finally open their eyes again, the fireflies have gone, but the forest is illuminated with the women’s own light. After making love, the narrator believes that the fireflies were one of Lucía’s “miracles” because “there’s nothing alive outside this place” (117). Lucía tells her that “truth is a sphere” and therefore impossible to see “in its entirety” (117). They are near the hollow tree where Helena is buried, and Lucía leads the narrator into the enclosed space. They kiss, and the narrator feels as if she is in “a cathedral of wood and sap” (118). Lucía tells her that she can hear the sounds of the natural world, and all the plants and trees have their own “melody.” The hollow tree’s song is “very solemn” but also “beautiful.” Holding hands, they sneak back into their cells.

The narrator knows it is dangerous to write about what happened with Lucía in the forest. She thinks of how Helena discovered her damning words, forcing the narrator to betray her. Now, she writes so that she won’t forget Helena, and she no longer cares if the Superior Sister punishes her because she can think of nothing but Lucía. She worries, however, that Lucía will soon be a candidate for Chosen or Enlightened.

He tells the unworthy that they must clean the “muck” out of the blood if they are to become Enlightened, but the narrator thinks of how similar the words “muck” and “luck” are. After leaving the cathedral, she and Circe “walked for days, for months, for years” (120), eating anything they could find. People and animals all around had died of hunger or thirst or “rage,” and they rarely saw living creatures. Once, they arrived at a beach, but the sea had long since retreated, turning the expanse of sand into a desert. In the small towns they came across, they searched methodically for anything useful or edible. In one town, the narrator found a house filled with paintings showing “barefoot, dirty children, with large, tear-filled eyes and bits of bread in their hands” (122). The narrator was “hypnotized” by the painting and filled with “horrible rage” and “disgust.” She destroyed the paintings, screaming with pain and exhaustion and hunger “because no one was going to paint [her] reality and hang it on a wall” (122). As the narrator tried to compose herself, Circe climbed a tree and began pawing at a honeycomb. The narrator worried about bee stings, but when the comb fell, there were no bees. There was, however, a bit of honey left. The narrator had told the tarantula kids that honey “was an eternal food,” but now she wonders what eternal really means when “the world could also disappear” (123). 

There was one house in the town whose lock hadn’t been broken. Inside, it was cold, and Circe and the narrator could sense “a threat lurking.” There was a strange creaking sound that led the narrator to a metal tree in the backyard. As the real trees had died, rich people had bought metallic replacements that were meant to purify the air. She remembers Ulysses telling her about the “metallic woods” he lived near, and she suddenly remembers why she cannot write the word “woods.” She remembers the terrible thing that happened in the metallic woods, but there is too much pain with the memory to write about it cohesively. There was another sound in the strange house, the creak of a rocking chair moving back and forth. In the chair, the narrator saw a woman who appeared to be nursing a baby. However, when the creature turned to look at them, she saw it was an oversized rat feeding on the woman’s flesh as she sang to it without opening her mouth. Terrified, the narrator seized Circe and ran.

It took her a while to calm down, and she cried, longing for her mother’s hugs, until Circe brought her a cockroach as an “offering.” The narrator was disgusted but recognized the gesture. She watched Circe play with the cockroach and eventually eat it, remembering a story about a woman making cockroaches into candies to feed to her boyfriend. She also remembered a story about an “invincible” sorceress that her mother had told her of and decided that the cat would be called Circe. She named the cat, and Circe approached her for the first time and settled in her lap, where she began to purr, making “an enchantress’s magical sound” (130).

The narrator doesn’t write for several days, consumed by thoughts of Lucía. During the day, they pretend as if nothing is happening, and at night, they sneak out to the hollow tree and make love. Lucía tells the narrator about the “secret name” that every plant and animal has. Learning this name and the natural world’s “vibration” reveals the “true” and “magical” world. Only Lourdes is suspicious.