The Unworthy

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.