dead.
Then the lights flickered.
The hallway went black.
The emergency generator should have started within seconds. It did not.
Only the office computer stayed on, powered by a battery backup. On the screen, Sister Inés stared out from the last frame of the video as if she had known this would happen.
Fonseca checked the clock.
One hour and fourteen minutes remained.
The instruction on her back had become more terrifying than any wound. Wait two hours. Not one. Not until morning. Two exactly. Something in her body needed time, or something hidden inside her needed to remain untouched until the danger passed.
They returned to the autopsy room and examined her without cutting. Fonseca angled the lamp over her ribs and noticed a faint swelling beneath the skin. Not the swelling of decomposition. Not an injury from a fall. It was too clean, too precise.
There was a stitched seam below the rib line.
Someone had operated on Sister Inés before she died.
Camilo looked sick.
“What did they put inside her?”
Fonseca shook his head.
“I do not think they put something in. I think she hid something there.”
A crash echoed from the service entrance.
The women had forced their way into the building.
Voices filled the corridor, murmuring prayers in Latin. But the rhythm was wrong. The words were broken, reversed, whispered with the mechanical coldness of people performing a ritual they had done too many times before.
Mother Elvira’s voice rose above them.
“Return what was entrusted to us.”
Fonseca moved fast. He copied the video file onto three disks. One went beneath a loose drawer. One went into his shoe. One he pressed into Camilo’s palm.
“If they separate us, get this out.”
Camilo wanted to argue, but the inner door slammed. A cabinet skidded against the tile as the women pushed from the other side.
“Doctor,” Mother Elvira called. “You do not understand what she has done.”
“I understand she was afraid of you,” Fonseca said.
A silence followed.
Then the door burst open.
The cabinet tipped, and Mother Elvira entered with the two nuns behind her. Up close, the women did not look like mourners. Their faces were pale and hard. Their sleeves hung too low over their hands. One of them carried a leather medical pouch.
Mother Elvira looked at Sister Inés on the table, and for the first time, grief touched her face.
But it was not grief for the dead.
It was grief for something lost.
“You should not have involved outsiders,” she said.
Fonseca stood between her and the body.
“What is inside her?”
Mother Elvira tilted her head.
“The burden of disobedience.”
Camilo, who had been edging toward the side corridor, suddenly ran. One of the nuns lunged after him, but he slammed a rolling stretcher into her knees and disappeared into cold storage.
Mother Elvira shouted for the first time.
The shout saved them.
Because outside, sirens began to wail.
Red and blue light flashed through the frosted windows. Camilo had not only called emergency services before the line died. He had managed to send the video file to the dispatcher from his phone.
Police entered with weapons drawn. Mother Elvira became gentle again at once. She spoke of grief, tradition, confusion, and the sacred
