The boy, now ungagged and unbound, sits on the floor with Carol, shaking in her arms and repeating one question - "Was the Prophet a pretender?" Meanwhile, Daryl tries the two keys on the boys' keychain in the other four iron doors.
Carol shushes and comforts Esau. He grows silent for a moment, and then mutters, "The Chosen are immune from the Scourge. There is no shadow of turning with the Chosen."
"No one is immune," Carol tells him.
"That's not true. I'm immune."
"Have you never seen anyone die and turn before?"
"Grandpa died. In the first year of the new earth. But he didn't turn. We kept the watch for three days in the mourning room before we buried him, and he didn't turn."
Carol considers how that could be. "Do your people have any ritual practices, Esau? Anything you do after someone dies?"
"We're supposed to pierce the brain with the freeing rod, to free the spirit. It was my mother's duty with Grandpa. It was supposed to be my duty with the Prophet, but I wasn't here."
"If you pierce anyone's brain," Carol explains, "they won't turn. But if you don't, anyone will. Everyone has the disease within them."
Esau shakes his head. "No. No. The chosen are immune from the Scourge. I'm immune. Only pretenders and adversaries turn."
"The Prophet turned, didn't she?" Carol asks softly.
Esau trembles and sniffles. "Was she a pretender all along?"
Carol strokes the boy's hair. "She deceived you and your people, Esau, about all of it. About the entire Revelation. She made it all up."
Esau shakes his head.
"Keys don't work in three of those doors," Daryl says as he returns to Carol. "Second one opened one. Empty bedroom. Probably the boy's."
"Esau," Carol says gently. "Where are the keys to the other doors?"
"A pretender…a pretender…Then where is the real Prophet? A pretender…a pretender…"
"Search that open room at the end of the hall for keys," Carol tells Daryl. "I think it was the Prophet's." Daryl nods and disappears down the hallway.
The boy begins to still, but he won't stop looking at the glassy eyes of his former Prophet. "How long had she been training you?" Carol asks. "To take her place?"
The boy shakes his head. "I don't know. I don't know how long I've been here. After I was enlightened in reflective isolation, she honored me by showing herself to me. No man sees the Prophet's face and lives…except me. That's how she knew I was the Disciple. But…" He stares at the walker. "She's a pretender? Does that mean I'm a pretender, too?"
"You were put in the doubter's chair four years ago and taken down here. She brainwashed you. She isolated you so that you would break down psychologically. She told you lies until you believed them. Your mother – Rebecca? She misses you."
Esau blinks in recognition at the name, but then his eyes return to the fallen Prophet. "But the Prophet enlightened me! She honored me with secret truths and taught me things no Chosen man knows. She let me help her in her mission to protect the Temple."
"Help her how?"
"I'd open and close the manholes for her when she left. The last time she took a Doubter, and the last two times she took Watchers, I helped her prepare the rags of forgetfulness." The chloroform, Carol thinks, for drugging captives. "I delivered the questionnaires and the Revelation through the doors. But she didn't let me write the questionnaires myself until this week. She didn't give me the honor of collecting the offering until tonight."
"Because she was too wounded to do those things herself," Carol says. She may have been training Esau to take her place, but she probably didn't actually expect him to do it for years. "Do you know how she got slashed?"
"She came back bleeding," Esau says. "From the forest. That Watcher did it, she said, while he was trying to cut free from the net. He cut her. He slashed her, but she said it was an accident. She said he could still be enlightened." The boy shakes his head. "She was bleeding when I helped her get the net down. I did what she said…I got the Watchers in their room, locked them in, and then I tried to help her fix the wound…" He lets out a long sob, and Carol holds him until he quiets.
Daryl marches out of the room at the far end of the hall with an iron key in his hand. "Found this on the desk. Gonna try it on Rostia's room first." He goes straight to that door.
Carol lifts the boy to his feet. "Come here," she tells him and walks him down the hallway. As she does, she looks at the cement floor and sees the now dried blood that must have dripped from the Prophet's wound as she was returning to her room.
Carol sits the boy down against the wall in the hallway across from the door. "Stay there for now."
Daryl tries the key. It clicks in the lock and turns, and Carol breathes a sigh of relief. First Daryl removes the hotel-style chains locking the door at the top – all three of them – and then he uses the great iron handle to pull the door open.
Rosita and Khalid stand with smiles breaking out over their faces. Carol hugs Khalid and Daryl hugs Rosita, and grateful exclamations of relief fill the room.
"Where are we?" Rosita asks.
"In and underground bunker in the Temple," Carol answers. She explains how the Prophet died.
"I don't remember cutting her," Khalid says. "I don't remember anything after looking up."
"You were knocked out, and then you were drugged with chloroform," Carol says. "I can see why your memory might be hazy."
"What day is this?" Rosita asks, and when Carol tells her, she says, "We must have been unconscious for a full day, then."
Carol tells them about the boy in the hallway. "And I think there's another girl named Hannah locked in one of these rooms down here." Carol turns to check on Esau and sees he's vanished from the hallway where she sat him down.
She readies her rifle, races into the hallway, and sweeps before her and behind her. "Esau?"
Daryl swings his crossbow into position and flanks her.
The boy appears in the doorway of the Prophet's room with a handgun held shakily in his left hand. "Hell he get that?" Daryl mutters.
"Esau, drop the gun," Carol says gently. She aims her rifle at him, while Daryl trains his crossbow on the boy's head. "I have a rifle, and Daryl here has a crossbow. You're not going to be able to shoot us before we shoot you. We don't want to hurt you. Just drop it, please."
But Esau doesn't. He turns the gun on himself and presses it against his own head. "I'm immune," he says. "The Chosen don't turn! I'll show you! I'll show you the Chosen don't turn!"
"Esau, no. No," Carol says as she approaches him slowly. "Put it down, Esau. Let's talk, okay? Let's just talk."
"I'm one of the Chosen," he says as Carol draws nearer. "I was the Disciple." Carol is within a few feet of him now. "And now I am the Second Prophet. I'm immune."
Carol flicks her hand out quickly, seizes the gun, and disarms him. The boy lunges for her AR-15 instead, but Daryl is there now, and he gets behind the boy and restrains him with an arm around his chest. The boy writhes desperately against Daryl's arm, but eventually flops like a ragdoll. Esau begins to weep.
Khalid and Rosita, after trying the iron key in the other two doors with no luck, join them.
"I'll stay with the boy," Carol tells Daryl. "While you search the room for more keys."
Daryl nods, and Carol takes the boy from him, leads him over to the wall, and makes him sit down. She sits beside him and begins to talk softly to him while the other three vanish into the Prophet's room.
[*]
The closet that was locked with a combination lock is wide open now. The boy must have known the combination, and it must be where he got his handgun, because it's full of weapons. It appears the Prophet has been collecting them from Watchers she captured.
"My rapier!" Khalid exclaims and seizes the sword. He slides it out of its sheath and examines the tip. "It looks like I did cut her. Someone cleaned it off, but not very well. It's still a bit stained."
"And my rifle." Rosita takes hold of her AR-10 and slings it over her shoulder.
"I wonder what she did with our packs," Khalid says.
Daryl sits on the wooden chair and digs through the desk drawers until he finds a tiny key, which he tries in the locked roll top. It works, and he rolls it up.
"There's the typerwriter she used for the manuscripts," Khalid says. "And the copier." There's a small, flatbed photocopier in the corner of the roll top, and next to it a stack of printer paper.
"And the radio," Rosita says. Cords hang down from a cut-out in the desk and are plugged into an outlet on the wall. "Looks like she used a voice distorter."
"'S what I thought," Daryl mutters.
While he continues to look for keys, Rosita and Khalid summarize what they've learned from watching the Temple and reading the manuscripts.
[*]
Carol's been trying her best to calm Esau. She reminds him that he has a home and a family waiting for him, a mother who still loves him. "Would you tell me, please," she asks softly. "Is there a girl named Hannah in one of these other rooms?"
"She's being enlightened."
One room for the boy, one for Khalid and Rosita, and one for Hannah. "Is anyone in the fourth room?"
"A Watcher the Prophet captured."
"Do you know where the keys to those rooms are, Esau?"
[*]
Daryl finally finds another small key, too small for the iron doors, but it does open the locked filing cabinets. The drawers contain photo copies of the two manuscripts Khalid and Rosita were given, as well as some kind of scrapbook containing news articles.
"Let me see that book," Khalid says, and when Daryl hands it to him, Khalid slaps it on the roll top desk and begins paging through it while Daryl continues rummaging through the filing cabinet.
Rosita looks over Khalid's shoulder at the old articles about the building of the Mormon Temple. There's one about the groundbreaking, and one about the Temple being closed to the non-Mormon public. There's also a series of articles about a green energy engineer who was in charge of a project to re-design the power and water systems of the Temple in the 1990s. The engineer was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement before embarking on her three-year project to renovate the Temple's systems. One of the articles is in a section of the paper titled Women in Science.
"Daryl?" Rosita asks. "I didn't look at that walker you killed, but did it look anything like this woman?"
Daryl walks away from the filing cabinet and looks down at the photo in the album. "That woman's a lot younger."
"Well, this was taken a while ago. She'd be closer to fifty now."
Daryl leans down and peers at the photo. "Could be. Why?"
"I think we've just learned how she knew about this bunker," Khalid says. "She helped equip the Temple for new sources of power in the 90s. And then, after the Outbreak…she must have become the Prophet."
Khalid turns the page and finds more articles about the woman's engineering projects and then three lukewarm reviews of a dystopian science-fiction novel she published with a small press in 2001. One of the reviews describes the author as more interesting than her own book. The book reviewer calls her a brilliant mind with diverse degrees in engineering, anthropology, and comparative religion, a doctor of both science and divinity, a nontraditionalist who embraced the polyamorous lifestyle despite being an active deacon in her Episcopal church. Her unique lifestyle, the book reviewer reports, led to deadly jealousy when her husband murdered one of her lovers in a fit of drunken rage.
"Jesus," Rosita says.
"See if you can find this book in her bookcase," Khalid tells her.
Rosita returns with a trade-size paperback titled A Covenant for Our Times and flips it over so they can read the summary blurb together:
When a deadly virus is released from a government lab, all but ten percent of the world's population is wiped out overnight. In the resulting apocalyptic wasteland, a team of engineers must rebuild the world. To prevent anarchy and sustain the population, a secret council of elders from six different world religions craft a new spirituality aimed at stabilizing society and repopulating the world. But can they convince the survivors to follow before they destroy themselves?
"In a way," Khalid says. "She really did prophecy all this."
[*]
Esau looks up at Carol with glistening hazel eyes. "If she was a pretender, that I can't be the real Second Prophet."
"But you can be a boy, Esau. You can just…" Anger rises up in Carol and cinches her jaw. "You can just be a boy now."
"The who's the Prophet now? Are you the Prophet?"
Carol could lie and tell him she is the Prophet. She could demand that he help them find the keys. She could play on his brokenness and desperation to get what she needs. She could, but she doesn't. "No. Your people are going to have to find a way to lead themselves."
Esau hangs his head. She thinks he's crawled somewhere deep inside himself. But then he says, "I know where the keys are."
[*]
Daryl is crouched down rummaging through the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet – which so far contains only blue prints – when Carol walks into the room with the boy. "Esau says the rest of the keys to the other doors are in a small box on the shelf of the closet."
Daryl stands abruptly, paces straight to the closet, and begins to scour the shelf for the box, but he's distracted by all the weapons. There are handguns and hunting and gutting knives lining the top shelf of the closet, rifles and shotguns leaned against the wall, an axe on the floor, and…something else. Something familiar. Daryl reaches into the far corner of the closet, seizes a sheath, and then steps back. He grasps the silver-white hilt of the weapon and pulls it out with a rasp.
"Holy shit," Rosita says. "That's Michonne's katana!"
