07FIRST INTERLUDE

Maria. Wittenberg, 1515

Our protagonists will travel through time. Between chapters, you’ll encounter brief scenes from other eras—featuring familiar names. These are different people with different lives. Yet the virus in their minds remains identical.

Maria is thirty-one and a widow. Her husband, Hans the cooper, died suddenly that winter—gone in three days from fever, without even a final confession.

It is that “before” that keeps her awake at night.

The priest explained it plainly, as doctrine demands: a soul denied absolution must burn in purgatory. No one can say for how long—a century, perhaps, or a thousand years. But there *is* a way to shorten the sentence. Holy Mother Church, in her mercy, sells letters.

An indulgence to ease the suffering of the dead costs as much as Maria earns doing laundry in four months.

She brings the money in a small pouch, still warm from her palm. The monk at the table does not look at her face—he looks at the coins, counts them out, nods. She is handed a sheet of paper with a seal on it. She cannot read, but she presses it to her chest the way she once pressed her newborn son.

For a week, Maria sleeps soundly. For the first time in six months.

On the eighth night, she wakes to a thought as sharp as an awl: what if it wasn’t enough? Hans swore in taverns. Hans skipped mass. And her—was she without sin? She resented him when he drank. Resented her husband—the one God took. What if God took him because of her?

In the morning, she counts her coins again.

Maria of Wittenberg doesn’t know the words “anxiety disorder” or “vicious cycle.” She knows one thing: guilt is a debt, and debts must be paid. A simple question never crosses her mind: who proved she owed anything—and when? It doesn’t occur to her because her operating system has a preset answer: guilty by birth. All that’s left is to keep making payments.

Two years later, in that same city, a monk named Martin will nail ninety-five theses to a church door—and the world will split apart. But Maria doesn’t know that yet. She washes strangers’ laundry and saves up for the next indulgence.

A debt that can never be repaid isn’t a debt. It’s a mechanism of power.