It was a thing you became, slowly, badly, one small refusal of despair at a time.
He never sent Tommaso the map. There was no need. The friar had already known the answer, even in his dying: the kingdom is within. But Piero would have added a footnote. Within, and also between. In the bread you break. In the hand you hold. In the door you leave open.
That night, lying on the floor of the single room, listening to three other people breathe, Piero understood.
And that, he thought, was why the plague could never burn it down. It was never made of gold. It was made of the only thing that survives any darkness: the choice to keep building it, here, now, with whatever is left.
“To the kingdom of heaven,” Piero said.
On the third day, he found a man sitting on an upturned barrel outside a burned mill. The man wore the tattered robe of a Dominican friar, but his tonsure had grown into a wild grey thicket.
Piero wanted to stay, but Tommaso waved him off. “Remember,” the friar called after him, “if you find it, send back a map.”
