The central dome, mounted with a crown of stained-glass windows, was so tall and filled with so much daylight that it seemed as if it were part of the sky. Head arched back, mouth open, Jekabs admired the dome’s peak some fifty meters above him. Rays of sunlight entered through the high windows, illuminating frescoes that were soon to be blasted apart, broken down into their constituent parts: a million specks of paint. The light spread across the smooth stone floor not far from where he sat as if trying to reach out to him, an outstretched golden palm.

He muttered:

— There is no god.

He said it again, louder this time, the words echoing inside the dome:

— There is no god!

It was a summer’s day; of course there was light. It wasn’t a sign of anything. It wasn’t divine. The light meant nothing. He was thinking too much, that was the problem. He didn’t even believe in God. He tried to recall the State’s many antireligious phrases.

Religion belonged in an age where every man was for himself

And God was for every man.

This building wasn’t sacred or blessed. He should see it as nothing more than stone, glass, and timber — dimensions one hundred meters long and sixty meters wide. Producing nothing, serving no quantifiable function, the church was an archaic structure, erected for archaic reasons by a society that no longer existed.

Jekabs sat back, running his hand along the cool stone floor smoothed by the feet of many hundreds and thousands of worshippers who’d been attending services for many hundreds of years. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he was about to do, he began to choke as surely as if there was something stuck in his throat. The sensation passed. He was tired and overworked — that was all. Normally on a demolition project of this scale he’d be assisted by a team, the workload shared. In this instance he’d decided his men could play a peripheral role. There was no need to divide the responsibility, no need to involve his colleagues unnecessarily. Not all of them were as clear-thinking as he was. Not all of them had purged themselves of religious sentiments. He didn’t want men with conflicted motivation working alongside him.