Ji'er

Jill’s life with Mike binds intimacy to service and, finally, to judgment. She helps sustain the Church’s long transition ceremonies, makes room for other people inside her relationships, and comes to assist Mike in acts of discorporation that she once regarded with squeamishness. Her arc is not simply one of devotion: it is a gradual change in what she believes responsibility requires, as care for the community becomes entangled with the power to decide who may remain in it.

Identity and Work

At the Church, Jill is part of the practical labor behind spiritual advancement. During a crowded day when members are moving into the Eighth Circle, Mike has gone without food for more than twenty-four hours because he will not eat while needed. Jill explains that when he finishes, he will eat heavily enough to sustain himself; she and Dawn, by contrast, become tired and take food and sleep when they need them. The distinction presents Jill as both an organizer and a clear-eyed observer of the different limits governing the people around her. She does not romanticize exhaustion: she recognizes the work, shares it, and knows when another person should take over.

That work passes from one woman to another without ceremony. Dawn offers to take Jill’s service so Jill can spend time with Ben, though Jill notes that Dawn has been on duty nearly as long as Mike. Jill teasingly objects to Dawn’s self-sacrifice, then mentions the practical shortage of vanishing robes: the garment she is wearing is the last one in the Seventh Temple. Patty has already ordered more. The exchange makes the Church’s spiritual labor tangible in shifts, meals, robes, and supplies, while showing Jill’s ease in moving between affectionate banter and the institution’s daily needs.

Relationships and Shared Life

Jill describes her bond with Dawn as a likeness formed through life together. The two women had already looked nearly alike when they met again; with Mike’s help, their height, measurements, weight, and coloring came to match exactly. Their faces, Jill says, are also becoming more alike, not by design but through doing and thinking the same things. She invites Ben to look at them, and Dawn’s stance recalls the pose Jill had struck when she first appeared as Mother Eve. Jill’s joke that Dawn is her makes their physical resemblance both an intimate pleasure and a visible sign of shared identity.

Her generosity toward Ben is equally deliberate. When he arrives, Jill recognizes that jealousy is still troubling him and later tells him that it has gone. She has arranged for him to spend the night with Dawn, while she, too, has had a joyful night, reassured that Ben is in good hands. The arrangement is not presented as a casual accident but as Jill’s considered response to what she sees in him. It allows Ben to experience closeness without treating Jill’s bond with Mike or her affection for Dawn as possessions that must be guarded against rivals.

Jill’s care is also bound to immediate presence. When she realizes Mike needs her, she leaves Ben, expects to be gone all night, and explains that the transition class is large; Mike has kept its members occupied while she visited. She stands, draws Ben gently to his feet, and embraces him before going. The departure gives her service a personal cost—time with Ben must yield to the work—but the tenderness of the goodbye prevents duty from being mistaken for indifference.

Learning and Moral Change

Jill’s changing judgment about discorporation marks a more consequential shift. Mike explains that he no longer needs the complicated measures he once used to protect the group from people he considered wrong. Jill has overcome her earlier misconceptions about removing people who possess wrongness; she now understands his actions in terms of fullness. He says she helped with a recent follow-up to the jailbreak, and that this was not the first time she had done so.

The change follows a distinction Mike draws between release and removal. After the jailbreak, he could not free certain prisoners because they were vicious, and he dealt with them before removing the bars and doors. He had also spent months observing the city, keeping a list of people he considered among the worst, including some who held public office. He waited until he felt fullness in each case; as the group prepared to leave, those people were simply missing. Mike describes discorporation not as killing but as sending a person back to the beginning to try again, comparing it to a referee removing a player for unnecessary roughness. Jill’s former squeamishness gives way to hearty approval when she accepts this account of what he believes the act means.

The narrative leaves the moral force of that conversion deliberately uneasy. Jill’s loyalty is not merely passive assent: she has helped Mike carry out the work, and her changed understanding allows him to act without the earlier protective expedients. At the same time, the city’s missing people include individuals Mike has judged over a long period, some of them public officials, and the standard that authorizes their removal is his own sense of fullness. Jill’s development therefore brings compassion and complicity into the same frame. She trusts Mike’s judgment and shares his purpose, but the scale and consequences of that purpose make her approval more than a private expression of love.

Later Encounters and Ending

Jill’s place in the wider Church is shown in her encounter with Jubal. When he calls out to her by name, the woman turns and corrects him: she is Dawn. She approaches Jubal, kneels, kisses his hand, and welcomes him, offering to drink deeply of him. Jubal pulls his hand away and asks her to rise and share water with them. The brief mistake and the formal welcome recall Jill’s account of how closely the women have come to resemble one another, while Jubal’s response turns the solemn gesture back toward shared fellowship.

Later, Jill waits outside Jubal’s door and comes straight into his arms. She tells him that they love him and invokes the Church’s teaching that he is God. Jubal returns her kiss, recognizes that refusing it would be hypocritical, and finds that kissing Jill differs unmistakably from kissing Dawn, though he cannot describe how. He then holds Jill away without releasing her and accuses her of having framed him. The scene extends Jill’s network of affection beyond her partnership with Mike: she offers Jubal closeness as a member of the family, while Jubal’s teasing suggests that he sees the emotional consequences of being welcomed into it.

By the time the family considers leaving the city, Jill’s changed view of discorporation has become part of their shared practice. Mike says she helped with the recent work and that she now understands why he acts only when fullness has been reached. Her story closes not with a withdrawal from service but with participation in a demanding communal life, where intimate bonds, practical labor, and decisions with irreversible consequences have become inseparable.