"Without faith, there is no refuge," she repeated, and rang her small bell several times. The Full Auras saw the signs in the sky. The Diaphanous Spirits heard them in the buzzing of the insects, in the slightest shift of the clouds, in the plants' growth. The Minor Saints warned us with celestial song, and the Enlightened, the emissaries of the light, declared it to be acid rain.

The House of the Sacred Sisterhood was founded by Him (who only the Chosen and the Enlightened have the privilege of seeing) and the Superior Sister (they say she fought in the water wars).

A climate catastrophe has left the outside unlivable: contaminated water, toxins carried by the wind, extreme temperatures, the thick haze that lasts for days on end. Occasionally a hare is trapped but it's often a deformed abomination. The relentless chirp of crickets betrays their main source of protein.

There are three orders of the Chosen (mutilated).

The Minor Saints have ethereal voices:

After a dramatic silence, the Minor Saints resumed their song. I saw thousands of white petals leave their mouths, filling the air, lily petals that glimmered until they disappeared. Their voices can reach the universal notes, vibrate with the light of the stars. (That's why their eyes are sewn shut, so they're not distracted by the mundane, so they capture the reverberations of our God.)

The Diaphanous Spirits have perfect pitch. Their tongues are cut out when they are chosen, so they communicate in writing to the Superior Sister. 

They can perceive the bitter, lurking sound of sickness, the slow absorption of bone tissue; they've heard the soft swell of the dark where our organs reside; they can tell by our pulse whether our heart seeks only possession or wants to redeem itself, whether it seeks to wound or to dissolve into another heartbeat; they can discern the damp movement of the bacteria that inhabit us, the microcosm we carry around without feeling it. Sometimes they spend long hours in the field trying to detect human words in the wind, messages from God. It's common to see them turning in circles, the palms of their right hands open to the sky and the left to the earth. But no one knows why they do this.

With perforated eardrums, the Full Auras can orate purely. "God's messages leave traces on their bodies"; they have the gift of prophetic vision.

The Enlightened embody all the virtues of the three orders of Chosen. They are the mediators with the ancestral, hidden God, the one before those that men created.  

The rest are unworthy. Their continuous sacrifices are necessary for God to protect their small world. It is forbidden to invoke "the erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother."

There is a lower class still, the nameless servants:

They whisper poison because their bodies carry the marks, the signs, of contamination, and though they can no longer infect us, they have to work to clean our filth and the filth that runs through their veins. They hate us because they have to serve us. The marks are the remnants of the pustules, wounds, infections. The rashes are the filth of evil, the filth of collapse, the filth of failure. This filth absorbed from the sick earth has blighted them permanently, lest we forget that corruption lurks and the Enlightened are the only ones who can quell it. This filth, nesting in the servants' skin, in their cells, is the anger of the sea, the fury of the air, the violence of the mountains, the outrage of the trees. It's the sadness of the world.

The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica, is an unsettling account of a sheltered postapocalyptic community. The unnamed, unworthy narrator secretly keeps a journal of the goings on while struggling to recall the path that brought her to this (un?)holy place.

One day, a new wanderer happens upon the Sisterhood. Her presence, her very being, seems miraculous, and she is instrumental in helping the narrator tap into her past (including a poignant, tear-inducing relationship with the enchantress Circe).

The beauty of the language masks something sinister (I'm reminded of Piranesi). The Sisterhood is built atop the destruction of the world and the violence of men. 

While Bazterrica's previous novel, Tender Is the Flesh, verged on the ridiculous, The Unworthy creeps toward the sublime.