“As long as it happens quickly.”
Please, God, if You prove Your existence by making this stop, I swear I’ll follow You for the rest of my days.
Then, of course, proof that Mom has dug faith into me like thorns under my skin, like a tattoo I can’t carve off, like trauma: Even when my chest splits open the next second, I think, But He still might be real, and I’m just too broken to feel it. It’s my fault.
* * *
Another ebb, another pulling back, another breath. My hair falls out in clumps. Blood and Flood rot have mixed together on the floor into something wine colored.
My body is too big for itself. My limbs are long, like they’ve been stretched on a rack, bending in places they shouldn’t and packed with muscle and tumors. Painful barbs jut from my shoulders and the curve of my wings, right where little spikes grow into feathers. I press my face against the tiles and gasp for air.
I wonder how Nick, Erin, the Watch, and the rest of the ALC are doing. There’s an emptiness in my chest where something used to be, and I can’t tell if it was another organ I can’t keep track of anymore or the sinking feeling of failure. Nick and the Watch were right there, waiting for me, and my body tore itself to pieces before I could raise my hand and turn the Graces against the Angels.
That was my one job, and it fell apart because I waited for Reverend Brother Ward to make me bleed.
I failed. And now Nick and the rest probably have no idea what to do.
Neither do I.
The door opens. Sister Kipling comes in.
She’s the opposite of saintly, with her hair unwashed and glasses sitting crookedly on her nose, though there’s a look in her eyes like she’s about to be martyred any second. Watching for arrows or burning stakes.
She created the Flood. She built Seraph. She killed so many people to make me, she turned me into a monster, and she can’t look me in the eyes. The Angels have made her a living saint, and she doesn’t even have the decency to take advantage of it. They’ll let her do anything, and she spends that leniency staring into the middle distance, hardly ever blinking, her hands wracked with tremors. I have never once seen her pray. I have only ever heard her talk in whispers, except for the terrible moment on the riverbank.
She’s going gray. Her glasses are held together with tape at the temples. The crosses on the back of her hands look like they were done weeks ago, not years, almost painful in how swollen and raised they are.
She says, “I wanted to talk to you. Without your mother.”
Sister Kipling sits at my head, as if she’s kneeling at the altar of my body. I have no sense of myself anymore besides the fact that I am not what I once was. I’m too tired to see my body from the eyes of others, in the terrible way transness demands—always existing both inside and outside myself, judging as an observer. Now, I am a pile of flesh on the floor, everything hurts, and I do not give a shit.
She says, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” grabs one of the budding feathers sprouting at my shoulder, and tears it from me.
Pain rips through the delicate, dying skin, and I shriek, moving faster than I have in hours to slam into her tiny body and drive her to the floor. I’m hunched over her, towering over her, limp wings sagging and claws digging into the floor inches from her skull. My arms tremble under my own weight. I’m so, so much bigger than her. Her neck would tear so easily. A drop of saliva falls onto her collarbone, and she chokes down a whimper.
I should kill her for what she did. She deserves it. Dad told me to make them suffer.
“Please,” she says.
Please…what?
A cold pit settles in my stomach, a horrible contrast to the fire still searing through me.
I step back, my wings dragging on the floor.