There’s a look in his eyes that’s nothing like the girls’。 Like he’s found something he’d lost for years.
Like I’m the final piece of some terrible puzzle.
REJECT FEAR AND HYPOCRISY. FIND PURPOSE AND LOVE ON THE PATH OF THE LORD—JOIN HIM IN HIS GRACE AND WALK THE PATH OF ETERNAL LIFE. FIND SALVATION IN HIS PLAN!
—The Angelic Movement recruitment poster
What I remember:
Aisha and Faith holding me steady. One asks Nick if there’s any chance I’m infected. He shakes his head even though there’s a splatter of Flood rot on his sleeve.
A sunburned boy balancing Brother Hutch’s head in his hands, cutting off his left ear with a knife. He does the same thing to Steven but can’t walk by the boy smeared into the road. Bones stick out of him like monuments.
Nick standing by the Grace in silence. Finally, he wrenches out a tooth, prying it free with a knife of his own. My tongue running along my canines as I wonder how long it’ll be until my mouth looks just like that.
All of us standing together, perfect strangers on the battlefield, and it’s almost like my prayers have been answered, amen—but I don’t believe it for a second.
* * *
I wake up on the floor. I recognize that much immediately: the crick in my neck, the carpet that’s never plush enough to disguise the concrete underneath. I bury my face in my arms and groan.
“Finally, a sign of life,” says someone beside me. “You awake?”
“No.” I want to ask where I am, but it doesn’t matter. Anywhere is better than New Nazareth. I could wake up in a cell, and as long as it wasn’t Angels on the other side of the bars, I’d be better off than I was.
“No?” says the voice. “Damn, all right.”
After a minute, I sit up by propping myself against the desk behind me. The room looks like an office. Books are scattered in piles on messy shelves. Papers are on every available surface. Certifications, newspaper clippings, and photos hang on the walls, their glass frames dull like they haven’t been cleaned since Judgment Day.
As interesting as this is, though, I feel like shit. And so does the person in the chair across the room, if their scars and grief-reddened eyes have anything to say about it. The right side of their face is destroyed with pockmarks. One eye doesn’t open all the way. Latinx, scarred face, and painted nails don’t combine into a person I recognize. “Who…？”
“Shit, we gotta do introductions.” The stranger leans back, fingers lacing together as if to distract from the obvious tears. “Name’s Salvador. I was with the group that found you, though I didn’t get to say hi before you passed out. Got stuck on babysitting duty—no offense—to make sure you didn’t lose your shit when you woke up.” I’m too tired for that. I’ve lost it enough for one day. “So yeah, nice to finally meet you. Xe/xem pronouns.”
Right, Salvador was the one who pulled the sunburned boy away from the body. The memory is hazy, though. There’s a fog in my brain I’m too tired to claw through. I recognize everything that’s happened today from a distance, like the color’s been bleached out by the sun. Dad’s blood under my nails is the only evidence that he died today. That he died a few hours ago.
Salvador watches me warily.
“Yeah,” I say. “Cool. Xe/xem.” I go through the rest of the set: xe, xem, xyr, xemself. I read about neopronouns in a book Dad smuggled from the burn pile of confiscated items at New Nazareth. He brought up the book again our second night in the city, just a few days ago, when we sat in a dead stranger’s bathroom and cut off two feet of my hair with sewing scissors. He apologized with every snip, certain he was ruining it. By the end, I was sitting in a pile of red-brown scraps and running my hands through my choppy, shaggy, awkward boy hair.