The blood water bubbles from my mouth. My normal human mouth, no fangs, no wounds. Without the Flood, I’m just a boy. No Graces to call, no Angels to shatter. I don’t even have the testosterone to back me up on the boy part. And Theo has half a foot and fifty pounds on me—a cis boy who could shatter me if he put his mind to it. Who has done it before. Who is more than happy to do it again.
He raises the rock to point at me, his arm shaking.
“What,” he gasps, “is wrong with you?”
I step back. My shoes sink into the slurry of mud and grass. “Theo, I—we—” Is this what I sounded like just days ago? How could anyone have seen me as a guy with a voice, a body, like this? “Put that down. Please.”
“They gave you everything!” He closes the space between us and then some. He’s almost within arm’s reach, close enough that the rock could almost smash into my skull. “Do you even understand how much you’re throwing away? How many people you’re fucking over?”
His name comes out of me like a prayer, like reminding him he’s human will snap him out of this. “Theo, please.”
“All because you don’t like it.” He laughs, and his pale, pretty face twists into something more like Dominion than the boy I fell in love with. I take another step back and nearly trip over the submerged sidewalk. “You’ve never liked anything about yourself, have you? Always trying to change it. You’ve never accepted what you’ve been given by God.”
He was the one who told me being trans wasn’t a mistake, that God made me trans on purpose. Did he never actually believe it? “Shut up. Don’t you dare.”
“You’d burn the world down if you thought it’d finally make you happy with what you’re supposed to be in this life. This life. You’d have a perfect one waiting for you if you just swallowed it like everyone else!”
But that would never work! Because—
Because I don’t believe in Heaven.
The realization crashes down, sinks its claws into me, threatening to drag me to the water. I don’t believe in it. I never have. I could tell myself that it all existed, I was just too wrong to feel it, that I had faith no matter how broken I was, but—oh God, I never believed.
That’s it. That’s what it comes down to. We exist in two entirely different versions of the world. Theo sees Heaven waiting for him when he dies, a life beyond this, something more. I see Dad’s face and a fucking black hole. No matter how much I tell myself that there’s a Heaven, I just can’t believe it. My mind refuses to grasp it; it recognizes the idea, but as soon as I try to say it’s true, I hit a wall. The same wall I’d hit if someone told me sewer water could be fresh and clean and clear if I swallowed and believed hard enough. It would be such a relief if I could just believe there was something after this, but I can’t.
It’s terrifying.
I say, “If you really think there’s something after this, that still doesn’t excuse what you’re doing now.”
“Don’t say that like we’re the bad guys.”
“You are! Jesus Christ, you are! Nine billion people. You killed—”
Theo growls. “That’s not the point.”
“What, genociding the entire human race wasn’t the point?” I fling my hand at the ghostly copies of New Nazareth buildings behind us, sticking up from the flood. “Like you haven’t spent your whole life praying for this world to be wiped clean? Besides, you know, a bunch of rich white Christians and the handful of undesirables they decided were useful enough to man the guns?”
“Stop.”
“I’m one of those undesirables, Theo. You are too.”
“Don’t.”