Nick breaks from the group and hauls me to my feet, not at all gently.
“I think,” he says, his face right next to mine, “it would be best if you turned in for the night.”
It isn’t until I nearly try to pull his arm out of his socket just for touching me that I manage to take a step back from myself and realize.
Something is really, really wrong with my head right now.
I don’t do this kind of thing. This isn’t me.
So what was it?
As the church is to Christ, a wife is to her husband, and Graces are to our Seraph.
—Reverend Mother Woodside’s notes
The Flood works in stages, but they pass so quickly—you’re dead by the fortieth hour, tops—that they blur together. It moves more like a parasite than a virus, devouring everything it touches. It starts with the insides, unraveling your organs for spare parts, and it gets into the brain so quickly that you don’t notice your spine growing out of your back until you’ve already tried to put your teeth through the nearest piece of flesh.
Seraph, though, is slow and meticulous. It has a vision in mind, and it’s going to do it right. I get to see the stages play out perfectly, all in order, ticking off each box as it goes. I watched it happen to the failed Seraphs before me, and now I get to watch it in the mirror.
This is the second stage. Sister Kipling had a specific word for where it happens: the blood-brain barrier. The virus gets from the blood into the brain and starts twisting it the way it twists the body. The way toxoplasma makes rats love cats, the way cordyceps makes bugs hang from the stem of a leaf. It makes you more likely to pass it on; it makes you angry. First you start puking up your organs, and then you get pissed.
I can’t say I didn’t know what came over me, because I do. And I can’t join the Watch if I’m going to hurt the people I’m supposed to be helping.
So I am going to do to Seraph what I can do to any other Grace: Look it in the eye and control it.
* * *
If Nick didn’t want me to leave the ALC, he shouldn’t have shown me how easy it was to get out without the sniper guard noticing. He had to whistle to get the guard’s attention when we left for Wagner Commons, and only then did they notice, acknowledging us with a wave: Fine, I won’t shoot you since you asked so nicely. All I have to do is wait until dark, then pull up on the gate handle so the hinges don’t squeal when I open it.
I am alone in Acheson.
The city is beautiful if you can ignore that, for months after Judgment Day, it stunk of dead bodies decomposing in beds, hospital gurneys, carpets, and alleyways. They baked in the sweltering sun, splitting down the stomach when they swelled too large with putrefaction gases. If you can ignore that some of the corpses track you with their eyes when you walk past. If you can hide well enough from the death squads.
But there is a beauty to the city. There’s no light pollution anymore, so you can look up at the night sky and see the entire universe twinkling between clouds and skyscrapers. Nature creeps back between cracks in the road and up the sides of buildings. I pull down my mask and breathe in fresh, cool, silent air on a street corner.
I understand how the Angels could radicalize somebody. Eternal life and a sky like this could convince a lot of people to join their cause. But that beauty is always dragged down by the desperate hands of the billions of people who were slaughtered to make it. I keep moving.
If I’m going to face Seraph, if I’m going to coax this virus to life and meet it in the middle, I need a Grace.
I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look. I don’t know this city nearly as well as anyone from the ALC does, so I count turns on my fingers and memorize street signs to make sure I don’t get lost. I open front doors to find bones and don’t stay because the dusty picture frames scare me. I startle stray pets and scavenger animals that wander the streets. No Graces.