It can’t be different.
“This is our best chance.” Nick jams his finger into the carpet. “Do you want to let everybody starve?”
“No, I don’t!” Her chest heaves. “Nick, look. Logically, I understand. I do. Don’t pretend like I don’t understand exactly where you’re coming from because I do. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who is fine with sacrificing a kid.”
Nick’s face is doing that thing where he can’t figure out how to move it, and he is so grateful for his mask because she can’t see the way he’s sucking on his teeth and chewing on his lips as if that will help, which it doesn’t.
“You get me,” she says. “Right?”
Deep breaths. “I do. But this is different. Seraph isn’t a person.”
The words snag on the way out. He tamps down how Seraph looked at him under the pavilion, the way it sagged in relief when Nick offered a little bit of himself in return—I’m autistic—to ease the tension in its shoulders. It looks like a teenager, it sounds like a teenager, it acts like a boy exactly his age, reflecting his worst nightmare back at him, desperately grasping for a friend, and Nick cannot be that.
Nick can be anything else. He can be cruel. He can build an entire personality out of violence and disconnection, convince everyone that he is unfeeling and uncaring, but he will not betray a friend. He has never gone that low, and he never will. The moment he does, he will be no better than the sons of bitches that burned this world to the ground.
Therefore, Seraph cannot be human.
Erin sniffles. Nick never knows what to do when people cry. It scares him.
She says, “He reminds me of you.”
No.
“You see it,” she says. “Right?”
Absolutely not. He refuses to listen to this from himself, and he absolutely will not hear it from her. He wants to beg her not to say things like this, because it will only make it harder for everyone, it will only make it harder for him, and he’ll be the one pulling the trigger if it comes to it, because he always is.
Nick says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You have to see it. It’s right there.”
He has seen it. How could he not? Under the pavilion, Nick almost kept talking. He wanted to tell Seraph everything. He wanted to say that it would be okay, that he’d been through it too. He understood the wild look in its eyes when it saw something it could protect, because he feels the same way every time someone comes to him for help. He understands, and if he so much as acknowledges it he will never forgive himself.
Why did he give it those bobby pins? Why did he reach out like that? What was he thinking?
“No,” he says.
“Nick—”
She reaches out to take him by the shoulder, but he jerks away and slams into the office door. She knows to ask before touching him. She knows that.
“Please,” she whispers.
Nick is silent. His jaw is locked, and there are no words in his head, just a storm of anger and gritting teeth and bones grinding in his knuckles. He tries to speak three times and fails, each time the thought burning away into ash before it can form the right shape. He counts the beads on the lizard without looking. Eventually, he pieces a sentence together word by word, bit by bit. The feathers tattooed on his back sear like a cattle brand. Like hellfire.
“Seraph will go to the church,” Nick manages, “and if it comes to it, it will be given to the Vanguard.”
That is his job. He will do his job.
I’ve heard of the Angelic Movement. Yes, I agree that the world’s situation is dire. Yes, I believe drastic action is required. But the day I ally myself with those who use God as a cover for genocide is the day you’ll see me dead…America! Come deal with the monsters you’ve made.