A little piece of Dad.
I spit in his face.
Brother Hutch howls. Watery Flood rot—saliva mixed with my own putrefying insides—drips into his eyes before he can wipe it away, and I’m backhanded so hard my vision explodes with sparks. My hearing dissolves into a high-pitched squeal. I barely catch myself before my head hits the road.
“It’s not contagious,” a bridge guard says, yanking Brother Hutch’s hands away from his face. “It isn’t contagious, brother, Sister Kipling said—”
I’m kicked onto my back. Hot asphalt burns through my shirt. Loose gravel digs into my shoulder blades. The heel of a boot pins me to the road and grinds into my stomach like it’s trying to snuff out a cigarette butt.
I know the man standing on me. The scar across his nose, his small eyes, the wrinkles digging into his forehead.
“Steve,” I whisper, as if using his actual name instead of “Brother Collins” will make one of the Lord’s holy murderers any kinder. “Steven. It’s me. You know me.”
We met, when I was eleven and he was twenty-one, because we came to New Nazareth around the same time. I remember when he got his death-squad markings: wings carved into his back, feathers from his shoulders to right where the ribs end. Theo stared at the raw tattoos the way little boys look at soldiers coming home from war. I stared at them the way little girls look at that one uncle their sisters tell them to stay away from.
Steven lets up, just a bit, and I think it might have worked, but he’s wrestling me up and pinning my head against his chest. He smells so much like sweat, I almost taste it.
A flick, and there’s a knife to my throat. A thick one, with a black blade glinting in the sun.
“You want to be a boy so bad,” Steven says. “I think we can start cutting shit off. That’s how it works, right?”
I can’t get the word out. I shake my head. No.
“That’s what I thought. So be a good girl and do what he says.”
I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry.
I say, “Okay.”
Brother Hutch picks up the Bible from the bridge checkpoint as Steven gets me into a set of whites and hooks a mask around my ears—a flimsy fabric mask worn only beyond the walls of New Nazareth, where we step beyond God’s protection. “Whore,” Steven whispers, glaring at my bulky denim shorts before they’re smothered by robes. The bridge guards take their places behind the Jersey barriers, waiting for nonbelievers to string up and Angel messengers from distant camps to let through. The soldier by the Grace gently coaxes it out from behind the cars, and its virus-melted body shivers in the humid breeze coming off the water.
“Lord,” Brother Hutch cries, raising his free hand as if reaching for the bodies swinging overhead. Everyone joins him but me. “Lord, how I praise You; how great You are in Your never-ending mercifulness, to bring our blessed Seraph back to us!”
I will be good. I will be good. I will be good. I will keep Seraph hidden, locked up in my chest, whatever it takes to make sure the Angels never get the weapon they made of me.
But I’m just so tired of running.
* * *
The death squad takes me away from the bridge, away from Acresfield County, and leads me through the streets of Acheson toward New Nazareth. I ask if I can clean myself, but they refuse, so Dad’s blood is still on my face, hair, and hands. Get off. I smear it down my sleeves, but it’s settled into the lines of my fingers and the creases of my palms. I want to stick my hands in boiling water. Get off, get off, get off.
Steven grabs my shoulder and shakes me. “Shut the fuck up.”
I wince. That sort of language would never be allowed inside the New Nazareth walls. Not even if you don’t say it out loud. Mom said God would know anyway.