We meet the Vanguard at the same pavilion in Wagner Commons. The body at the tree shows the days of rot, sagging against the ropes, skin mottled and eaten away by scavengers. The sad trees and skyscrapers feel more oppressive than they had before. Everything has eyes—everything is watching, trying to catch a glimpse of Seraph, the Flood creeping out from my veins. If we really do walk by faith and not by sight, 2 Corinthians 5:7, then I have faith that every damn thing in this city knows what’s wrong with me, and it’s worming its way into my head with everything else.
“Morning, kids!” Joey chirps, helping his buddies haul their cart up on the table. The others, with their patches and stocky body armor, make a semicircle around us like we’ll lunge for the supplies if we aren’t held back. “What have you been up to? You called us awful quick.”
He isn’t happy to be back, no matter what his tone says. It’s in the way his squad holds their shoulders, the way they study us.
Of course the Vanguard isn’t happy. They don’t want to be this deep in the city. They don’t want to be this close to us. They don’t want to give their supplies to a bunch of kids, but they made a deal, and now they have to live with it.
Nick says, “Let’s see it.”
“Skipping the pleasantries.” Joey and a second man—the one who holds his gun weirdly at his crotch—tear the tarp off their cart.
There it is. Water and food and socks. Masks and bandages and painkillers. Replacements for what I stole for Theo.
“All right,” Joey says. “Pay up.”
Cormac hands over the bag to the woman, who holds it with one hand and a rifle against her chest with the other. They’re mirrors of each other, and for the moment when they’re both holding the ears, they look like they’re going to lunge and wrestle each other down to the concrete.
They don’t. She takes the ears, plastic-looking dead things, and counts them. She holds every one up to the sun between the skyscrapers, checks that each is from the left. Faith stares at the cracks in the floor, at the grass coming up between her boots. Cormac watches Joey, and Nick watches the rafters. I watch the city.
That’s why I see the girl.
At first, I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Maybe another corpse across the pond, one I hadn’t noticed my first time at the Commons, clothes fluttering in the breeze coming in low over the grass. Maybe a deer on its hind legs to reach a tree’s softer branches.
But there’s hair held back with a clip, torn jeans, and a shirt stained all the way down the front with rot.
“Nick.” I move my lips but I’m not sure any sounds come out. “Nick.”
The time it takes for Nick to look at me, figure out something’s wrong, and track my gaze across the pond is probably less than two seconds, but it feels like forever. And when Nick sucks in a sharp breath, that’s the death blow—that’s when everyone notices it at once. Something is very, very wrong.
There’s a girl across the pond.
She’s eleven, maybe twelve, the same age as one of the boys who died on the floor of Reformation Faith Evangelical Church, whose ear sits in that bag. The age of the tiny skeletons Dad and I found while crossing Acheson, curled in bed when their parents realized the world was burning and it would be better for the little ones to die quickly.
She moves slowly. Too slowly. Dragging one foot behind her.
“Ah, shit,” Joey mutters, pulling his rifle to his front. “We got a sick one.”
No. No, no, he’s going to shoot her. Cormac takes the safety off his gun, pushing through the crowd to the edge of the pavilion. Seraph burns in my throat, right where the Flood comes up.
They can’t do this. She’s a kid. She’s harmless.