Harp and I sit side by side, the issue of Godly Girl! splayed across our knees. We consume the feature on our old friend Dylan Marx with the same level of rapt absorption as the hormonal tween Believers for whom the magazine is written.
Dylan appears on five pages of Godly Girl!. Four are just photos, primly sexy shots of him in a variety of dumb poses: rowing a canoe in a checkered button-up; in a tux, holding a bouquet towards the camera, glancing shyly through his curls; kneeling before a portrait of Frick, palms together, solemn eyes focused on the Prophet’s face. “What the fuck is this?” Harp says each time I turn the page. “What the fuck is this?” At the corner of each page is a list of prices on all the clothes he wears, available at the Church of America website. What this is is an ad. What remains unclear is how Dylan ended up in it.
On the fifth page there’s an interview we snatch up hungrily, eager for any clues as to why Dylan is shilling menswear for the Church. Instead, we find questions such as: “Describe your dream girl” and “What do you look for in a potential wife?”
“She has a penis,” Harp remarks, deadpan, “and is, in fact, a man.”
I shush her to concentrate on Dylan’s reply:
I love girls of all shapes and sizes, but when I settle down, it will be with a woman who loves the same three F’s I do: food, football, and Our Heavenly Father!
“ARE WE IN HELL RIGHT NOW?” Harp shouts in my ear. “VIVIAN, I THINK WE MIGHT BE IN MY PERSONAL HELL.”
The questions never stray far from the territory of “Do you like girls/Jesus?” and “How much do you like girls/Jesus?”. All Dylan’s answers read to me as desperately insistent that he likes both very, very much. (“The perfect date? That’s easy! Taking a girl to church is the surest way to find out if she’s the one for me! Girls look prettiest when they’re lit from within by God’s holy light!!”) The interview is surrounded by pastel hearts proclaiming Dylan’s virtues: “Handsome! Devout! Your Boyfriend Would Look Great in These Clothes!” It’s only in Dylan’s last answer that we receive any insight into how and why he ended up in Godly Girl!’s pages:
Not to be all frowny-town, but how did you feel about being Left Behind? And what are you doing to prepare for the arrival of the Second Boat!?
I was initially bummed! My parents embraced eternal splendor in March, but Frick had different plans for me and my little sis, Molly. I’ve spent this time between Raptures digging deep into my faith to figure out where I went wrong. Luckily, Frick sent me a sign! I was on a bus to New York with Molly last April when I met the Church scout who got me my first modeling job. And then I realized Frick wanted me to stay behind and encourage Believer girls to stay holy and virtuous, no matter the temptation! Now I’m truly giving back to my community—and getting to wear all these cool, affordable clothes isn’t so bad either! [Laughs.] As far as the Second Boat goes—I plan to look my best, in my new boot-cut Church-brand jeans. I can’t wait to greet the Prophet Frick in style!
“Are we doing this, somehow?” Harp asks incredulously. “Is there something about us that makes all the boys of our acquaintance turn belatedly evangelical? Maybe we’re, like, too raw in our intelligence and sensuality.”
“I don’t think the rawness of our sensuality was ever an issue for Dylan.” I reread his final answer, trying to make sense of it. “This is too ridiculous. He has to be faking it. Don’t you think? The scout spotted him on the bus and he saw easy money, plus stability for him and Molly. So he let the Church believe he Believed. I can see him doing that—can’t you? It’s not like he ever had any sympathy for the Church of America.”
“Neither did Peter,” Harp points out.
“But we knew Dylan longer, and a lot better. And Raj knew him better than either of us. I can’t imagine Raj being wrong about him.”
Harp has a faraway look on her face. I wonder if she’s thinking about the last time she saw Dylan: when she lashed out at him, blaming him for Raj’s death. I watch as she grabs her laptop and searches Dylan’s name. Together we marvel at the results. I’d searched for him before—two months ago now, in Keystone—but nothing came up. I hadn’t searched since because I was afraid of what I’d find. I thought he was dead—as far as we knew, he’d been on the East Coast during the devastating Hurricane Ruth. But we soon figure out that this push to make him famous is recent and aggressive. The image search is a treasure trove along the same theme as the pics in Godly Girl!. Here, Dylan smiles sultrily in front of an American flag. Here, Dylan stands knee-deep in ocean in a red-white-and-blue swimsuit, beckoning to the viewer. Harp finds his Twitter (“PGH boy in the City of Angels! Prayin’ for the Second Boat!”); he has two hundred thousand followers. He tweets in the same cheerful tone as his Godly Girl! interview:
July 21st: Great shoot today over at StyleVirgin! Classy & modest just as Frick would want. Think you guys are gonna luv these pics! God bless USA
July 22nd: Wow! I love my new Church of America © brand water carbonator. Gotta get my fizz on! Seriously tho they make a great product.
July 24th: Lazy Saturday working on my car! I am a car buff! Total dude thing. Keep holy the Sabbath tomorrow!
Ten hours ago: Just asked to be the new face of Church of America cologne for men: Eden! Soooooo blessed! Smells great.
Three hours ago: I’ll b at the Grove this afternoon doing a promo event with Godly Girl! Come say hi! Frick bless you!
It’s isn’t the most egregious of the Church’s crimes, but my skin crawls at the way they’ve turned my friend Dylan—whom I loved in Pittsburgh for being smart and sly, sharply sarcastic—into this brainless walking advertisement. I’ll never understand why Believers cling to this kind of language, this relentless empty optimism, plus all! those! exclamation! points! Maybe the corporation uses it to offset the doom preached on a daily basis—if the corporation’s language matched Frick’s, people would be too depressed to leave their homes to buy the Church-brand cologne and kitchen appliances. On her screen, Harp pulls up a map of the Grove, apparently a shopping center. She traces its proximity to our current location, a neighborhood called Silver Lake.
“Five and a half miles,” she notes, standing and heading for the door. “Do-able. It looks like there’s a bus we can take … we’ll have to get the fare somehow. I have no cash. You think Amanda leaves a stash around?”
“Wait—what are we talking about?”
Harp makes a disbelieving face at me. “You don’t seriously expect me to sit here while Dylan Marx is alive in the same city we are—do you?”
“Harp, come on.” I trail her downstairs into the command center, empty now as the soldiers of Amanda’s army scatter across the city on their various missions. “You think you can waltz into a Church-sponsored event and out again with no repercussion? They’re looking for us. They have the whole country looking for us.”
“Exactly!” She throws open drawers, searching for secret petty cash. “It would be so stupid for us to try this that no one in their right minds will expect it. It’s the perfect cover!”
I watch her move to the kitchen. Harp opens a cabinet above the stove, takes out a black tin, and removes the lid. “Ha!” She holds up a wad of small bills. Her grin fades when she sees the anxiety in my expression.
“You don’t have to do it, Viv. Just because I’m doing it doesn’t mean you have to. You don’t magically turn back into the old Vivian Apple every time you make the choice to abide by the rules. But I have to go. Because Raj loved him, and you’re right—that’s not the real Dylan. They’re making him do it or he’s doing it to survive, but that isn’t him. And maybe I can help him get away from them.”
It’s true that I don’t want to take chances. I feel like we’re already pushing the line with Amanda’s militia—Kimberly thinks we’re liars and the others think we’re reckless; Diego’s impression of us as useless teens would probably not be turned around for the better if we were seized at a Godly Girl! event in the middle of a bright Los Angeles day. I don’t want to betray Winnie’s trust. But I look at Harp’s face, at the determination set into every line, at that little glimmer of mischief, too—she wants to see Dylan. She’s going to see Dylan. And if she’s going to get caught, I won’t let her get caught alone.
“Lead the way, old sport,” I tell her.
We’d be most incognito in our old Church of America-approved apparel: modest long-sleeved shirts and ankle-length skirts to hide our skin, the source of all temptation. But when Winnie brought us new things to wear, she somehow didn’t anticipate our need to blend into a crowd of tween Believers. We try to make ourselves look as different as possible from the girls on the feed. Harp raids the others’ bags for bits of disguise; she finds for me a baseball cap and a pair of wire-framed glasses that blur my vision but make me look a few years younger. My sprained hand has mostly healed—Frankie took the splint off last week—but my fingers are still stiff, and I struggle to pull Harp’s hair into two tight pigtails. “Hustle up, Apple!” she commands; we don’t know how much time we have until the soldiers begin to trickle back home. When we assess ourselves in the bathroom mirror, I note that we don’t really look different—we’re recognizably ourselves, just more ridiculous. Harp’s expression is sober, but she’s not deterred.
“Let’s move,” she says.
By the time we walk down to the bookstore, Julian’s shift is over, which is a relief—he and Harp have this new flirtation, but still I think he’d have stopped us if we tried to get past him. Robbie sits behind the counter. When we walk in, he looks up from his book.
“Where are you going?”
Harp replies simply—“Out”—but one look into Robbie’s eyes and I panic.
“Amanda asked us to go on a mission … for the blog!” I blurt. “It’s secret, so you can’t tell anyone.”
Untroubled or uninterested by this burden, Robbie shrugs and returns his eyes to the page. When we step outside into the brutal glare of the sun, the searing dry winds blowing down on us, shivering the leaves of the palms overhead, Harp gives me a look.
“What?”
“You are terrible at lying, Viv. Embarrassingly bad. Have I taught you nothing?”
At the stop down the block, I’m expecting a normal public city bus to pull up, so when the gleaming white shuttle that arrives turns out to be a Church-sponsored one—Sacrificial RidesTM—I feel a cold sweat break out over my skin. I stand back, ready to let it pass, but Harp pinches my arm and gestures me forward. “It’s the only bus there is,” she whispers.
Onboard, I feed my fare into the machine, avoiding eye contact with the driver, hyper-aware of the security camera above. There’s a large cluster in the center of the bus—elderly women; boys with skateboards; wealthy tourists with sunburned faces. Harp slips into the crowd with ease. I move awkwardly, too aware of my body. One of the skaters glances up as I push my way behind him, and when our eyes meet I instinctively smile—then freeze. My face is visible, but it’d be weirder to duck my head, to hide. So I stand there, smiling politely at him, hoping my eyes don’t reveal the terror I feel, until the boy, apparently taking me for a crazy person, makes a face and turns away. When I glance at Harp, I see she’s watched the whole exchange with an incredulous look upon her face.
Sacrifical RidesTM are more expensive than public transport used to be, and it shows in the sleek, clean interior of the bus; the small televisions hanging over every other seat, each of them playing the Church of America News Network. I stifle a gasp as I recognize Pierce Masterson’s thin face on a split-screen beside one of the newscasters.
“Mr. Masterson, could I get you to just lay it out for me like I’m an idiot? It’s August first; we have less than two months left until the Rapture happens—what can we expect from these last weeks of our time on Earth?”
“Happily, Scott.” Masterson has a reedy voice and as he continues to speak, his face takes on a sleepy self-satisfaction. He looks like a cat, I realize. I half-expect him to purr. “As we move through August and into September, I expect we’ll see the very fabric of human civilization begin to unravel. Democracies will fall and class warfare will erupt—meanwhile, deadly storms will continue to ravage the nation from coast to coast. The Book of Frick talks of a death toll of tens of thousands. Now”—he draws himself up—“some scholars of Frickian theology believe this to be an exaggeration for dramatic effect. But I say that’s heresy.”
“Well, you can bet I’ll put money on your interpretation. Now take us through the last two days of the world. What will that look like for the people Left Behind?”
“Well, I imagine the morning of September twenty-third will be quite familiar to all of them—waking to find loved ones gone, ruing their presence on a dying Earth. But luckily they won’t have too long to dwell on this self-reflection. Within forty-eight hours, the Earth will be destroyed. The exact amount of time it will take for the Lord to destroy the world is unknown, but a careful reading of the Book of Frick reveals we can expect it late in the evening on September twenty-fourth. What we do know is that a wretched hellfire will cover the surface of the planet and devour everything that’s left. The pain, as I understand it”—he wears a false, piteous smile—“will be absolutely excruciating.”
It takes us forty minutes to reach the Grove and by the time we do, I’m sick to my stomach at the sound of Masterson’s sneering voice in my ears. Harp and I exit the bus into a sunny plaza swarming with people. At its edges, under the dubious shade of the palms on the parched grass, there’s a small tent city—signs reading Need Food and Water, Please Help. Beyond is the dazzling shopping complex, shimmering in the heat—dozens of expensive stores and well-maintained cobblestone paths. The only evidence of the drought are the elegant stone fountains that sit every couple of hundred feet, bone dry.
We make our way through the crowd, keeping space between us at all times. We’re not sure where exactly Dylan’s event will be, but then Harp points out a pair of Believer mothers looking dizzy in their long skirts and bonnets, shepherding three giggling tweens in matching modest dress. “Bethie,” one of the mothers snaps, “what does Frick say about such unseemly behavior?” One of the girls stops laughing, looking chastened. “The voices of young girls give Satan pleasure and Jesus untold grief,” she quotes back. We decide to shadow them.
In the center of the Grove is a white tent with a crowd of young Believers gathered at its mouth, and a banner reading Frick Bless You, Dylan Marx! to let us know we’re in the right place. But we’re dressed all wrong—surrounded by this sea of demure femininity, we might as well be wearing mesh tank tops and thigh-high leather boots. Luckily, the crowd seems too focused on the prospect of Dylan to pay much attention to the heathens in their midst—they stand on tiptoe, strain forward, attempting to catch a glimpse. They’re very quiet, trying hard not to please Satan. I remember being twelve, killing an afternoon in the mall with my old best friend Lara Cochran. Outside the food court, we stumbled on a performance by a boy band on the rise. The girls thronging the stage that day were slightly older, totally wild: jumping, shoving, holding up suggestive signs with neon lettering. Above all, they screamed so loud you couldn’t hear the band. They were completely undone by desire. I tried to edge closer, fascinated, but Lara hung back, looking revolted. “They’re like animals,” she’d said disdainfully—prime Believer material before there even was such a thing.
These silent Believer girls could not be mistaken for animals—they cower under the eyes of their mothers and God. Still, I feel their quiet yearning, all the more powerful for being contained. I’m unsettled by it. I know as well as anyone the strain of being good, and I wish I could convince them it isn’t worth it. If I weren’t trying so hard to stay anonymous, I’d start screaming and pushing; I’d start a riot.
The meet-and-greet line forms with a hushed excitement. I get on it while Harp makes a loop around the tent. She’s gone a few minutes, and every second she’s not in my sight is agonizing; I imagine a Peacemaker seizing Harp’s skinny arms, dragging her off into parts unknown. I sigh in relief when she reappears, tugging thoughtfully at one of her pigtails.
“Okay,” she says in an undertone. “He’s nearly alone up there—there’s a woman at the table who seems like an assistant; she sells posters of the Godly Girl! cover to the girls, and he signs them. There’s also a Peacemaker right behind him—just one, and he doesn’t look particularly speedy, so if worse comes to worst, we could probably make a break for it?”
“‘We could probably make a break for it’ is a sentence that should never end in a question mark, Harp. But okay. Anything else I should know?”
She shakes her head, and then, grins. “It’s really him, Viv. I got a good look, and it’s just—Dylan! He looks so good. He’s alive!”
Her excitement’s infectious; I grin back at the thought of him at the end of the line, shaking the hair out of his eyes in his casual way, probably desperate for a cigarette. It’s like holding a piece of home in my hands, to think of him so near.
Harp appraises the line behind me. She nods. “OK, I’ll go back there. Once he recognizes you, he’ll make a point of getting you alone.”
“How do I let you know? How do we get him away from his handlers?”
“I’ll come back when I think of something!” she says as she walks away.
But she doesn’t come back. I stand in the slowly dwindling line, fidgeting in my stolen glasses, feeling the sweat pool at the small of my back. I watch as Believer girls collapse onto the pavement, either from heat or the pressure of repressing their imminent sexual awakenings. As I get closer to Dylan—close enough to see huge posters of his face on either side of the tent; his dimpled grin beckoning me nearer—his fans around me work themselves into as much of a frenzy as their decorum allows. The girls in front of me, their hair tied back into somber braids long enough to sit on, grasp each other’s hands, tense and jittery. Behind me, I hear the squeak of a little girl’s voice as she recites an endless list of Dylan facts: “His favorite football team is the New Orleans Saints! He likes hiking, sailing, and bowling! I like bowling! And he has a sister, and she’s the same age as me! And he’s so handsome!” Her mother whispers, “He’s very godly, Trudy, but keep your voice down—you know it’s a sin to speak wantonly of the opposite sex.”
Soon there are three groups in front of me, then two. I watch girls run off ahead, clutching signed posters to their chest. Now I can hear the friendly murmur of Dylan’s voice as he greets his fans: “Good morning! And what’s your name?” I try to find Harp behind me. But all too quickly, the girls with the braids in front of me get their posters signed and step away, one trying to suppress a squeal; the other looking pale, leaning against her friend. Right as I step forward, Dylan turns to ask the Peacemaker for a bottle of water and the man sets off in search of one. Dressed in a crisp button-down and shiny boots, Dylan leans back to flick lazily through an expensive-looking phone. It’s so hard not to simply call out his name.
“Forty-five dollars for a small poster, seventy-five for a large,” says Dylan’s handler. She’s in a modest black skirt suit and her upper lip gleams with sweat.
I slip my hand into my pocket but I already know I have nowhere near that much.
“Uh … ” I try to pitch my voice higher. “I just wanted to say hi?”
She sighs and glances up with disdain, but seems to look right through me. “Dylan has a very full schedule—if you want to say hi, buy a poster.”
Dylan stays focused on his phone. “Relax, Marnie. It’s not gonna kill me to say hello.” He glances up in a jokey, perfunctory way and says it: “Hello.”
I watch his smile hang there a moment as the panic reaches his eyes. Then his face falls. He drops his phone on the table and stands. I feel the muscles in my legs tense—he’s about to say my name; I need to run before he gets the chance—but then I see how pointedly he stares away from me. When he speaks, he sounds calm.
“Marnie, I need a bathroom break.”
His handler leans to the side to gauge the line. “Can it wait twenty minutes? We’re nearly done.”
“No,” Dylan insists. “I really have to go. Look, it’s in my contract that I get at least one fifteen-minute break at every event. I never make a fuss, but legally—”
Marnie throws her hands in the air, aggravated. “Fine!”
I step away slowly so as not to attract her attention and head for the public restroom to our left. Behind me, I hear Marnie call out, “Make it quick, though! I don’t want the headlines tomorrow to be: Teen Idol Disappears Halfway Through Event, Fatal Riot Ensues. I’m the one who has to answer to Peter Taggart, you know!”
I don’t hear Dylan’s response. A moment later, someone shoves me hard from behind, and when I look up I see him making a beeline for the men’s room. I speed up to slip in behind him, hardly thinking about what will happen if anyone else is inside. But the blue-tiled bathroom is empty—Dylan crouches, moving from stall to stall to check, and when he finds no one, he whirls around to face me, eyes blazing.
“What is wrong with you?” he hisses.
“I think etiquette dictates a greeting more to the effect of ‘So happy to see you alive and well in these troubling end times, old friend.’”
“I’m not happy to see you! Seeing you is confirmation that you’re actually deranged! The Church of America is looking for you and you respond by accusing them of mass murder; you wait until they call you a terrorist to show up at a crowded Church event—”
“I thought it was a sin to read the post.” I stand by the door, hoping Harp’s seen me leave the line, that she’s followed. If she hasn’t, the next time the door opens, I’ll have to run like hell. “You’re never going to get on the Second Boat with that kind of browser history, no matter how dashing you look in your boot-cut jeans.”
His face goes pale under the fluorescents, and when he speaks again his voice is soft and controlled. “I’m glad I could bring you such amusement during these dark days.”
“Dylan—”
“Really, it’s a comfort. Frick knows how doomed you are. There’s a bullseye on your back, Vivian, and if I can bring you some laughs before the Church takes aim—I’ll consider it an act of charity. I’m trying hard to give back while I can.”
“We were worried,” I say, feeling uncertain. Were we right to think that Dylan’s Believer posturing was entirely an act? “We thought we could help.”
“You have a weirdly optimistic conception of the position you’re in. Thank you, but no thank you. I don’t need the help of a known heathen. ”
“Dylan.” I stare at him hard, but his expression is blank. “Come on. It’s me.”
He turns, focusing on his own reflection in a mirror above the sink. He adjusts an artfully tousled curl. “Get out of here, Viv. Okay? Go back to hiding in caves, murdering Peacemakers, whatever it is you do these days. I’ll pretend I didn’t see you—it’s a sin against Frick, but I’ll do it, for old time’s sake.”
I take a step back, frightened. But at that moment the door bangs open and to my relief Harp bursts in. Dylan jumps at the sound. When he turns and sees her, his mouth falls open. She moves towards him, determined, and I want to warn her—it’s not safe; he’s not our Dylan anymore. But Harp doesn’t even acknowledge my presence in the room. She and Dylan face each other; they wear identical expressions of surprise and sadness and lingering anger. It was a mistake to send me to him first, I realize. He and Harp are bound together for life: they’re the ones who loved Raj; they’re the ones who buried him. I lean against the door with all my weight, and wait for someone to break the spell.
“You look,” Harp says after a long moment of excruciating silence, her eyes welling with tears, “so fucking stupid on the cover of that magazine.”
Dylan covers his face with his hands. When he takes them away, I see he’s laughing and crying. “At least I’m not a slutty Muslim extremist! At least I have that going for me!”
They each take a couple of steps forward, meeting in the space between to throw their arms around each other. After a moment Dylan lifts Harp’s small frame up into the air; she squeals.
“This is so weird, you guys,” I tell them.
Dylan pulls away first, wiping his eyes with his forearm. “You have to get out of here. Don’t worry about me. I’m okay.”
“How do you know you can trust them?” Harp grips his arm and doesn’t let go. “How do you know they won’t get rid of you once they don’t need you anymore, once you stop making money for them?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t! But it’s better than the alternative—if I hadn’t met Marnie on the bus, Molly and I would’ve headed straight into Hurricane Ruth. Instead I’m here, in Hollywood, and Molly’s safe at a Church boarding school in Colorado. She has three meals a day, and water, and friends, and the corporation doesn’t know I’m—” He stops himself, swallows. There’s no one in the room except us, but still he’s afraid to say it. “They don’t know of any reason to take me out of my room in the middle of the night and shoot me. I’ve locked that part of me away.”
“And what if you slip up?”
“Not going to happen. I play the part extremely well, Harp. Vivian can attest.” Dylan nods at me, a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I admit it’s not an ideal situation, but I’m safe … which is more than you two can say.”
“It doesn’t bother you at all,” I say, “that you’re on the wrong side?”
He laughs a familiar laugh—wide-eyed, gently teasing. “Viv, come on—don’t you get it? It’s a luxury to be able to choose a side. I’m trying to eat, access clean water, keep Molly safe—I don’t have time to have ideals. Look, I won’t pretend every person who works for the Church of America is perfect, but they’re more than you make them out to be. A lot of them are just trying to do what they think is right.”
Harp watches the faucet drip. I know that for her the idea of helping Dylan, of rescuing him from the Church’s clutches, was a way of turning back time. She wasn’t there when Raj was killed, and she must feel the way I do about my father—that if we’d just been able to change the situation in one microscopic way, everything that happened after would have been different.
“Dylan,” I say. “You need to know something. There’s a militia planning an attack against the Church—an explosion at the Chateau Marmont.”
Dylan’s mild expression goes rigid. “Is this a joke?”
“No. We’re not sure when it’s going to happen yet—but they have the means, and they’re going to do it. If that’s where you’re living, you need to get out of there.”
He turns to Harp, like she’ll assure him that I’m only playing around, but Harp has raised a trembling hand to her eyes. She hadn’t realized what I only just did—that, at this moment, Dylan doesn’t need to be rescued from the Church as much as he needs to be rescued from Amanda Yee.
“How am I supposed to get out of there?” he asks, pacing the damp, dirty floor. “It’s in my contract that I have to stay at the Chateau for the duration of my employment—and if I lose my contract, Molly loses her tuition. Oh, God. Guys! What am I supposed to do?”
“Maybe you can talk to Marnie about going on vacation for a while. Tell her you want to visit Molly before the Second Boat?”
“Even if she agrees,” Dylan notes, “which she won’t—Marnie lives at the Chateau, too. I’m supposed to waltz away and leave her there, knowing full well she’s about to get blown up? I’d have to warn her, too. I’d have to warn everyone! But—what am I supposed to say? Where am I supposed to have gotten this information? If they find out I know you, how I know you … ”
He stops and bends over the sink, heaving. I think he might be about to throw up. Dylan’s right—it’s not a good idea for him to warn the Church of America about the attack. If they traced him back to us, they would find out about Raj. That would put both Dylan and Molly in danger. I put my hand on Dylan’s back to comfort him.
I have an idea then. Possibly a profoundly stupid one.
“What if,” I suggest, “you got us in the Chateau? What if you helped us meet with Peter Taggart? I’ll warn him myself. He’s powerful enough that he could get the Church to relocate. And I’m pretty sure he’d believe me.”
Harp snaps her gaze towards me, eyes bright with alarm. Dylan laughs weakly. “Ha ha, Viv. I really don’t see how a showdown with your ex-boyfriend is going to help. Although can I just say, I’m impressed? No doubt the betrayal was a blow, but that boy is cute. I frankly didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I’m not joking,” I say.
He pauses, then looks back at Harp, who continues to say nothing. She retreats to the opposite corner, as if to put as much distance as possible between herself and this idea.
“You’ll get caught,” he points out. “They have Peacemakers at every entrance.”
“You can tell us when the building will be closest to empty; you can help create a diversion. All we need is an open door, Dylan.”
He seems speechless. The last time we saw each other, I was only Harp’s compliant sidekick, a pleasant dull presence in his apartment. Now Dylan turns helplessly to her, as if she’ll rein me in, get me to stop asking the impossible.
Harp shrugs. “A simple yes or no, Dylan.”
“It could still backfire for me, easily. So why should I?” he asks, sounding both confused and defiant. “I’ve spent two months making these people trust me. Why should I put myself at risk? Why should I put Molly at risk, just because you’ve gone full adrenaline junkie?”
“Because otherwise I can’t promise you won’t be in the building when the bomb goes off,” I say, and Dylan recoils. “Also—because it’s what Raj would do.”
This plan is brand new; it arrived fully formed in my mind only seconds ago, and part of me hopes he’ll be so angry with me for invoking Raj that he’ll refuse. But after a long moment, Dylan sighs. He takes a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, shoves one into his mouth, and glares at me.
“The guilt, Apple, my God. You should start your own religion.”