What do Angels believe? As true believers, our priority is to serve the LORD. We know salvation comes in service to God, in carrying out His final command. We call ourselves ANGELS to proclaim our truth in servitude.
—The Angelic Movement official website
It’s time to come home.
Brother Hutch holds out his hand to me. The hand that clasped Mom’s in prayer, the hand that pulled the trigger on Dad.
Home means going back to New Nazareth. Back to Theo, back to Mom. Every Angel in New Nazareth will fall to their knees and beg for my blessings. Theo will take me back as his betrothed, like he didn’t spit at me and call me a lying, ungrateful bitch. Mom will kiss my cheeks, pretending she doesn’t notice my boys’ clothes and short hair, and then she’ll slam me in an isolation cell until the Flood turns me into a monster.
Into Seraph. Into a six-winged beast burning with holy fire, leading Graces and the Flood to war, carving a path to Heaven through the bodies of nonbelievers.
I don’t take his hand.
I don’t want to go home.
My stomach seizes, and I vomit onto the road. It’s yellow, red, and black; sour and hot all the way up my throat. Around me—click, click, clack, a choir of safeties coming off. But the Angels won’t shoot. They won’t kill me. Imagine what the faithful would do to the soldier that did. He’d be crucified. He’d be cut open, and he would die watching maggots squirming in his intestines.
“Hey!” Brother Hutch snaps at the soldiers. “Stand down, now!”
I heave again. Nothing comes up except acid. Brother Hutch hums softly, and it’s such a kind sound, it’s terrifying.
“There we go,” he murmurs. He rubs small circles between my shoulders. “It’s okay.”
My words come out in an unsteady wheeze, bubbling with saliva. “Don’t touch me.”
“All right,” Brother Hutch says. “I understand. I heard what your father called you. Ben, was it? I’ll call you Ben if that’s what you want. Your mom is worried about you, Ben. She wants to make sure you come home.”
Mom’s not worried about me. She’s worried about salvation.
I say, “Rot in Hell.”
That does it. Brother Hutch snarls and hauls me up—not enough to stand or even get onto my knees, just enough to look him in the eyes. His bloodshot, beady eyes.
“How about a deal?” he says. I try to pull back, but he holds me tight. “I’ll give you a choice. You can come with us the easy way, or we can take you by force. You can come to your senses, or I can break your legs.” He’s smiling. It makes his face shine in the ugliest way. A mask can never hide that. “It’s up to you. How do you want to do this?”
There’s something on his cheekbone. A splatter, strangely soft and pink. A little piece of meat.
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.
Besides the soldiers and the Grace dragging itself along with us, the only things we see all morning are abandoned cars and empty buildings. The world is only two years gone, so everything is almost exactly how it used to be: clusters of stickers clinging to bus shelters, weeds springing up between cracks in the sidewalk, trees outgrowing their dirt squares in the concrete. A corpse hangs from a flagpole, and massive letters on the building behind it scream REPENT, SINNER.
That’s the way it works now. Everybody is dying, and it’s just a matter of what kills you. Whether it’s Angels or the Flood or heatstroke or good old sepsis.
For most of humanity, it was the Flood. Theo’s mom was martyred on Judgment Day, and he grieved her in the only way he was allowed: by learning everything. How the virus burned through billions, missionaries like his mom carrying it to every major city in the world. How it either kills you when a new set of ribs grow through your lungs or how an unlucky few survive long enough to find salvation as a Grace. How the death squads infect themselves with a taste of the Flood at their initiation ritual, walking the fine line between taking a step closer to God and succumbing to the sickness…
How Seraph is a balance of the Flood’s need to devour and its need to survive—ravenous enough to turn me into a monster, patient enough to do it right. Because Sister Kipling made the Flood powerful, and she made Seraph perfect.
She made me perfect.
The Grace rumbles, shaking like a horse twitching away flies. I come up to its hunched-over chest, maybe. When its mouth is closed, I can see remnants of the person—people—it used to be. Human teeth between serrated fangs. The remains of a button nose.
Brother Hutch catches me staring. I avert my eyes, but it’s not enough. He slows down to match my stride. In front of us, two soldiers peer at a map, murmuring about previous ambushes and new paths through the city.
Acheson has been devouring Angels lately.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Brother Hutch croons, spreading his fingers toward the Grace. “This new life they’ve been given? How merciful of our Lord to allow them to be born again, to become warriors in our fight for His plan. Just like you.”
Just like me. This is what I was chosen for. For the virus to turn me into a monster that will lead the Angels to Heaven.
That will wipe humanity from the earth once and for all, just like God demanded.
A little after noon, the youngest of the squad calls for a rest. We’re on a wide street lined with restaurants and hipster offices sporting strange logos. Some were abandoned long before Judgment Day, thanks to skyrocketing inflation, rent prices, and everything, really. Water-conservation flyers and open calls for protest peel off brick walls, next to eviction notices and Going Out of Business signs. I haven’t seen any bodies or Angel propaganda for a few blocks. This must be a new path.
“I need a drink,” the youngest soldier whines. I’ve been trying to place him the whole walk, but I keep coming up blank. Whose brother is he, whose son? “My feet hurt.”
Steven shoves a water bottle against his chest. “Then drink. Stop complaining.”
I wouldn’t take a break either, if I were escorting my only sure shot at eternal life. But Brother Hutch says, “He’s right.” Steven’s eye twitches above his mask. “There’s no point in wearing ourselves down. We’re still an hour out from Reformation.”
Reformation? He means Reformation Faith Evangelical Church. Memories of the place come rushing back, and so does vomit in the back of my throat. I should have seen this coming. Reformation is halfway between the bridge and New Nazareth; it’s the perfect place to rest in this beast of a city, and if I walk into that building, I am going to lose it. If I walk into any church ever again—
“Sit,” Brother Hutch says. “Eat, rest. All of you.”
“Thank God,” says the youngest, who immediately slumps against the hood of a bullet-scarred sedan. The others roll their eyes at him. He’s scrawny and strange, not that much older than me. Probably just graduated from training, his wings still aching, assigned to a squad that happened to get the most important task in the world. If he’s as new as I think, I’m surprised somebody hasn’t smacked him hard on the back yet, right where the tattoos are still painful. Theo used to complain about that all the time, back when he still had squadmates to complain about. Granted, I’m too big a deal for that kind of rough-housing.
If Theo hadn’t been exiled from the death squads, that could be him right there. My betrothed, staring at me with a mask and a gun.
One soldier points at the road. The Grace folds itself up and sits, shuddering all the way down. There’s enough gray matter left in the heads of Graces that they can be whipped into following basic commands—sit, stay, kill. Steven doesn’t give me the dignity of following orders. He just forces me down to the curb. The others trade packages of food and their map, praying over their meals and clustering in the shade. The rookie squabbles for the map and jerks it out of someone’s hands with a triumphant snort.
I weave my bloody fingers together and press my lips to my knuckles like I’m praying too. If we’re going to stop, I’m going to take advantage of it. There has to be a way out. If I can put some distance between me and the Angels, any distance, I can lose them again. There’s an old café behind us, and the glass door is shattered, revealing a path through a seating area with chic little tables, right to a back door labeled Emergency Exit.
If I distract them long enough, I could do it.
By the sedan, the rookie says, “We’re really close to where Salvation disappeared.”
Everyone stops. Unease settles like a fog.
I heard something about that a while ago. Squad Salvation went out to sweep a possible camp of nonbelievers last month and never came back. Mom held a service on the chapel lawn for them, lifting her hands to help them to their destined place with Jesus, the gift of eternal life now and in Heaven forever. Not a funeral, though. Angels never hold funerals.
Brother Hutch takes the map. “We shouldn’t be,” he says. “We’re nowhere near the northeastern quarter, we should be fine. We should be…”
The Grace snuffles.
“We are,” Brother Hutch says. “Aren’t we?”
Another soldier crowds in. “I thought we were taking the long way around.”
“I thought we were too,” Brother Hutch says. “Maybe we got turned around by the courthouse.”
CRACK.
A wound blooms across Steven’s throat, like someone aimed for center mass and botched it, tearing his neck into a mess of meat and severed arteries. He stays upright for a second, gurgling, before he falls.
We walked right into an ambush.
The Grace screams, long and loud and high. It clatters to its feet, and its mouth opens into a hole of teeth and spit, swinging toward the office building across the street. I jam myself against the sedan for cover. Brother Hutch slides into place next to me, cradling his rifle to his chest.
CRACK. The rookie stumbles in silence, eyes bugging. CRACK. He’s dead.
The Angels scatter. Some jump through the broken window of the storefront next door, some duck behind the pickup parked in front of the sedan. Steven’s body stares at me, mouth open, a halo of blood spreading around his head.
“Where are they?” Brother Hutch snaps.
“There!” someone shouts back, pointing to the top of the office building.
Up there, backlit by the sun, a smudge of black—and it’s gone. Brother Hutch pulls me down and hisses, “Stay.”
Brother Hutch shatters.
It’s not a clean shot. The bullet nicks his eye and takes out a piece of his skull, blowing it open. I jerk back, slamming against the curb. Brother Hutch is gone. The man who watched with a gentle smile while Mom cleaned my scraped knee, the man who congratulated Theo and me on our betrothal and wished us a happy marriage through holy war, he’s gone. His body sags. There are brains on the sedan. There are brains on me.
Dad’s shattered skull. His blood in my mouth.
If they want their monster, make them suffer for it.
I’m on my feet. Away from the sedan, up the café stairs, through the shattered glass door. I tear off the robes and yank down the mask. I just have to get to the back door. I can lose them. I can make it if I just—
There’s movement behind the coffee bar.
A boy in black points a rifle at my chest.
