Our LORD’s message is clear: Mankind has disappointed Him once again. We have been tempted beyond salvation and have become a plague upon His earth. Our redemption, our eternal life, lies only in this: an eye for an eye, a plague for a plague.
—The Truth by High Reverend Father Ian Clevenger
Nick catches me at the chore board the next morning while I’m debating between cleaning duty or helping Carly fix the rain barrel, which sprung a leak in the night. He takes the chalk out of my hand. “You’re with us today. Meet me in ten.”
That’s how I end up at the back door of the ALC with Nick, Salvador, and the sunburned boy, Cormac. Cormac is tall and sharp with long red hair and a rifle, and he greets me with, “Great. We have to babysit a middle schooler too.”
Um?
“Nick,” Salvador says, clasping xyr hands together in supplication. “I am literally begging you to let me hit him. Please? Just once. Trevor would want me to.”
Nick goes through each of us in turn. “Benji, ignore him. Salvador, not funny. Cormac, one more word, and I will look the other way. Am I clear?”
“Clear,” Salvador chirps. Cormac scoffs.
My contribution is ignoring Cormac altogether and saying, “So what are we doing, anyway?”
Salvador slings an arm over my shoulder. The sudden touch startles me, but xe is warm and strong, and I don’t exactly mind it. “You know how Cormac’s been cutting off all those ears? Believe it or not, he doesn’t just do that for fun.”
Cormac snarls, “Choke on a dick,” and Salvador shoots back, “Maybe you can give me some pointers!”
Nick shoves them out the back door and into the courtyard like unruly children, and they squabble for a second before disappearing farther into the grass. A clatter of wood and metal later, they’re dragging a wheeled cart toward the gate to the street.
“If you’re thinking about joining the Watch,” Nick says, “might as well get a taste for what we do.” I step out into the sun, squinting up at the early-morning clouds. It’s a beautiful day. “Don’t want to keep the Vanguard waiting.”
The city park—Wagner Commons, according to the sign—has become an infant forest between skyscrapers and dead streetlights. Benches line a gravel path grown through with weeds, and the pond is choked with filth. Squirrels chase one another around a towering maple with a body lashed to its trunk. Flies buzz in a shifting cloud, surrounding the caved-in skull and cross carved into the stomach.
Bodies like this hang in a long, stinking row on both sides of the New Nazareth gate. They’re everywhere in this city.
“Shit,” Cormac mutters. His trigger finger twitches. “Is that—”
Nick holds out a hand. “It’s old.”
“Still,” Salvador says.
The four of us give the execution a wide berth as we trudge toward the meeting spot at the edge of the pond. It’s a pavilion, a roof on stilts above a concrete slab, the kind of thing families used to rent for birthday parties. There’s even a sad little grill, blackened with ash. Nick and I pull the sled up beside one of the picnic tables—I switched off with Salvador a few blocks back because I felt bad for not helping—and Cormac glares out over the wavering fields.
He growls, “They said they’d be here.”
Along the way, Nick explained the Vanguard: They’re a militia group on the other side of the city, made up of a collection of families sitting on top of a hell of a lot of supplies. If I ever heard about them in New Nazareth, I can’t remember. We prayed for the destruction of the nonbelievers’ strongholds but never any one in particular.
I feel the knife Nick gave me in my pocket. Mom’s horror stories about nonbelievers squirm uncomfortably in my skull. Nick wouldn’t have given me the knife if this were all a setup, right? If he was just going to hand me back to the Angels? The death squads might make an exception to their no-survivors rule in exchange for getting me back.
“We still have some time.” Salvador squints at the sun. “It’s not even noon.”
“Not even noon,” Cormac repeats. “God.” I bite the inside of my cheek at the Lord’s name being taken in vain, on alert for a grown-up to overhear and scream at us. “I’m going to do a sweep. Come with me or not; I don’t care.”
Nick sighs. “Salvador, make sure he doesn’t get himself killed.”
Salvador perks up. “Permission to deck him if he starts saying stupid shit again?”
“Not answering that. Be safe.”
They both walk away, and it’s just me and Nick. I sit on the edge of the concrete in a patch of sun that shifts as bare tree branches move in the breeze, and I don’t let my hand off the knife.
New Nazareth had a lot of green places like this: lawns and wooded areas, creeks and bridges over gullies. I first kissed Theo in one of those little forests. We were fourteen and barefoot in the dirt, obsessed with each other because juvenile crushes meant we could forget about the world choking to death beyond the walls. I could pretend I didn’t hate the way my body looked in a dress if it meant Theo would touch me again.
Nick says, so quietly that I know exactly what he’s talking about, “When did you join?”
My head snaps up to where Cormac and Salvador are drifting out of earshot. What kind of question is that? I open my mouth to protest, Are you trying to get me shot? But…I want to talk about it. You can’t talk about how much it sucks to be an Angel to other Angels. I tried that once, and look where that got me with Theo.
“Mom took us to New Nazareth when I was eleven. When the High Reverend Father put out the call to the faithful, if you know what that is?”
“The Cloister Order,” Nick says.
“Yeah. The Cloister Order. Mom wasn’t planning to go, said she had more work to do on the outside, but she was offered a place at the head of the church, and she wasn’t about to turn that down.” I lean back on the concrete. A flock of birds swirls overhead. “I was eleven. Got pulled out of sixth grade. Never did learn how to do algebra.”
But I can recite the Book of Revelation from memory, which I’m sure is an equally useful skill. The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass…
“Were you involved with the death squads?” Nick asks.
“Only because my boyfriend was.” Calling Theo my boyfriend is easier than explaining that we were engaged, that we still are, even if I don’t wear a ring anymore, and I’ll die before I go back to him. “I went to his initiation ritual, if that means anything. He got kicked out, though.”
I went to Reformation Faith Evangelical Church and watched as Theo kissed the mass of flesh rooted to the altar. I touched his wing tattoos and pretended to love them because he did, and then held him when those wings were ripped off. He just believed so much. In the church, in the Angels, in Seraph, in me, because those were all the same thing, really. You could have cracked open his chest and read gospels in his entrails. If I hadn’t told him how much I hated Seraph, he probably would have died for me one day.
And no matter what he did to me, I still—
I still love him. The edge of the knife’s handle digs into my fingers.
For some reason, I still do.
I keep talking.
“I feel like I’m going to mess this up. Like I’m going to do or say something awful, because I was raised like that.” Nick grunts in reply. “I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t want to hurt anybody. And that’s hard when I’m some kind of monster.”
Nick finally turns his gaze on me. There’s a strange expression drawn between his eyes, one I can’t read.
“Are you a monster because you were an Angel,” he says, “or because you’re Seraph?”
“Shit, either? Does it matter?”
The flock of birds finds a spot in the tree with the body. Across the pond, Salvador throws a rock into the water.
Nick takes something out of his pocket: a toy lizard made of beads, about the size of his palm. The bright yellow beads border on ugly. He rolls them between his fingers a few times.
“I’m autistic,” he says.
I splutter, “Oh—” not because of anything bad, but because he suddenly makes a lot more sense. Autism was hardly talked about in New Nazareth. When it was, it got the “God never sends trials we can’t handle” and “I’m sure it’s a blessing in disguise” treatment. Sometimes it was accompanied by glances at the culling fields. I can’t make Nick fit that mold, no matter how much I twist him.
“If I can figure out how things work,” he says, “so can you.”
“Right,” is all I reply.
“And take these.” He presents me with a set of bobby pins from his jacket. His pockets are never-ending wells of little things. “Your hair is getting in your face.”
Then he holds up a hand. Across the algae-choked pond, there are people, and one has a gun raised in greeting.
They’re not Angels. I take my hand off the knife.
This is the Vanguard?
This is a group of middle-aged white men (okay, four white men and one white woman, but the Angels have made it painfully clear that’s no better) made entirely of wraparound sunglasses and pilfered army fatigues. They’ve sewn monochrome American flags and skull patches onto their sleeves, and one even holds his gun with the barrel pointed down between his legs as if to make up for something. I get the feeling I should be grateful they’re wearing masks, even if two have their noses peeking out over the top.
Salvador leans over my shoulder to whisper, “Yeah, I know.” Cormac shushes us.
“Morning, kids,” one says, almost high-pitched, the way you’d talk to elementary schoolers.
“Morning, Joey,” Nick drones in return. His head is at an angle that could almost be cocky, eyes cold and tired. Even with his mask, there’s an edge to his expression I can’t look away from. I am betrothed, I remind myself, which has no impact on the fact that I am very gay. I dig my nails into my ring finger instead.
The Vanguard—five people and twelve firearms strong, which is way too many even by Angel standards—claims the opposite table, hoisting their own sled on top. It’s covered by a dusty tarp. A guy in the back eyes Cormac like a competitor, as if Cormac isn’t half his age. Another stares at Salvador as if he’s trying to figure xem out, which has so many racist and transphobic implications that the air goes thick with it.
The one woman crinkles her eyes at me and says, “You’re a new one, aren’t you, miss?”
The word miss hits hard, the way Sister Woodside did. A knife between the ribs and into the lungs that takes all the breath out of me.
For the first time in my life, I defend myself out loud.
“I’m not a girl.”
That’s it. That’s all I have to say. I’m not a girl. The world doesn’t fall apart. The woman doesn’t spit at me and call me a failure of God’s vision for my girlhood. She just mutters, “Right. Should’ve guessed.”
As if to cut the tension obviously building in the pavilion, Joey pulls the tarp off the sled. “Let’s make this quick!”
It’s something out of Isaiah 25—a feast of wines, of fat things full of marrow. Cases of water bottles, boxes brimming with canned fruits, vegetables, and tuna, and is that peanut butter? Bars of soap, packs of socks and tampons. Batteries, hand sanitizer, and salt. The plastic gleams hard and sharp in the sun, but it might as well be the shimmer of precious metal.
“This is all we could get on such short notice,” Joey says. “Water, nonperishables, hygienics. We couldn’t spare the antibiotics”—Nick huffs—”but hopefully oxycodone makes up for it. Let’s see the goods.”
Nick nods to Cormac, who offers a bag to the woman who misgendered me.
“Should be seven,” Cormac says.
Brother Hutch. Steven. The rookie. Wedding ring. Three others whose faces I didn’t recognize and should have.
The ears come out one by one. Each is held up to the sun, pinched between the woman’s gloved fingers, her eyes narrowed as if searching for something. The ears look strange all on their own, discolored and rubbery. Like they came from a costume shop and got fake blood all over them. As she clears each one, it gets placed on the bench beside her. A little parade of body parts, all ears, all left ears. Probably so the Watch can’t be accused of doubling the numbers.
She pulls out a mangled, fleshy mess. Brother Hutch’s left ear. Or what remains of it.
“The hell is this?” she demands.
“An ear,” Cormac says. “What does it look like?”
She turns it over, inspecting it one more time. “I’m not calling you a liar, but I am saying—” Without breaking eye contact, she flings it into the grass beyond the pavilion. “Not good enough.”
I almost protest, but Nick says nothing so I say nothing too. He just crosses his arms, eyes flickering shut as if begging himself to keep his composure.
Thankfully, the rest of the ears are fine. There are six now, a little two-by-three set resting by the woman’s thigh.
That’s when she gets to the Grace tooth at the bottom. She hands it over to Joey.
“And this?” he says.
Nick answers, “An abomination tooth.” Not a Grace. Abomination. I tuck the vocabulary away for later: abomination. Leviticus 20:13—If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. Deuteronomy 22:5—The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God. Mom’s voice, hissing behind my shoulder the way the Devil spoke through the fangs of a snake in Eden.
“What makes you think this is worth anything to us?” Joey says.
“It’s another thing out of the city.” How is Nick’s voice so calm? “It’s what you asked for.”
“For all we know, this is from one of those little—” Joey makes a skittering motion with his hand. “Those little bastards. Not anything dangerous.”
A lot of Graces aren’t actually the massive, terrifying monsters the Angels have adopted into their ranks. Graces like those are a rare blessing, where the mass of mutations creates something useful. Most of the time, your body shatters into something just shattered. Dad and I found one a few days ago: a person turned inside out, lungs bulging as they gasped for air again and again.
That’s when it dawns.
The Vanguard are too afraid to do this themselves.
With all the skulls and flags, the firepower and muscle, they can’t handle what the Watch does. They’re too scared to fight back, so they’re using kids to do it instead.
Nick says, “It killed our friend.”
Silence.
“Right,” Joey finally says. The tooth goes next to the ears. “My condolences.”
“Is that enough for you?” Nick says. I can hear the grit of his teeth, the tension in his jaw. “We’ve done what you wanted.”
Joey says, “It’ll have to do,” and turns to the man beside him. “Two cases and all boxes but the big one.”
The big one: the one with fresh socks sticking out the top and pill bottles peering from the seam in the cardboard.
Salvador cries, “What the fuck, man!” Cormac lurches forward like he’s itching for a fight, and Nick just makes a quiet, broken sound. Even I can’t help myself.
“You can’t do that!” I protest. I turn to Nick. “Can they do that? They can’t just do that, right?”
“Stand down,” Nick warns us.
“One of those ears just wasn’t up to snuff,” Joey says. “Sorry if we’re a little cautious these days. We’re low on supplies too. Everybody is. And we decide what’s worth it. I’m sure you kids understand.”
“We made,” Nick grits out, “a deal.”
“And that deal,” Joey says, “is contingent on you doing your jobs. Look, kids. We go through a lot to get this to you. We’re taking this away from our own wives and children on the promise that you’re making the city safer for us.” I knew it. “We thought it was a good deal at the time. And if this is all we get on our end, maybe our families will decide this isn’t worth it.”
A threat.
Nick crumbles.
“Fine,” he says. His eyes drop to the floor and his fingers tighten around the bead lizard. This doesn’t look right—this doesn’t look like him. “Fine. Okay.”
“That’s what I thought,” Joey says. “Let’s load you up.”
I grab a case of water and carry it over to the sled. It’s probably forty pounds, and my hands ache when I set it down. I can feel the woman’s eyes on my back, their eyes on all of us. Cormac lingers by one of the pillars holding up the roof, assigned to his spot as a guard, glaring Joey down.
“Bunch of fucking assholes,” Salvador whispers to me when our arms brush tying down the boxes. Two cases and all boxes but the big one. Under the mask, xyr face twitches with rage. Xe looks like xe’s going to explode as soon as we’re out of earshot. “Can’t fucking stand them.”
This is why the Watch fights Angels. To trade pieces of flesh for supplies that are just stolen right back out from underneath them. Taunted with food and medicine by grown-ups who talk down to them like they’re toddlers. Grown-ups who should know better. A bunch of cowards.
Nick shakes Joey’s hand, sharp and quick. The bead lizard rattles. He’s angry. We all are. They lost their friend to the Angels, and this is all they get in return: some water and disrespect.
That settles it. This is what I want to do. I can help. I can make the Angels suffer for it.
I can do something.
When we make it back to the ALC, we’re swarmed with eager, curious people. It’s the first excitement I’ve seen from them since I arrived. Someone offers to split half a canned peach with me in thanks, but I feel too guilty to eat it and wave Salvador over instead, because xe’ll appreciate it more than I could. Now that I know where this comes from, now that I’m another mouth to feed, food might as well be wet cardboard. I’m sickened at the idea of taking it from a person who might need it more.
I distract myself by tracking down Nick to tell him my decision, but he’s nowhere to be found. Erin is so caught up trying to organize the food and the people that it would be a dick move to add one more thing to her plate. So I spend the rest of the day helping Sadaf catalog her dwindling medical supplies, even if, halfway through, I have to duck out into the courtyard, into the weeds in the back corner, to throw up more of my organs. A piece gets stuck in my throat. I have to pull it out with my fingers.
