As the church is to Christ, a wife is to her husband, and Graces are to our Seraph.
—Reverend Mother Woodside’s notes
The Flood works in stages, but they pass so quickly—you’re dead by the fortieth hour, tops—that they blur together. It moves more like a parasite than a virus, devouring everything it touches. It starts with the insides, unraveling your organs for spare parts, and it gets into the brain so quickly that you don’t notice your spine growing out of your back until you’ve already tried to put your teeth through the nearest piece of flesh.
Seraph, though, is slow and meticulous. It has a vision in mind, and it’s going to do it right. I get to see the stages play out perfectly, all in order, ticking off each box as it goes. I watched it happen to the failed Seraphs before me, and now I get to watch it in the mirror.
This is the second stage. Sister Kipling had a specific word for where it happens: the blood-brain barrier. The virus gets from the blood into the brain and starts twisting it the way it twists the body. The way toxoplasma makes rats love cats, the way cordyceps makes bugs hang from the stem of a leaf. It makes you more likely to pass it on; it makes you angry. First you start puking up your organs, and then you get pissed.
I can’t say I didn’t know what came over me, because I do. And I can’t join the Watch if I’m going to hurt the people I’m supposed to be helping.
So I am going to do to Seraph what I can do to any other Grace: Look it in the eye and control it.
If Nick didn’t want me to leave the ALC, he shouldn’t have shown me how easy it was to get out without the sniper guard noticing. He had to whistle to get the guard’s attention when we left for Wagner Commons, and only then did they notice, acknowledging us with a wave: Fine, I won’t shoot you since you asked so nicely. All I have to do is wait until dark, then pull up on the gate handle so the hinges don’t squeal when I open it.
I am alone in Acheson.
The city is beautiful if you can ignore that, for months after Judgment Day, it stunk of dead bodies decomposing in beds, hospital gurneys, carpets, and alleyways. They baked in the sweltering sun, splitting down the stomach when they swelled too large with putrefaction gases. If you can ignore that some of the corpses track you with their eyes when you walk past. If you can hide well enough from the death squads.
But there is a beauty to the city. There’s no light pollution anymore, so you can look up at the night sky and see the entire universe twinkling between clouds and skyscrapers. Nature creeps back between cracks in the road and up the sides of buildings. I pull down my mask and breathe in fresh, cool, silent air on a street corner.
I understand how the Angels could radicalize somebody. Eternal life and a sky like this could convince a lot of people to join their cause. But that beauty is always dragged down by the desperate hands of the billions of people who were slaughtered to make it. I keep moving.
If I’m going to face Seraph, if I’m going to coax this virus to life and meet it in the middle, I need a Grace.
I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look. I don’t know this city nearly as well as anyone from the ALC does, so I count turns on my fingers and memorize street signs to make sure I don’t get lost. I open front doors to find bones and don’t stay because the dusty picture frames scare me. I startle stray pets and scavenger animals that wander the streets. No Graces.
My path takes me to a bodega between two crumbling storefronts. The windows are plastered with sun-bleached ads and government-distributed signs about water shortages and electricity limits. Might as well. I pull open the front door and a bell rings, the first sound I’ve heard all night that isn’t my sneakers on the asphalt. It’s immediately followed by the yowl of a cat as an orange blur scatters from the counter, knocking over pens and hissing and spitting the whole way.
I frown. I miss pets. “Sorry, kitty.”
The store was ransacked. The shelves are naked and only the most useless items have been left behind—zip-tied clusters of brooms, sludge that had probably once been fresh fruit, stacks of lottery tickets that are all scratched off for some reason. Considering how close this is to the ALC, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone I know stripped these shelves of everything they had. If Erin, Aisha, Faith, and Nick lived off Doritos and beef jerky for a time.
I’m about to leave—there’s nothing here but brooms and a cat—when I find a stack of Acheson maps in a plastic case. Perfect. I grab one and spread it out in a back corner cordoned off by shelves, where a spill of moonlight comes in through the window. The floor is disgusting, but I sit anyway. According to the map, there’s an emergency room a few blocks away. Hospitals would have been hotbeds for the Flood. I picture morgues filled to bursting by doctors who are starting to spit up blood, a Grace rising between gurneys as its flesh melts and builds itself anew.
That’s my best shot, then. I hunker down, fingers tracing paths through the streets, trying to orient myself. Which direction did I come from? Which direction should I go?
The doorbell jingles.
The cat yowls.
I freeze.
The door eases shut. A black form eases between the shelves, a hand lingering on the front counter. I put a hand over my mouth to muffle my breathing. No white, no robes, so not an Angel. A nonbeliever? Someone who would get scared off if I banged on the shelves or someone who would slit my throat?
I grab the knife from my pocket and ease it open. As soon as the blade peeks from the handle, the silver edge catches the moonlight. Its point is terrifyingly sharp, the way Angels always keep them.
The blade clicks when it settles into place. Loudly.
I mouth Goddamn it and don’t have time to feel guilty for taking the Lord’s name in vain. The footsteps stop for just a second, the hard scuff of a rubber sole against tile, before they pick up again. Faster. Toward me.
That red anger burns up my throat again, the fury that pushed me to crush Alex’s throat in my hand. More of Seraph past the barrier, nestling into gray matter and the folds of my brain.
The dark form takes one step past the last shelf.
I lunge forward.
A hand catches me by the wrist, twists me around and smashes me into the shelves. My back pops, and mop pads and magic erasers clatter to the floor. My knife hand is pinned above me. The dull shine of another blade glints between my stomach and a bruised hand.
A raspy voice warns, “Careful.”
You’re kidding.
I struggle for air. “Nick?”
Nick lets go, pulling the knife away from my belly. I stumble a few steps and cough into my hands, trying to get breath back into my lungs.
“Your form is messy,” Nick says as I struggle to regain my composure. I lean over to spit Flood rot in the corner but thankfully nothing else comes up. “And close the knife. You’re going to put your eye out.”
Grudgingly, I do what he says. “I thought you were going to kill me!”
“Then don’t be so easy to kill.” I groan. “And put your mask back up. If it was anyone other than me following you, you’d have a lot of explaining to do.” He’s right, I guess—no mask means either I’m infected and there’s no point or I don’t care if I get sick and bring it back to everyone else. I shove the mask over my nose and crouch to gather the map. He steps on the corner so I can’t. “More explaining to do than now, anyway. What are you doing?”
“Why were you following me?” I snap.
“Because you made yourself easy to follow. What are you doing?”
“I was trying something.”
“Too vague.”
“I’m not a double agent, if that’s what you’re thinking. Give me the map.”
He doesn’t let up. “You can never be too careful.”
I sneer. “You really think the Angels would use Seraph to spy on a bunch of queers that’ll starve out by summer? Yeah, right. The map.”
Nick moves his foot off the map. I fold it up and shove it in my pocket.
I want to join the Watch. I need to prove I’m not a danger. I force my voice to steady and scrub all the anger from it, making sure it comes out quiet and calm.
I say, “I was trying to find a Grace. So I could practice.”
“Practice,” Nick repeats.
It sounds sad when I say it out loud. “I scared myself at the funeral. This is what I was talking about at the park. Being a monster and everything.” But even if it’s pitiful, I have to say it. “I want to help you. I want to join the Watch”—Nick blinks—”but I don’t want to hurt my friends.”
Nick says, “You’re not friends with Alex. Nobody is friends with Alex.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s not,” he concedes. “You want to join the Watch?”
“I do.” Make them suffer for it. Be good. “God, I do.”
Nick holds out his hand. “The map.”
I give it to him. He points to an unlabeled spot nearby. “There’s a homeless shelter here. Let’s go.”
“So what was that at the funeral?” Nick asks. We’re walking down the middle of the road; feral Graces can be heard from a block away, and death squads don’t usually roam at night. No need to stick to the sidewalks. “If you know.”
I stick my hands in my pockets. “The Flood messes with your head.”
He glances at me. The starlight really brings out his eyes. People never talk about how pretty dark eyes are, especially the so-dark-they’re-almost-black of Nick’s.
“How much?” he says.
“Not a lot,” I say. “Not yet, at least.”
“We’ll deal with it.”
We find the homeless shelter a few blocks away, squat and nondescript. I’ve never seen one in real life before. When I was younger, Mom would have hurried past it, giving me a lecture about the dangers of overpopulation and laziness, how some people refuse to take responsibility for their lives. They must have done something wrong for them to be punished this way. God is kind; God is just. That wouldn’t fly at the ALC. It’s been just a few days, and I know how they would react: “God sure as hell isn’t. People were poor because the rich wanted them to be, just like we’re fucked now because the Angels want us to be.”
The inside of the Acheson Rescue Mission is a massacre. The windows let in just enough light to see by, illuminating rows of stained beds and plastic chairs. It may as well have been a military barrack or maybe a low-security prison. No privacy, no human comfort, just four walls and a cot.
And the bodies. Always the bodies. The Flood is in their bones—splinters break off from femurs and jaws, strange structures grow through chest cavities. I mouth my cobbled-together prayer for the dead as we walk between the beds, because Mom isn’t here to stop me.
This is what Seraph was made for. To turn every human being into this. To destroy what’s left of the world.
“Maybe there’s a back room,” I offer. My voice is too loud in the silence. “There’s just bones.”
Nick goes back to the front desk and sticks his hand in a trash can.
I say, “Um.”
He pulls out a glass bottle, weighs it for a second, and smashes it on the floor.
“Christ!” And it feels good to shout it, to mean it. It burns through me like blood rushing back into my fingertips, and I do it again because I can. “Christ, what the hell!”
A low, long wail keens from the far side of the hall. It rattles in my ribs and puts every hair on edge, the way a child’s scream gets under your skin.
A Grace.
I’m across the room before I can stop myself, holding on to the edges of cots to keep myself together. My fingers snag moth-eaten sheets. A Grace. A Grace.
I’m at the edge of its bed, wavering on my feet.
This is me.
This is what I’ll become.
Its mass of white, whirling eyes lock on me, and it begins to scream. High, shrieking, choked with phlegm. Nick stops a few steps away, but I don’t. I move forward because I have to.
It’s more human than not, more human than some but less human than the inside-out man Dad and I saw on the apartment floor days ago. A head, a torso, close enough. But its ribs open into a second set of teeth, gray organs pulsing underneath like fat, heavy tonsils. Its lower jaw has melted into its chest, and molars stick out of its collarbones. One desiccated arm is wrenched above its head, lashed to the bedframe by a pair of old handcuffs.
It. I can’t keep saying it. That’s not right. I want to press my hands to its, their, their skin, reach into their organs the way Theo brought the flesh to his lips, whisper to them, We’re the same thing, we’re the same, can you tell?
Nick says, “Are you all right?”
I’m so much more than all right. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”
The Grace makes a pitiful sound, scared and small. I press my hand to the broken expanse of their chest.
“Hey,” I whisper, and I make sure to whisper it too. Softly. Gently. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
They’re in so much pain. They’ve spent two years like this, kept alive by the Flood and nothing else, alone for so long. Their skin is mottled all kinds of colors, green and black and yellow, looking like it might come off in my hand when I take it away. It won’t, though. Grace skin is tough and hard, impervious, intensely painful. It’s why people like Nick have to get them in the soft parts—the mouth and eyes, into the brain.
Just thinking about that makes my skin crawl. No. I’m not going to let that happen. They’re scared. I am too, but I’m here now, and I’m not going to let anything happen.
We’re the same, can you tell, can you tell?
Nick comes up beside me. He’s been keeping his distance, hands clasped behind his back. I don’t blame him. I’ll have to scrub my hands raw as soon as we get back to the ALC, or Sadaf will probably have Cormac haul me out back and set me right. The Flood creeps in through the same soft parts of bodies that are so vulnerable in Graces, the mouths and eyes and mucous membranes, and it gets you any way it can. Clinging to skin and clothes, lingering in dead meat, sometimes traveling through the air on an infected person’s breath. At least the virus has the decency to show itself quickly.
“It’s calm,” Nick says, eyes fixated on the Grace’s cracked-open chest.
I say, “They’re safe now. They know that.”
His eyes narrow at the use of they, but he doesn’t point it out. “How?”
“I told them.” But whispering is more than just telling. It’s a live wire. Seraph to the Flood, the Grace to me, like the virus is some kind of current thrumming between us. I open my mouth to explain, but none of the metaphors sound right. A language, a connection deeper than that. Even Sister Kipling couldn’t put it into words. How am I supposed to?
Any attempt to explain is choked when I take off my mask and spit black sludge onto the floor. The Grace turns in bed as best they can, whimpering, free hand reaching for me. I grab their fingers as I straighten up, murmuring, “I’m okay, it’s okay.”
Screw practice. I need to make sure this Grace is okay.
“Does it follow orders?” Nick asks.
“They’re not a dog,” I retort. I don’t like the way he says it, and I can’t tell if it’s just the flat way he talks or if he truly doesn’t give a shit about the person in front of us. My skin burns warm, then hot, the way it did when Alex pinned me to the wall.
This is it. I said I would control it. I’m going to control it. I’ve spent years swallowing down anger the way girls are told to do, so I can learn to do this too. Breathe. Ask the question calmly. “Do you see a handcuff key anywhere? A little metal thing?”
Nick frowns. “What?”
Calmly. “Do you see one?”
“I heard you the first time. Why do you want one? You’re not thinking about…”
I bristle. No, no, get it together. “I am.”
Nick says, “Absolutely not.”
“They’re not going to hurt anybody.” They’ve been trapped here for years, this isn’t right. If I can help them, I have to. That’s what it means to be good. “Just help me look.”
“It’s dangerous,” Nick says. His calm voice isn’t matched by the look in his eyes, nervously flicking from the Grace to me. “I understand that this is important to you”—Don’t take that tone with me—”but this is taking it a step too far.”
“It’s not. They’re just stuck. They won’t hurt us, I swear.”
“No.” Nick pulls me back. “This is too much.” I wrench out of his grasp and shove him away. It burns where we touch. “If you’re going to act like this, we’re leaving.”
I bare my teeth. Even though it’s behind the mask, even if he can’t see it, it feels right. Showing my teeth like a Grace, like Seraph. “No.” I’ve never said no to anyone before. Not in any way that mattered. “We’re not.”
We watch each other. I’m skimming him for weapons the way I did in the office that first day. He has a knife in his pocket. He could have it at my neck in a second and slit my throat in another, and I know it.
I have a knife too.
And an idea.
I snap it open and dive for the Grace.
I jam the blade into the crook of their thumb and shove it between the bones and wrench it until something snaps. The Grace shrieks, and Nick’s body slams into mine, taking us both down to the floor. He bashes my knife hand into the concrete and the blade clatters away.
“Get off!” I howl. His knee digs into my hip. I try to twist him off but, God, why are cis boys so much stronger, it isn’t fair, I remember when Theo held me down almost just like this and I hate it, I hate it. “Motherfucker!”
Nick’s weight disappears from my chest. A mass of flesh hits the cot beside us, sending it across the floor with a screech and taking Nick with it.
I sit up. The Grace has Nick trapped against the floor, strings of saliva trailing from their gaping mouth. The thumb I broke hangs limply by the rest of their clawed fingers, just enough to help them slip their cuffs.
Nick has gone completely still, dark eyes wide and jittering.
It’s beautiful, and I come back to my senses immediately.
I clap my hands as if scolding a puppy. “Hey!” The Grace’s head snaps up. “Don’t hurt him!”
The Grace snuffles and backs away, taking their hand off Nick’s shoulder. Nick scrambles to his feet, wheezing. The fire of Seraph chews through my stomach, and it hurts, but it hurts like growing. Like setting a bone, or popping a joint back into place.
This is control. This is what I wanted.
This is what I was made for.
“All right,” Nick rasps. His hand hovers by his shoulder where the Grace held him down. “All right. You want to join the Watch?”
“I do.” More than anything. I do.
He looks to the Grace.
“Good. You start tomorrow.”
