We have made so many mistakes. Am I the only one unable to sleep at night?
—Sister Kipling’s notes
There are no bodies on the culling field today, so it can’t be real. There’s no buzzing of flies, no metronome dripping of blood. A crow hops from branch to branch in search of food that isn’t there. The water flowing down the stream is fresh too, so clear I could drink from it.
The beast isn’t here. No fangs, no feathers, no flesh. I touch my face, and my fingers meet smooth cheek instead of exposed teeth. There are no open sores on my legs, just plain white skin. I’m not in my dress, either. I’m in the clothes I’m supposed to be in—baggy shorts and a black jacket, sneakers instead of standing barefoot in the water.
New Nazareth is silent. Not a body exists except my own.
It isn’t right.
I need to find the beast.
I leave the stream and go to the student union but find nothing on the roof. All I’m offered is a beautiful view of campus, with a bonfire of red and orange leaves lighting up in the gold of late afternoon.
Why am I still this? Why am I still no different than I was weeks ago? There’s no tongue weighing down my jaw, no open wounds to feel the wind. I’m just a boy standing on a roof, alone. But I shouldn’t think about it too hard. When I’m here, I’m not out there. Going out there means having to deal with the pain, and nothing hurts right now.
And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light.
For the world will burn under the weight of it.
I walk across campus until I make it to the old health center, Sister Kipling’s building. The laboratory, the office, the examination room. I muscle aside the glass doors and follow the basement stairwell all the way down to a deep, oppressive hall.
At the end is the room I am being kept in.
A narrow sliver of glass cuts through the door, offering the only glimpse inside that isn’t hidden tight behind laboratory walls.
I press my face to it. It’s cold. It feels more real than anything ever has here.
A bulging white eye surrounded by rot stares back.
That’s me.
Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
Even through the hellfire, talking:
“How much longer?” Mom. Her voice is choked. I think. Choked? Over me? “It looks—”
Sister Kipling: “You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to, Reverend Mother.”
“I do. Answer me.”
Shuffling. “At least a day.”
A day?
A day?
A day?
The pain is in an ebb now. It comes and goes like the tide, in and out. Big changes, then little ones to fill in the gaps.
I stretch my hands, and shattered-bone claws carve tracks in the floor of the isolation room. I want to stand, throw myself against the walls, tear the door off its hinges. But I am exhausted, and my wings weigh me down. Fleshy newborn things. Heavy and useless.
My neck and chest are sticky with black bile. My dress is stained and torn, and my unholy mess of a body has escaped it. It destroys the perfect whiteness of this room. Good.
Across from me, there’s a two-way mirror halfway up one wall and a small hole for people to speak through. That’s why I can hear voices, murmuring.
Mom says, “How’s Brother Clairborne?”
“He’s fine.” Sister Kipling. “The effects were minor. Reverend Brother Ward and Brother Abrams are under observation now. Tipton wasn’t so lucky.”
“Poor souls. It happened so quickly.”
That agony—was that me? Did I do that?
“It’s fascinating, really, how even latent microdoses of the virus react in Seraph’s presence. A side effect of the blooming, causing a mirror effect in nearby infected tissue. It should calm in time, once the virus settles, but—”
“As long as it happens quickly.”
Please, God, if You prove Your existence by making this stop, I swear I’ll follow You for the rest of my days.
Then, of course, proof that Mom has dug faith into me like thorns under my skin, like a tattoo I can’t carve off, like trauma: Even when my chest splits open the next second, I think, But He still might be real, and I’m just too broken to feel it. It’s my fault.
Another ebb, another pulling back, another breath. My hair falls out in clumps. Blood and Flood rot have mixed together on the floor into something wine colored.
My body is too big for itself. My limbs are long, like they’ve been stretched on a rack, bending in places they shouldn’t and packed with muscle and tumors. Painful barbs jut from my shoulders and the curve of my wings, right where little spikes grow into feathers. I press my face against the tiles and gasp for air.
I wonder how Nick, Erin, the Watch, and the rest of the ALC are doing. There’s an emptiness in my chest where something used to be, and I can’t tell if it was another organ I can’t keep track of anymore or the sinking feeling of failure. Nick and the Watch were right there, waiting for me, and my body tore itself to pieces before I could raise my hand and turn the Graces against the Angels.
That was my one job, and it fell apart because I waited for Reverend Brother Ward to make me bleed.
I failed. And now Nick and the rest probably have no idea what to do.
Neither do I.
The door opens. Sister Kipling comes in.
She’s the opposite of saintly, with her hair unwashed and glasses sitting crookedly on her nose, though there’s a look in her eyes like she’s about to be martyred any second. Watching for arrows or burning stakes.
She created the Flood. She built Seraph. She killed so many people to make me, she turned me into a monster, and she can’t look me in the eyes. The Angels have made her a living saint, and she doesn’t even have the decency to take advantage of it. They’ll let her do anything, and she spends that leniency staring into the middle distance, hardly ever blinking, her hands wracked with tremors. I have never once seen her pray. I have only ever heard her talk in whispers, except for the terrible moment on the riverbank.
She’s going gray. Her glasses are held together with tape at the temples. The crosses on the back of her hands look like they were done weeks ago, not years, almost painful in how swollen and raised they are.
She says, “I wanted to talk to you. Without your mother.”
Sister Kipling sits at my head, as if she’s kneeling at the altar of my body. I have no sense of myself anymore besides the fact that I am not what I once was. I’m too tired to see my body from the eyes of others, in the terrible way transness demands—always existing both inside and outside myself, judging as an observer. Now, I am a pile of flesh on the floor, everything hurts, and I do not give a shit.
She says, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” grabs one of the budding feathers sprouting at my shoulder, and tears it from me.
Pain rips through the delicate, dying skin, and I shriek, moving faster than I have in hours to slam into her tiny body and drive her to the floor. I’m hunched over her, towering over her, limp wings sagging and claws digging into the floor inches from her skull. My arms tremble under my own weight. I’m so, so much bigger than her. Her neck would tear so easily. A drop of saliva falls onto her collarbone, and she chokes down a whimper.
I should kill her for what she did. She deserves it. Dad told me to make them suffer.
“Please,” she says.
Please…what?
A cold pit settles in my stomach, a horrible contrast to the fire still searing through me.
I step back, my wings dragging on the floor.
She wants me to kill her.
“No!” She reaches for me, snatching for my jaw the way soldiers hold their Graces. I rear back, and she grabs me by my half-broken arm. “Seraph, please. Please.”
This is all her fault—everything she’s ever done to me, to the people who came before me, every single person who suffered as the Flood broke them apart. I should tear her to shreds, drag her by the leg and bite it off, and crush her body under my claws.
“I know you hate me,” she says, clinging to me, “and you have every right. I understand. If it’s any consolation, we’re all going to Hell for what we’ve done.”
She—
Our living saint is saying the Angels are going to Hell.
Our living saint is…a heretic?
No. No, it doesn’t work like that. She can’t be. She created the Flood. She built Seraph from the ground up. She destroyed me, she destroyed everything. And now she’s trying to repent her repentance? Now she feels bad? Now?
She’s so close. Her face is so close to my fangs. I should just end her. End whatever bullshit she’s trying to pull, end this pathetic attempt to trick me.
But I can’t.
Even though my jaw is dislocated and my insides bubble up when I speak, I manage, “Why?”
“Why?” Her lip trembles. Her hands find my face, and she holds me close, like she’s trying to cradle me, keep me away from the stained white walls and bloody floor. “We have made so many mistakes. I never should have wanted this.” Her eyes are glassy—with terror, remorse, martyrdom. It scares me. “If I can’t take it all back, I can do this. Please, let me do one thing right.”
Mistakes. Let her do one thing right.
But why now? Why is she coming to me now, when I am this—not when she could have stopped this, when she could have never stepped into the Angels’ arms in the first place? Why didn’t she stop when I begged her to? Is it now that she can look me in the eyes and see what she’s done?
I speak because I have to. “Mistakes.”
Sister Kipling says, “Yes. A mistake.”
“I could tell Mom,” I say. “Have you killed.”
“If you want me dead, you can do that now.”
I snap my teeth at her. She squeezes her eyes shut and does not move.
She says, “Lord, just make it quick.”
So I sit back and watch. Watch the heaving of her chest, the quiver to her lip, her fingers clutching her stained white coat.
A heretic. It’s too good to be true.
Nobody who has caused this much suffering deserves an easy ending. She doesn’t get to do one thing right to take even the smallest weight off her soul.
God will judge whether she has truly changed her ways in her heart, but I don’t have the luxury of being sure. I’m fucked no matter what I do, so I might as well try.
She can let Nick know I’m still alive.
