It was Mom’s idea for me and Dad to build the blood altar in the garage.

She said it would be a bonding experience. We could drive out to a dread farm together to pick out the raw materials, then stop at the hardware store on the way home for anything else we needed.

I remember being so excited. I kept saying I wanted to get a mirrorfox for cunning or a shaded tortoise from the Southern Breach with ink for blood. I saw Dad drooling over a thousand-year-old angler slug wound up in coils as wide as my leg, a dim white light pulsing out from the center of its curled mass.

“Here he is,” my father said, as he led the old greyhound out of the barn. He must have seen my expression, which I can’t say I did my best to hide, because his own face darkened. “He’s all we can afford,” he said. “Come on, Mom wants us home before dinner.”

“He looks good.” I sat in the backseat with the nameless dog, petting his flank. His fur was mottled, bald in patches where he’d chewed at whatever it was that made him so affordable. The dog smiled, tongue out, tail wagging between his legs like its hinge was broken.

“A lot of families can’t afford an animal this nice, Samaeul,” Dad said.

“I know,” I said. I put my hand out the window and drummed my claws against the side of the car. We had 2-60 air-conditioning, which meant you rolled down two windows and went sixty miles per hour.

The drive home took us past the power plant where my dad worked, with its monolithic smokestacks covered in runes two stories high. Whenever we passed it, I always stuck my head out the window and strained my ears, convinced I could hear the confessors at work, that I could discern faint screams beneath the hum of the roadside pylons.

The dog smiled the whole way home. I couldn’t get him to stop licking my ear.

I begged Dad to let me hold the knife. He refused, said he needed me to hold the bucket to catch the blood, which we couldn’t afford to waste. Every part of the animal had a purpose. But Mom insisted he at least let me try.

“Don’t cut yourself.” He handed me the knife. The bone-handled blade was the oldest thing in the house. When he was alive, my grandfather used to tell me how he’d used it to cut the finger off a seraphic warlord at the Battle for the Abyss. Until the day he died, Granddad kept the finger strung around his neck where it still bled a little, half a century later, staining every shirt he wore.

“I won’t cut myself,” I said, rolling my eyes, and cut my thumb pretty much in half.

We were in the kitchen, my father and I seated at the table, Dad’s reading glasses perched on his nose to monitor the leech he’d spread over my thumb to clean the wound, when Mom came in.

“As per usual, your son thought he knew best,” Dad said to my thumb. “And as per usual, he got his hubris handed to him on a . . .” His voice trailed off when he saw my face and turned back to look at his wife.

Mom looked confused. Like she didn’t know where she was or who we were. She looked at Dad and me, at my cut, at the leech. She ran a hand through her hair and straightened her sleeve. She walked over to the table and put a tiny flower on the table in front of my father, who recoiled from it. “I think I might need to see a doctor.”

It took six months for the horticancer to consume my mother, to coat her skin with a layer of moss thick enough that the doctors couldn’t burn it away even if Mom had wanted them to keep trying, if the cure hadn’t become worse than the disease. By the end, only her eyes — a pale lilac faded from their once deep purple — could be seen beneath the bed of flowers that covered her like a blanket, flowers of every color sprouting from every pore on dark green hair-thin stems, swallowing her body in a canopy of petals, their roots spreading through her body, turning her veins to kindling as they reduced her heart, liver, and lungs to lumps of misshapen wood.

“Whoa, check it out.”

I waved Dad over from the corner of the garage where he’d spent the afternoon packing and stacking cardboard boxes labeled mom against a wall on the far side. My father stretched his back, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and followed my voice to where I knelt, bent over a small wooden chest. It was late summer, which meant Mom had been dead for two months, that my sophomore year of upper school was about to start, that all my friends were still out of town, and that I was made of equal parts boredom and sweat. It was the time of year when the world was perfectly placed between its twin suns, Brother and Other, so that night never fell and wouldn’t fall for at least another month, on Transgressor’s Eve.

Dad squinted down at me, his gaze one of constant appraisal, an X-ray that peered inside things and people to see how they worked and what was wrong with them.

“Check it out.” I held up a small net of leather straps and iron fastenings.

“Your old muzzle,” Dad said. “Your mom said she threw all that stuff away.”

The old chest smelled of mildew and damp yellowed paper and clothes half eaten by whatever lived there. From inside I fished out the tangled steel knot of a choke chain attached to a powder-blue collar with Samaeul stitched across it in dainty yellow thread.

Dad picked the old leash out of my hand. Examined it with that look of his. Normally, my father’s face made a habit of being unreadable; his thoughts kept their own council. But right then, I knew he was thinking about Mom. I held my breath and watched him think, not wanting to break the spell.

He dropped the leash into the chest.

“You shouldn’t leave these things out,” he said. “They have a lot of power.”

I closed the chest, gently. “Can we have dinner now?”

“Dinner?” said Dad. I’d gotten a lot of those answers since we’d burned Mom, like I was speaking a language he didn’t understand: Laundry? New backpack? Permission slip?

Not that I relished the idea of chili for dinner for the eighth night in a row. A month ago, it had dawned on my father that he could simply buy a whole grocery cart of something and make that for dinner till it ran out. He’d smiled and shook his head in that I can’t believe no one’s thought of this way dads get that invariably augers doom, like when they discover a shortcut to somewhere that’s anything but. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the chili was made with beef or fox — or even dog. Instead, Dad bought out the store’s entire stock of Forest Ranch-Style chili, which meant a heady mélange of squirrel, vole, mouse, and, if you were lucky, a little snake meat.

Dad took my hand, turned my fingers in the light. “When was the last time you cut these?”

My claws were at least two inches long, unclipped in the two months since Mom had died.

Dad took my chin between his forefinger and thumb. “Better have a look under the hood. Come on, open up, mister.”

I opened my mouth. Dad whistled between his filed fangs. He kept his teeth like he kept his hair: short, practical, and without the slightest hint of fashion sense.

“You need to file those teeth down, young man. Tonight. You’ve chewed your cheeks to ribbons. Hey, what’s this?”

My father reached up, ran a finger over the four sharp nubs that protruded from the top of my head, still hidden under my shaggy, uncombed mop of summer hair.

“When did these start coming in?”

“Two months ago.”

“A four-pointer,” said Dad, nodding, impressed. A two-pointer himself, my father’s own horns extended a foot over his head, straight up, no twists or branching, which, while unremarkable, made it easier to put on a T-shirt. At least, that’s what he said.

I grinned from head to heels. “Granddad was a four-pointer.”

My father’s father had had the largest horns in the city, a chandelier of bone that grew a towering five feet over his head.

“Did you need a muzzle when you were a kid?” I asked.

“We all need them.”

“Even Mom?”

I only ever saw my dad laugh three times. This was one of them. “Especially Mom.”

The walk to school took me past the Chasm.

The Chasm was this giant crack in the earth a thousand feet wide that went for forever in both directions and had no bottom and that we supposedly came out of a million years ago, sent by the Father of Fear to lay waste to all the plants and animals because life was chaos and we were order or something. I don’t remember it all. Just that we gave the Chasm our dead. Other cities buried bodies to feed the Wyrm. Or set them adrift in the sea, an offering to the Leviathan. We dropped ours in that big hole to feed the Void, weighted down so they couldn’t get sucked up into the sky and kidnapped by the Empire of Heaven.

I didn’t think I wanted to get dropped in a giant hole when I died. Maybe burned like Mom. Then maybe someone could take my bones and make something out of them, like a chair. Not a confessor’s torture chair like my dad used on angels at the plant, but a really comfortable one that girls would sit on and it would be so comfortable they’d want to take their clothes off.

I hadn’t seen Jushuh since my mother’s pyre, just after school let out for summer vacation. She’d spent the summer at an internship studying with the healers of the Eastern Massif.

“Sam!” she shrieked when she spotted me walking through our school’s parking lot, the end of a five-mile trudge that began at my front door. I looked up from the sidewalk just before she collided into me. Jushuh’s strong, slender arms wrapped around my neck as a curtain of matted auburn hair fell over my face. Her scent filled my nose with the tang of oranges, paint, and girl sweat. Since childhood, Jushuh had bathed only occasionally and grudgingly.

Something was off. Something about the way she hugged me. Not wrong, but different. For a second, I thought something was pinned between us. A pair of somethings.

Jushuh had boobs. A double scoop of maturity tightening a T-shirt that she hadn’t yet figured out no longer fit.

“Guess I should have stuffed my shirt if I wanted a hug, too.”

Ungluing myself from Jushuh, I found Bon standing behind her, smiling the half smile that was always present on his aggravatingly clear complexion and that made you smile even when you didn’t want to, like he was letting you in on the best secret ever. He’d let his claws grow all summer like me, only his folks hadn’t made him cut them. His teeth were sharp, too, and his horns were already six inches grown, spiraling out in a V. At least he only had two of them.

“You look like crap, dude,” Bon said. “What happened — somebody die?”

Jushuh rolled her eyes with her whole body. “Nice one, Bon. Real classy.”

“Aw, Sam knows I got nothing but love.” Bon stepped up, hugged me, put an arm around my shoulder. “Seriously, you hangin’ in?”

Bon Dur Suun Kyyver was like the weather: you could complain about him or you could accept him, but you couldn’t change him.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up with your ear?”

Bon touched his left earlobe, or the place where it should have been.

“Oh, that. Me and Jushuh were making out, and she got a little carried away.” Bon laughed. Jushuh hit him. Hard. Something sharp poked at me when she did. Something in the way she smiled at him. “No, for real, either of you ever gone on safari in the Underveldt and woken up to find a dream-eater having dinner in your ear?”

Like either Jushuh or I had ever been on safari. Like either of us had a high-ranking Ministry official as a father.

“Well, trust me, you don’t want to. Now come on.” Bon cupped a hand around the back of my neck and led me toward the western grotto. “We’re gonna be late.”

“We’ve got five minutes,” Jushuh said.

“You don’t understand.” Bon pulled a tightly rolled stick of fireweed from his pocket. “We’re gonna be late.”

“Blood is not enough.” From his lectern, Elder Kohl addressed us while we struggled to arrange spaghetti-string handfuls of rabbit intestines into a pattern that matched the diagram illustrated on the chalkboard at the head of the class. Dressed in the sapphire robes of a Master Elucidator, Elder Kohl worried at his three jade lip rings as he spoke. Two ebony horns rose from either side of his head and curled toward the ceiling. “Blood is nothing without intention. Intention is everything.”

The entire day, I’d been routed by Bon when I tried to sit behind Jushuh in class, been forced to frown from the next row over as Bon passed her notes, offered little massages, made her laugh. At least once during every subject, Bon would turn to me and mime like he was holding heavy melons, the universal sign for TITS!

Which meant that my sharing a workbench with Jushuh during animalurigical studies was a major victory, though due to no guile or strategy of my own, but, rather, Bon’s need to go to the bathroom at least once during the school day to jerk off.

The last seat available when he’d come through the door was in the first row of tables, directly in front of me and Jushuh, next to Rudi Onvl.

I think maybe we all knew something would happen to Rudi. Maybe not as soon as it did but eventually. Some people just walk through life with a mess with Me sign stuck to their back. Usually, you don’t feel too sorry for nerds because, hey, they might be social outcasts now, but when they grow up they’ll be the ones in charge, summoning the deep Terror to hold back the hordes of Heaven and keep our children safe at night while the rest of us struggle to pay our bills. But Rudi wasn’t just a nerd with greasy skin and the physique of a six-foot baby. He was a stupid nerd. The only kid whose grades were worse than Bon’s.

“We channel the blood through intention, and we channel intention through knowledge. Remember, this world does not belong to us, boys and girls. The world belongs to chaos. We are the Voidspawn, the Redkind of the Cold Womb. We are order. And order never takes anything from chaos, merely borrows it. Without knowledge, we are the victims of the chaos. The Mother of Mercy wishes nothing more than that end.”

No one knew much about the Mother of Mercy. Just what the confessors could torture out of her soldier angels. We knew she ruled an empire called Heaven, and that she claimed dominion over all life, that we were all her Children. According to her, nothing had the right to die. She wanted everyone to live forever. Which sounded okay until you saw what she took in exchange for eternal life.

Some people said the Mother of Mercy was the Father of Fear’s own daughter, and that she rebelled against him eons ago when he sent us out of the Chasm to rein in the chaos of life. But that’s not the story I believed.

At the front of the class, Elder Kohl pinned his own rabbit to his workbench with the easy motions of muscle memory, weaving geometric patterns into the entrails. Even with the windows open, the smell in the room was a physical presence, the scent of warm blood thickening the air so you could taste it when you breathed.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Bon hissed at Rudi, his partner’s clumsy fingers lost in a maze of guts.

“I’m doing my best,” said Rudi.

“That’s what your mom always tells me.”

“However,” Elder Kohl said, “with the right training, the right channeling of intent, a nuanced focus of power, perhaps one of you will help bring order to the chaos by donning the hood of a Master Confessor someday. Or as long as you’re dreaming big, the gilt tongue of the Speakers Without Mouths.”

Beside me, Jushuh shivered in the ninety-degree heat. We saw one once, a Speaker Without Mouth. Imagine a man-size wad of used chewing gum squished into a wet black wrapper floating three feet above the ground, warped and twisted by their dealings with the deepest sciences.

Elder Kohl clacked his tongue, murmured something under his breath, drew a long claw down the length of his tongue, then stabbed it through the rabbit’s small purple heart as it burst into flame.

“I can’t believe I forgot the marshmallows,” Bon said.

Without a word in response, Elder Kohl strode casually over to Bon and plucked a hair from his bangs. “Ouch!” Bon said, and rubbed his head. Beside him, Rudi snickered. He shouldn’t have.

Back at his worktable, Elder Kohl murmured something under his breath. The flames consuming the small heart turned a dark green.

“Sacrifice is nothing without intent,” he said to Bon, and held my friend’s hair over the fire. “Power is nothing without control.”

The whole class heard Bon swallow. His eyes, already wide, became saucers when Elder Kohl let the hair fall into the flames.

It took about a minute for the class to start breathing again, once they realized that nothing was going to happen.

“As I said”— Elder Kohl clapped his hands together — “sacrifice is nothing without intention. What was my intention? To scare this young man. But I didn’t need to summon a gender thief or an emotionmutt to do that. I simply needed to imply my intention. Sacrifice. Intention. Power. Control. By the end of this year, you will be seeing these words writ on the backs of your eyelids while you sleep, children.”

The great iron bell rang in the High Tower to announce the end of class. Everyone rose from their chairs.

“Your homework for this week is to bring a live animal to class on Friday! Please remember: Bigger animals don’t mean better grades. It doesn’t have to be a demiverge from beyond the last veil. In fact, it shouldn’t be, because then we’d all be turned inside out. It can be a mouse, as long as it’s alive.”

“Seriously, did you hear Rudi laughing at me? I could’ve died, man. Kohl is sick in the head.”

We sat in my garage, smoking fireweed with the windows open.

“All I heard was you wetting your pants,” I said. “Come on, it’s Jushuh’s turn.”

Jushuh took a drag off the fireweed. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Oh, come on!” Bon said. “You promised. I’ve been waiting all summer to show you guys!”

Jushuh rolled her eyes. “Fine. Go. But nothing, like, freaky. I’m already scarred for life knowing Sam stuck a battery up his butt.”

“When I was five!” I protested.

“All right, I’ll let you off with an easy one.” Bon leaned forward over crossed legs. The concrete was cool beneath us. “If you could steal anything and get away with it, what would it be?”

Jushuh smiled, then bit her lip when Bon leaned closer. Her cheeks reddened, chin quivering. She crossed her arms, trying her best not to answer, to resist the pull of Bon’s blood talent.

I’d spent the whole summer sweating in the garage, bent over my half-built cheapo dog-bone altar with a children’s book in my lap called So You Still Haven’t Discovered Your Blood Talent, trying to set silverfish on fire with the power of my words.

“My neighbor’s jacket!” Jushuh offered through gritted teeth. She looked at Bon expectantly.

“Nope,” Bon said, lips pressed into a hard smile. “You’re lying.” He leaned closer, his eyes becoming two pinpricks of light in a curtain of shadow. “What do you want, Jushuh?”

Jushuh bit her own smile so hard, I thought she’d chew through her lips until she shouted, “Mr. Firehot!” and burst out laughing. She shoved Bon into me as the two of us snickered.

“Excuse me?” I said. “Like, the candy guy?”

Firehots were this candy we all loved as kids. They were sweet and tangy and delicious, but you had to spit them out before you got to their lethally spicy centers or you wouldn’t be able to taste anything for a week. Mr. Firehot was a cartoon guy on the candy’s wrapper with a red face, sharp teeth, and fire for a tongue.

“I had a huge crush on Mr. Firehot when I was a kid, okay?” Jushuh said. “Whatever.”

“You know he’s not a real person, right?” I asked.

“We’re totally gonna get married someday, so shut up!” Jushuh smiled, her breath heavy, like she’d just sprinted down the block. She rubbed her temples. “That’s so creepy. I can’t believe I let you do that.”

But her smile said something else. Whatever it said, she changed her face when she saw me watching her. A little emotional striptease I wasn’t meant to see.

“All right, Sam,” she said, “your turn. And make it good, Bon.”

“Mr. Firehot good?”

She shoved him again, wearing that striptease smile. “If you ever use those three words in a sentence again, I will throw you in the Chasm!”

I never mastered that way of talking to girls where you were making fun of them but really you were flirting with them. I never got the I can’t believe you just said that love shove, the way you do when you’re young and need an excuse to touch someone you like.

“You guys need some privacy?” I said.

“Would you mind?” Bon said.

“Shut up!” Jushuh said, and gave him another love shove.

“Come on, man, my turn,” I said. “Don’t make me use the battery on you.”

“You really want a second try?”

“At your talent, not the battery.” Leaning back against the Mom wall, I took a drag off the fireweed and lifted my chin to Bon. “Bring it.”

“All right,” he said, and flashed a wicked smile. “Who do you like at school?”

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

At once, my head felt heavy, like it was filling up with sand. I could feel my friend’s new talent working on me. It had developed over the summer like Jushuh’s sweater melons. Blood came to a slow simmer behind my eyes, the muscles in my legs going tight as I fought the urge to blurt out the name of the girl seated directly across from me.

“Who do you like at school?” Bon asked.

My breathing went ragged. Then stopped all together.

Jushuh’s face darkened. “Bon . . .”

“Tell me.”

“Bon, stop. He doesn’t want to tell you.”

“But he does want to,” Bon said. Beads of sweat dappled his forehead, his own breath shallow. “He has to.”

Cold needles stabbed at my heart. My throat closed, jaw rigid. A sharp crack! rang through my mouth as a tooth chipped.

“Bon, for real, turn it off.” Jushuh pulled on Bon’s arm.

The world became a fluid thing, shimmering and unreal, filled with stars that swam through my pinhole vision. My heart slowed to a murmur, a mere rumor of life.

The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, on my side, looking up at Jushuh kissing Bon.

The world came back into focus. I gasped, gulped down all the air in the smoky garage. Put my hand on my heart to make sure it was still beating.

What I saw when Jushuh pulled away was Bon’s grin. Just this knife slash of pleasure cut into his face, and the way he wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand. Like she was this overripe fruit he’d just eaten down to the pit.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I didn’t do it for you,” Jushuh said. She’d saved me, broke his concentration with a kiss.

“I was talking to Sam,” Bon said.

I didn’t realize Jushuh was leaving until she had her hand on the doorknob. I opened my mouth to say something, but she was already gone.

“Let her go, dude,” Bon said. “My dad told me that if they could weaponize the hormones of teenage girls, the War would be over tomorrow.” Bon dragged on the nub of fireweed until his fingertips blackened, hissing as he shook out the pain. “You all right, man?”

I nodded, still trying to swallow my lungs back into my chest.

“Hey, I was just having fun,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, you know, kill you or whatever. I didn’t know you liked her that much.”

Liar.

When I was a kid and I’d come home with a scraped knee or a torn shirt or a tongue swelled up to the size of my foot because I couldn’t swallow the spider Bon had dared me to eat, my dad would always ask why I was friends with him. I never had an answer while Bon was still alive. But I do now. When people ask, I tell them he was like fireworks. You know they’re dangerous. You’ve heard all the stories about what happens to kids who play with them. But you can’t help yourself. Fireworks don’t mean to blow up your hand. At least, you don’t think they do.

“Whoa, dude.” Bon rose unsteadily to his feet and hobbled to the rear of the garage. I followed. “Is that what I think it is?”

The chair was made of iron and angel bone.

“It’s my grandfather’s old confessor’s chair,” I said. “They gave it to him when he retired.”

“It’s so small.” Bon stared at it reverently. Held out his hand to touch it, changed his mind. “I wonder how many people died in it.”

“None,” I said. Grandfather had been famous for never losing a prisoner. He could keep an angel alive and healthy for years, draining every last ounce of its faith, until its soul had corroded from the inside out, leaving only an insensate shell that dreamed of death.

I asked my grandfather once, what it was like, torturing an angel. For a second I thought I was in trouble because we’d been at dinner and everyone had stopped eating and just stared at me like I’d taken a dump in the middle of the table.

They are like children, Granddad had said. Children who love you. So, it’s like killing your children.

That’s what the Mother of Mercy did, in exchange for eternal life in her Empire of Heaven. She made you a child. All the currency of experience you worked so hard to earn through living and growing up and learning how to be you, all the joy, the regret, the pain, desire, fulfillment, love and despair and everything else that made you you: that was the price she asked. Only . . . she didn’t ask. So we fought. For a million years we’d fought.

“Hey, I just wanna say, that really sucked about your mom,” he said to the chair.

“Thanks,” I said to the chair.

“I wanted to go to the funeral, you know?”

“I know.”

“But, I mean, my dad.”

“I know.”

We stared at the chair for a long time, having the same conversation we’d had a thousand times in our heads but had never vocalized:

My dad’s still mad at your dad for stealing your mom away when they were teenagers, Bon wouldn’t say.

My dad’s still mad that my mom cheated on him with your dad when they worked at the plant together, I wouldn’t reply.

My dad’s still angry she went back to your dad.

My dad’s still angry your dad became his boss, and then his boss’s boss, and then his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s whatever. What does your dad do anyway?

I don’t know, some important junk with the War.

My dad still doesn’t want me hanging out with you.

My dad still doesn’t want me hanging out with you.

Screw ’em.

Totally.

After a time, Bon reached out a hand, tried to touch the chair again, and again found himself unable.

“Dude, you know who we need to get in this thing?” he said, grinning that fireworks grin. “Rudi.”

That night I stayed up in the garage reading So You Still Haven’t Discovered Your Blood Talent. Dad worked nights at the plant, so it wasn’t a big deal if I stayed up late. He’d never made it past First Novice Confessor, which basically meant he cleaned up the cells once the Master Confessors were done for the day and their prisoners were dragged off by their clipped wings to be healed while the faith their confessors had tortured out of them was piped down to Refining to light our streets and heat our water and make our cars run.

I spent all night in that garage — or what passed for a night with Brother and Other refusing to set completely for another few weeks — staring at that stupid book. I knew every god call in the book, but I couldn’t summon so much as a minor fecal imp to my altar. I even cut my hand on Granddad’s old chair, just to see what would happen, which was nothing. The chair was cold, though. Colder than anything in that sweltering garage had a right to be.

In the end, I gave up and went upstairs to my bedroom to polish the horn and call it a night.

When we were kids, Jushuh used to come over and spend the night without permission. Mine or my parents’. She used to sneak in my window and crawl into bed with me, shoving me over so she could have the warm spot. I don’t know when it started. Back when her dad was still around. I never asked which were the bad times, when her dad was drinking or when he wasn’t. But when he didn’t, or when he did, she would come over and not say anything. Just lie next to me and hold my hand, looking for cuts on my fingers because I was clumsy and just always cut myself.

When she found a cut, she’d put that finger in her mouth. She didn’t suck on it or anything. Just stuck in her mouth for about a minute. Then spat it out all covered in spit.

“You need to wash your hands more,” was all she’d say, every time, while I held my healed finger close to my face, smelling her spit. It smelled sour. It took a lot to convince Jushuh to brush her teeth.

She stopped coming to my window the summer Mom died. I still leave the window open at night.

Some people said the Mother of Mercy was actually the Father of Fear’s mother, and that it was he who rebelled against her, that he created us to undo the chaos of creation she had invoked and inflicted on existence. But that’s not the story I believed.

Chili for breakfast.

Chili.

For breakfast.

The look of betrayal I gave my cereal bowl that morning could have boiled water if I had a pyromancer’s blood talent.

“You don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it.” Across the table, Dad propped himself over his own bowl of chili, still dressed in the jumpsuit he wore at the plant, its armpits pitted out with sweat, the cuffs saturated with a shift’s worth of blood spatters and other dark stains you could only identify by the smell.

I asked him once, maybe the year before, why he didn’t change clothes when he got home, because I mean he stank, right? His answer was to strip down to nothing but his scars, of which he had a ton, right there at the breakfast table. Not much of an answer, if you ask me, but I never asked again. Not because I didn’t want to see him naked again (which I didn’t), but those scars? I mean, wow. And I thought my dad was strict. And, yeah, of course I thought about what Granddad had said about torturing your children, so shut up.

“I miss Mom’s eggs,” I said. Mom had this way of taking a single turtle egg and turning it into a feast for three when money was tight. She did this thing with spices and stonecat milk. It was amazing.

Dad said nothing to this. Of course he said nothing. He didn’t even keep a picture of Mom in the house anymore except inside the top drawer of his nightstand. He wasn’t a husband anymore. And he’d never been a dad.

“Why can’t you heal yourself?”

All through her illness, I kept asking Mom the same thing. My constant asking would have driven her up the wall if she could have gotten out of bed, all wrapped in gauze and reeking of the flowers that had buried their roots deep within her, green stems bursting out of the open sores on her arms and legs and stomach and cheeks in explosions of violet and marigold, crimson and cornflower blue.

“Why can’t you just make yourself better? You’re a healer. Why can’t you just heal yourself?”

Every time I asked, she’d just reach out a hand and touch my face.

“Your horns are coming in,” she said once, toward the end. “They’re going to be so beautiful. Just like your grandfather’s.”

“Granddad always said I was gonna be just like him when I grew up.”

Mom gave me this look then, this smile I couldn’t mistake for anything but relief. “No, you won’t.”

Bon had Rudi cornered when I got to animalurgical studies. A crowd of students had gathered around them.

“I asked you a question,” Bon said. “Have you ever seen your mom naked?”

“Y-yes,” Rudi said, the word pried from between his teeth. An eruption of applause and laughter as Bon took a quick bow.

“When?”

“I-I don’t know. When I was little.”

After dumping my backpack, I made my way over to the crowd. I wondered where Elder Kohl was, then noticed him standing right next to me, arms crossed, staring through narrowed, analytical eyes at the two boys. Bullying wasn’t exactly allowed, but there wasn’t a really clear definition of it, either, considering what they were training us to do. Let me put it this way: When it came to breaking the rules at my school, you got a lot of points for style.

“Okay,” Bon said. “How ’bout your dad? You ever see him naked?”

Rudi’s eyes grew wide, red-rimmed. He bit his lips, squeezed his eyes shut. He had a horn coming in. A single nub protruding from the center of his forehead. Or maybe it was just a big zit. “Yes.”

Bon leaned closer. For a second, I thought he was going to kiss Rudi. “When?”

Rudi whispered his answer. “All the time.”

Damn.

More cheers, laughter, clapping. Bon leaned against the wall, then slumped to the floor, doubled over with his hands on his guts. I thought he was hurt, then realized that he was laughing so hard that he couldn’t stand, tears streaming down his face.

At some point, someone reached down to help Bon up. Bon waved them off with a bandaged hand, four pink fingers poking from a cocoon of gauze. I squinted at his hand, thinking I must have counted wrong. I hadn’t. Three fingers and a thumb. The pinkie was gone. The whole thing. Beside me, Elder Kohl studied my friend, and his bandaged hand, for a long time.

“Do you know what you’re gonna do for Transgression Day?” Jushuh asked.

“No,” I said. “You?”

We sat on my roof, watching the War. Brother had set, and Other was low on the horizon. A thick front of thunderheads covered the sky. Forks of lightning split the clouds where angels swung flaming swords of Truth at our own Void masters, who opened gaping mouths of space-time to swallow the Enemy whole. About once a week the evening sky would tear open, and a host of angels would swarm out to try to do battle against us. This kind of thing happened all over, not just where I lived. Our city had never fallen to the Enemy, but other places weren’t so lucky.

“I don’t know.” Jushuh shrugged. “Probably just swipe something like last year.”

It was always a struggle, picking a transgression, another stone to tie to your soul in the hope that when you died, your soul would be heavy enough to weigh you down and keep you from getting sucked up and turned into a Fatherless Child.

Growing up, whenever I got busted for sneaking cookies or staying up past my bedtime or something, I would ask my parents why, if transgressions were good, if doing bad stuff was good, why we couldn’t do bad stuff all the time. I mean, why was being bad bad instead of good?

My dad would always say that transgressions weren’t good, just necessary. That’s why we could only do them once a year. Why we all had to wear leashes and muzzles when we were young, until we learned to behave. He sounded just like my teachers when he said how life was chaos, and how we, the Redkind, had been sent by the Father of Fear to rein in that chaos, and that if we all committed transgressions all the time, it would just be another form of chaos.

“I think I’m gonna kill Rudi,” Bon said, plopping himself down on the roof between me and Jushuh. That guy always knew when Jushuh was over.

“That’s not funny,” said Jushuh.

“I’m not laughing,” said Bon.

“I mean it,” said Jushuh. “That’s really not funny.”

“I totally agree,” said Bon.

An explosion shook the sky. A burst of white lines jagged through the black clouds like cracks in the pavement of the world. The house shook under our butts. Bon and I laughed nervously, exchanged scared smiles. Jushuh glared at Bon.

“Say you’re not gonna do it.”

Bon smirked at Jushuh. “What do you mean? I’m totally gonna do it.”

“That’s really not funny,” Jushuh said, her face painted the brightest color of Don’t mess with me. “Say you’re not gonna —”

“You guys,” I said, rising to my feet. The sandpaper feel of the roof scratched at the soles of my bare feet. The air smelled burned. “Look!”

Bon and Jushuh followed my pointing finger to where a rain of feathers fell from the sky, a million points of light tumbling out of the black. They fell around our feet, on our shoulders, in our hair. Weightless needles as long as your forearm trailing a halo of pearl-colored light as they fell.

“Angel feathers.” I don’t know who said it. Maybe all of us.

Bon picked one off his arm, dropped it with a bark of surprise, sucking his scorched finger over a smile. “It shocked me!”

“Ow!” Jushuh howled, shaking the pain off her fingers where she’d brushed a feather off her arm.

“Wait a sec,” Bon said. He skittered toward the edge of the roof, then out into the tree we used to get up there.

“What’s he doing?” I stepped closer to Jushuh, her whole body glowing with fallen needles.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I am totally afraid to move.”

“Seriously. Whatever you do, don’t sneeze.”

“Don’t make me laugh!” Jushuh giggled, then cursed the sizzle of feathers that shook loose from her shoulders and tumbled down her arms. “I mean it!”

“Check it out!” Bon scrabbled back onto the roof.

“Oh, god!” Jushuh howled, clapped a hand over her mouth, and winced at the thousand tiny shocks that assailed her when feathers cascaded from where they’d settled all over her body.

Wearing my father’s work gloves, a pair of black underwear, and nothing else, Bon held out a glowing white feather.

“What are you —” I began.

“Check it out . . .” Bon said, and drew the tip of the feather across his chest. My friend sucked air sharply between his teeth as his skin made a popping, sizzling noise, the fine gold hair around his nipples fizzling into ash. In about thirty seconds he’d burned the words bon rocks! into his chest.

“You. Are. Insane.” Jushuh’s tone was sharp, but she couldn’t shake the grin off her face, try as she might.

“Also,” Bon said, “if you put it in your mouth, your whole face goes numb.”

“Your brain is numb,” I said.

“Come on.” Bon pointed at me with his feather. “Seriously, chicks dig scars.”

Bon was giving me that tell the truth look he got when he was using his blood talent. I’d heard some confessors could Persuade. I wondered if Jushuh would think I was more mature or something with a scar. She must have known what I was thinking, because she did that rolling-her-eyes-with-her-whole-body thing, head lolled back, hands in the air, never more beautiful.

“You’re seriously gonna do this?” she asked me.

“I dunno.”

“Stupidity is a germ and it’s spreading!” She laughed.

“Come on,” Bon said. “It fades in, like, a week. My dad zaps my mom all the time. He likes to zap her butt when she bends over. No wonder she hates him.”

A weird silence settled over the roof then. I looked at Jushuh, who was looking at Bon, who was looking at his feather, holding it to his forearm, where the skin was turning black.

“Bon, stop,” she said. When he didn’t reply, she smacked his hand away, sending the feather flitting to the ground.

They exchanged a look I couldn’t read, though the air between their eyes crackled like Bon’s skin did when he held the feather to it. I would’ve given my left foot for her to look at me with that same intensity.

Without a word of good-bye, Jushuh slid down the roof and disappeared into the tree. Bon and I watched her hop the fence at the far end of my backyard.

“Are you really gonna kill Rudi?” I asked.

“You remember in your garage, when I was using my talent?” he said, ignoring my question, his eyes fixed on the place where she’d jumped the fence.

“Yeah, I remem —”

Bon turned to me with a grin. “She totally snuck into my room that night.”

“What?” My heart dropped into my guts.

“She does it, like, all the time.” My friend’s eyes had grown wide and hungry, like he was eating my attention. “She started doing it when your mom, you know, got sick. Then when she went off to the Eastern Massif for the summer, I figured it was all done, right? I didn’t hear squat from her the whole time, no It was nice while it lasted or anything. But then, like, the first night she was back, she snuck over. I even locked the window once, maybe a week ago, just to see. Girl still got in. She doesn’t even talk to me. Not one word. Just comes in my window and starts pulling my clothes off. It’s crazy.”

At least, that’s what I think he said. Crazy as it sounds, I wasn’t really paying attention toward the end.

One of Bon’s nipples was gone.

The left one was missing. A long slash stood in its place, crudely stitched together. Like he’d done it himself. I tried not to stare at it but couldn’t help it.

He saw me seeing him. And smiled. And held out the angel feather.

“We’ve gotta get Rudi in that chair.”

That Friday when I came down for breakfast, I put my bowl of breakfast chili, or chilereal as it had come to be known, in the trash can, bowl and all. Right in front of my dad. It wasn’t the chili I was protesting. I mean, I know that now, and I sort of knew it then. It was my complete and utter lack of talent that I hated. It was the fog in my head from staying up all night, every night, working on the altar and practicing from my stupid kids’ book. It was the way Jushuh looked at Bon when she didn’t think I was watching.

“You have no idea how hard I work,” Dad said, his own mouth full of the hot stink of ground meat, beans, cumin.

“I know you wouldn’t have to work as hard if you got a promotion,” I said, headed toward the door.

“I put a roof over your horns.”

“Grandpa put this roof over our horns. But, hey, they say talent skips a generation, right? So maybe by the time I’ve got a Ministry position like Bon’s dad, we can afford to fix the leaks.”

I kept expecting him to do the almost-hitting-me thing he sometimes did when I mentioned Bon’s dad. To grab me by the shirt and almost do what he never did and would never do. At company picnics, it always gave me this weird tickle to watch my Dad suck up to Bon’s dad while they pretended to like each other. They were the same age, but my dad looked twenty years older. His hair was gray and his horns were brittle, like they would shatter if you hit them right. Bon’s dad barely looked older than Bon himself, except for his dad gut. His hair was all gold blond, his curled ram horns a glossy pearl color.

But all my father said to me was, “I don’t want you hanging out with Bon anymore.”

“Come on,” I said, trying to do Jushuh’s roll-my-eyes-with-my-whole-body thing and totally failing. “You’ve been saying that for forever. You and Bon’s dad hate each other. I get it. Mom told me.”

I watched my father get up from the table, fish my bowl of chili out of the trash, and take it to the counter. “He’s dangerous,” he said, like I hadn’t even mentioned Mom.

“He’s your boss.”

“Not Elder Dur Suun Kyyver.” Dad took a steel thermos down from a cabinet and poured the chili into it. “His son. Your friend Bon. He’s dangerous.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t —”

“Yes, you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about.” He screwed the top onto the thermos and stuck it in the fridge. “Power can’t be created, Samaeul. If a man has power, that means he took it from something else. He took the blood of a stag or a hound, or he tortured out an angel’s faith and used the old words of the deep science to change it and trade it for power. That’s legitimate. That’s order. That’s why we’re here. But self-mutilation is a shortcut to power, and a bad one. You’re giving more than you get. More than you can possibly know. Until it’s too late to get it back.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Dad weighed the thermos in his hand, spoke to its brushed metal surface.

“Because your friend Bon is in trouble.”

His attention shifted to my face, to my reddening cheeks, the ache in my clenching jaw.

“You can’t hang out with him anymore. This is not a subject for debate.”

How bad is it that all I could think of was Bon hanging out with Jushuh without me? Not that I couldn’t be with Bon, but that I couldn’t get in his way with Jushuh anymore. Not that I was doing much good in that department. Which was probably at the root of the whole thing.

“I’m saying this for your own good,” he said.

“No, you’re saying this for your own good,” I said. Oh great, I was gonna cry.

“Look —” he tried.

I fled. Listened hard as I stormed down the block for him to call after me, which he never did. Even when I was miles away, walking past the Chasm, I was still listening.

“’Sup, brother.”

Bon was just coming out of his house when I passed it. The city’s nicest houses had a view of the Chasm, and Bon’s house commanded one of the best.

“You all right, man?” he said. “You look like you spent the night in a confessor’s chair.”

“You should talk,” I said. Bon looked ragged. Like he hadn’t slept in a week and hadn’t eaten in twice that long. His top front teeth were missing when he smiled. There were cuts on his arms. Countless and tiny. Like a swarm of razor blades had attacked him.

“Top of the world,” he said. “For real. You have no idea. Here, check this out.”

Bon pulled back his collar. A half-dozen bite marks pocked his lower neck and shoulder in concentric rings. “What is that?”

“Jushuh. She’s totally a biter.”

I recoiled, like he’d spat at me.

Bon laughed, ate up my reaction like a cheeseburger. “Awesome, right?” He leaned close to my face, eyes hungry like he was about to take another bite of whatever I was feeling. “Dude, you should see the bruises she —”

“Hello, Samaeul.”

Bon’s face soured. Behind him stood his dad, though he could have been my friend’s older brother. Elder Dur Suun Kyyver wore the gold robe of a Ministry Elder, with red brocade cuffs and a high collar to show that he had achieved the rarefied post as a Master Confessor. Blue brocade meant healing. Purple, for combat in the War. Above them all were the Speakers Without Mouths, but their robes were black, not for dramatic effect, but because they sweated horror the color of shadows while the Abyss wrung them like living rags, and it stained whatever they wore. “How’s your family?”

Bon flinched, offered a look of apology.

“We’re fine, Elder,” I said. Thanks for asking. You’re looking especially sinister today. My dad would throw me in the Chasm if he knew I was talking to you.

“I was so sorry to hear of your mother’s passing.”

“Yeah. Me, too,” I said. Knew I shouldn’t antagonize him, but couldn’t help it. Bon’s dad was one of the most powerful men in the city.

“She was a beautiful woman. Everybody thought so. Immensely powerful. For your sake, I hope you are your mother’s son, rather than your father’s. If you got even a fraction of her power, or better yet your grandfather’s, you’d be the most fortunate boy. Did you know your grandfather’s name became a curse in the angelic language? Do you think anyone will remember either of your names, boys?”

Without another word, Bon took my shoulder and steered me away from his house. His dad watched us go. Probably saw my hands making fists so hard they shook.

“Sorry my dad’s such a tool,” said Bon when we were a block away. “Come on, I’ll let you kiss my bite marks. It’ll be like kissing Jushuh, only less smelly. Girl really needs to brush more often.”

“Whatever,” I said, trying not to laugh and scream at the same time.

I almost asked him if he used his talent on Jushuh to get her to be with him, if he had gotten that good. I wondered if he’d teach me. Hated myself for wondering.

“Why can’t you just switch with Dad?”

I knelt at her bedside, my hand as close to her own bandaged palm as it dared, her body swaddled in bandages from the latest round of burn therapy. Her skin should’ve smelled scorched, like cooked meat, because that’s what it was. But it smelled fresh, like dirt and tilled earth, like life. Chaotic, uncontrollable, insatiable life.

Mom sighed. Did she know where she was? That I was with her? Her breath reeked of flowers.

“Bon told me how it works,” I said. I had a basic idea of how it worked, but my friend had clued me in to the whole deal, how a confessor cuts and burns the angels and whatever, killing their hope and siphoning their faith until they’re about to die. Then the healer comes in to heal the prisoner up again. They have a couple of dogs with them, or a deer, and the healer draws the life out of the animal and gives it to the prisoner, whether the prisoner wants it or not. That’s how my mom met my dad. “Why can’t you do it?”

I made the mistake of touching her arm with the tip of my finger. She stifled a moan.

“Why can’t you just . . .” I scrubbed my tears away with my fist. “Why can’t you just use Dad like one of those animals and heal yourself?”

Her answer was to touch my face, to run her bandaged fingers through my hair. It made her cry to touch me, to touch anything, but she held my hand and never let go until she was gone.

Some people said the Mother of Mercy was the Father of Fear’s twin sister, that she is his opposite, that war between the two of them, between life and death, between chaos and order, is the only True Order. But that’s not the story I believed.

Our animal didn’t have to be expensive. Most of us brought a mouse or a lizard or a snake if we were lucky. I brought a roach. I’d found it in a kitchen cabinet, looking for food. I don’t know if it had been more confused by the empty pantry or the paper bag I stuck him in.

“Nice,” Bon said to my roach. “If my teddy bear gets a hangnail, I’ll ask you to heal it.”

I didn’t respond. Hadn’t said a word to him since we got to school. Beside him, Rudi took his seat. Bon snorted.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” he murmured. “I have an angel to torture.”

Bon took his seat beside Rudi, who did his best to disappear as Bon set his backpack on the worktable in front of them. Something moved inside it. Something big. I kept waiting for Bon to say something about it, some joke to bait Rudi into asking what was in the bag. But he didn’t say anything. Which, really, should have been warning enough.

“It’s okay,” Jushuh said when she sat down and saw my roach. Her own mouse scratched for purchase at the walls of the glass jar she’d brought it in. “Elder Kohl will understand.”

Bon leaned back to speak over his shoulder. “Yeah, we all know your granddad’s money is gone.”

Jushuh leaned forward and tagged Bon on the shoulder. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Come on, Sam knows I’m just messing with him.”

“Why am I even your friend?” Jushuh said.

“Didn’t I give you enough reasons last night?”

Jushuh gasped, gave up a furious smile, cheeks red.

I felt like such an idiot, sitting there, pretending to look way down into the bottom of my backpack for something so Jushuh would think I hadn’t heard. Bon wasn’t wrong, though. My dad was drowning in debt after everything we tried to save Mom.

As soon as class began, Elder Kohl launched into a lecture on the perils of self-mutilation, occasionally looking up from his notes to glare at Bon, who pretended to be asleep, bare arms crossed over his chest, covered in those thousand tiny cuts.

After the lecture, we all had to bleed. Nothing huge. Just a pinprick. We had to do it ourselves, then our lab partners would try to heal us by sacrificing whatever animal we brought to class. It was through this kind of experimentation that we were meant to discover our blood talents.

“Do you want me to do the cut?” I asked Jushuh when it was her turn. I sucked my thumb where I’d cut it. It still stung, though Jushuh had already healed it. My roach hadn’t done squat for me. Jushuh healed me on her own. Put my finger in her mouth like old times, turning me bright red as my heart tried to break out of my chest.

“No,” she said, and drew a long cut down the center of her palm. She didn’t cuss or cry. Merely held her concentration on the cut while I held out her jar. “What are you doing? You’re supposed to heal me.”

“You do it,” I said. “There’s no way I’m gonna heal that.” I pointed to the blood running down her forearm.

Jushuh gave me this look, and I still don’t know what it meant, though I’ve narrowed it down to either disappointment or gratitude. She reached inside the jar for the mouse. Didn’t pull it out. Just squeezed that squeaking thing so hard, her fist vibrated while the wound on her hand sealed itself up in a wisp of smoke. She hissed through her teeth at the brief searing pain.

“Wow,” I said, unaware that I was speaking aloud. “That was —”

A piercing, agonized scream filled the room. Every head in class jerked toward the front row, where Rudi slumped doubled over in his chair, both hands pressed against his right eye. A clear, viscous fluid ran between his fingers, down his cheek. Beside him, Bon’s shoulders shook in a silent laugh. He snorted, tried to hold it in. On the workbench between them lay a discarded dissection blade.

“Jeez, man,” he said, “it was only a suggestion.”

Rudi slid to the floor, blubbering. Jushuh was already at his side, an arm wrapped around Rudi’s shoulders, telling him to let her see. I don’t know how she got him to pull his hands away from his face. Long spiderweb strands of ocular jelly clung to the kid’s fingers. A collective groan rose up from the class. Bon was laughing so hard, he couldn’t breathe.

“You did this,” Jushuh told him.

“Hey, it’s cool,” Bon said. He wiped a tear from his eye and opened his backpack. “It just so happens, I brought medicine.”

From his backpack, Bon drew out Rudi’s cat. I’d seen it before. Rudi actually had a shirt with a picture of his cat on it. Yeah, I know. And while I can’t say for sure that his mom made him wear it, I should certainly hope so for his sake. But anyway. The orange stripes, white boots, stub of a tail. It was unmistakable. Rudi’s remaining eye went wide, the other a shrunken, puckered hole. His mouth moved, no doubt to ask how Bon had gotten ahold of his damn cat, but no sound came.

Jushuh also said nothing. Didn’t even bother to wipe the tears from her eyes before she flattened the squirming cat down onto the table with one hand as her other hand picked up the knife we’d used to cut ourselves.

“No!” Rudi cried. He shot up from the floor, arms out. But the cat’s neck was already open. Jushuh dropped the knife and grabbed the back of Rudi’s hair with her free hand. She held the cat up high. Its blood drizzled down onto Rudi’s head, pooling in his punctured socket like runny pancake syrup while he wailed. When the drizzle became a drip, Jushuh dropped the cat, stuck her thumb in her own mouth, then thrust it into the wounded eye. Rudi screamed when the thumb entered his socket, then louder when the cat’s blood burned up in a bright, heatless flash.

“Don’t open that eye for a week,” Jushuh said, halfway to the door by then, both hands covered in rose-colored ash.

“Look at it this way, Rudi,” Bon said. The door slammed behind Jushuh. “Now you can cry for your cat with both eyes.”

In the middle of the kitchen table, waiting for me when I got home, was a can of chili.

I didn’t even take off my backpack. Just took the can out to the garage where Dad had stockpiled the stuff like the world was running out, a mountain of chili I was sure he came out there to worship like the Father of Fear incarnate con carne.

I opened every can. Dumped them on the half-finished altar and burned it all. I watched the small flames char the meat and thought about Jushuh and Rudi and Bon and Mom and Dad and everything else. I was more worried about Jushuh than Bon. Whatever Bon was becoming, it looked like a one-way ticket. But I wouldn’t let him take Jushuh. Whatever sex or love or whatever had started between them over the summer, he was using it like a confessor’s tool to manipulate her. I’d tried to ditch him after school, but he’d caught up with me on the way home and regaled me with details about how Jushuh had “abandonment junk” that made her want guys like him instead of guys like me, which he always followed up with “no offense” as I squirmed.

The chili didn’t burn for that long. Maybe twenty minutes. I opened the windows and made sure there was nothing else nearby. I was staring at the fire, lost in the flames, when something touched my leg. I jumped, screamed. Looked down and let out a smaller yip of surprise.

Maybe Rudi’s cat had smelled the meat cooking from whatever hell he’d tumbled into. Maybe I’d done something right with the altar that I wasn’t aware of. Whatever the cause, he huddled there on the concrete floor, looking like complete crap. Scraggly fur, eyes glossed over with a cataract of death, shivering in the stifling heat. It didn’t look like it was in pain, but it didn’t look happy. It just looked kind of confused. Like it was lost.

I’d taken it from animalurgical studies. Stuck it in my backpack for whatever reason, I don’t know. It had seemed like the right thing to do. I couldn’t let it just get thrown away. Now that its soul had been incinerated to heal Rudi’s eye, the cat’s body wasn’t of any use, even if it was still alive.

My first instinct when it came back to life was to throw the cat on the fire. Maybe some use would come of it, even without a soul. Some power or something, I don’t know. It was freaking me out in a really good way that I’d done something right, even by accident. I mean, holy crap, I was an amateur necromancer. But instead of capitalizing on my success, I found myself on the garage floor, legs folded beneath me, stroking the cat’s patchy fur.

When it purred, the slash in its neck whistled.

I kept waking up that night expecting it to be morning, for Other to have set and Brother to have risen, expecting to hear my dad stomping up the stairs to throw me out of bed to force-feed me the ashes of the chili pyre until it was gone.

When Brother had come up but my father still hadn’t, I went downstairs to find him scraping the chili from the bottom of a can and spooning a sliver of the cold gunk into his mouth. At first, I thought it was a new can he’d bought at the store. Then I saw the row of maybe ten cans lined up on the counter, scraped clean. The ones I’d left on the garage floor.

And, yeah, I get it now that I wasn’t pissed at the chili. That I just wanted my dad to react to something, even if he couldn’t react to Mom. Or maybe it’s not that complex after all. Maybe I was just really tired of chili.

“Bon’s dad is having a Transgression party tonight,” I said. Every year, on Transgressor’s Eve, Bon’s dad invited half the city to his house for this legendary party that began all formal but devolved into yelling and fighting and taking their clothes off, all in the name of committing a transgression just after midnight, on Transgression Day. “I’m going.”

I wasn’t going for Bon. Bon was crazy and going crazier. I was going for Jushuh. I didn’t want her to be alone with him on the one night of the year where you were supposed to do something bad.

I don’t know what Dad was looking for at the bottom of that chili can, but he wasn’t finding it. He didn’t say crap. Just kept scraping at the bottom of that can.

Stalking toward the door, I snarled under my breath: “I wish Mom traded you and saved herself.”

“I know how you feel.”

My shoes made this little squeak on the linoleum in the foyer.

“I asked her to do it,” he said to the can. “She could have. Your mother was the greatest healer of her generation.”

I didn’t know what to say. I never asked Mom to trade me in order to save herself. What did that say about me? Was that bad? Was that selfish? Or was that a normal thing?

“She said no, of course,” Dad said. “I knew she’d say no. But it didn’t stop me from begging her to give you up and heal herself.”

You ever see someone do something to themselves that you shouldn’t see? Not undressing or anything, but giving themselves a shot or sitting on the toilet? It’s like they’re doing something they’re not supposed to, something unnatural. Imagine that times a million, and you’ll get close to what it was like watching Rudi beat himself up.

“Now your face,” Bon said.

Rudi balled up his fist and popped himself in the nose. A cry went up from the circle of students that surrounded the two boys in the hallway. Laughter, now applause. Bon was in his element. Unfortunately for Rudi, so was he.

“Stop it, Bon,” Jushuh said. “Come on.”

“You punch like such a girl.” Bon shook his head. “Come on, break your freakin’ nose.”

Rudi wiped at the blood and snot that ran down his lips, smeared it in a streak across his cheek, then clocked himself in the nose.

“Stop it!” Jushuh may have said. It was hard to hear over the cheering.

“Harder!” Bon said. They all said.

Another muffled smack as Rudi punched himself in the nose.

“HARDER!”

I don’t know if it was his hand or his nose, but something made a wet crack in the center of Rudi’s face the next time he popped himself one. Twin ribbons of blood ejaculated out over his chin. Jushuh was crying now, jerking my arm and screaming for me to stop Bon before he told Rudi to kill himself. But I was transfixed. Mesmerized. Couldn’t believe Bon could do this. Where had this power come from? What had he done to himself to get it?

“Now your balls,” Bon said. “Punch yourself in the balls.”

Rudi did as he was told, swung the pink pendulum of his fist down between his legs. A strangled woof escaped his throat. His knees buckled and he doubled over, threw up, collapsed onto the ground to uproarious applause.

Glancing back at the crowd, I wasn’t surprised to find three Elders off to the side, watching, arms folded into the sleeves of their robes. Occasionally, one would murmur something to the other.

“Pull your pants down.”

Through a lens of tears, Rudi shot Bon a look of animal fear. He tried to say something, but he must have bitten his tongue because the only thing that came out of his mouth was blood.

Bon bent over Rudi. From where I stood, I could feel the fever heat of spent power my friend gave off. It was like standing next to an oven.

“Pull your pants down,” he said.

Sobbing, Rudi unbuckled his pants to a sound track of hysterical laughter.

“Underwear, too.”

Oh, man.

All at once, the laughter died. You could hear a pin drop. Or a pair of underwear. No one spoke. No one breathed.

Lying on his side, Rudi had gotten his tighty-whities down around his ankles before they got so tangled that he couldn’t kick them free. Bon leaned into Rudi’s face so their foreheads almost touched.

“Now make a fist, and sh —”

I don’t remember seeing Jushuh tackle Bon. My only memory is of them on the ground, Jushuh punching and slapping and clawing at Bon. For about a second. Then Bon was on top of her, holding her hands to her chest as she bucked and kicked.

“Take off your clothes,” he said, by turns laughing and snarling. By now he was baking. Waves of heat rippled the air around him.

Jushuh fought like a wildcat, thrashing under him.

“Take off your clothes and dance.”

And then I was on him. My turn to snort and huff and struggle before I chipped a tooth on the concrete when Bon flipped me over and shoved my face to the ground.

“What’s your deal, bro?!” Bon shouted, half laughing and half pissed. “You should be thanking me. I was doing you a favor. I was about to make your dreams come true.”

Bon leaned down and breathed in my ear, pointed my face at Jushuh crying against a row of lockers. “Why did you think she was with me? ’Cause she needed somebody, and you were too scared to touch her.”

I think that’s what he said. That’s what the people there told me he said. I didn’t hear him. Didn’t hear anything. I was too focused on the shirt I’d torn from Bon’s body, and what it showed me. His body was a battlefield. Trenches of flesh gouged out of his chest. Countless razor-blade cuts. Unnatural dents and crevices pocked his torso where pieces of Bon had been removed and traded in dark transactions.

Somebody broke us up. Took the four of us four different directions and called our parents. When my dad couldn’t come pick me up, Elder Kohl drove me home saying I didn’t look so good. Was I eating? Were things okay at home? Because if there was anything I ever needed to tell anyone, about how things were at home, I could tell him. I knew that, right?

I gave no answers. Couldn’t believe this was the same man who’d stood by and watched one of his students destroy another, just to see what kind of aptitude he had for his future job. I wished I had a can of chili to offer him.

The sun was nearly down for the first time in a month by the time I reached the Chasm. Another thirty blocks to go before I got to Rudi’s house. Walking along that great gaping mouth of darkness, I peered through the windows of the mansions on the other side of the street, saw the Transgressor’s Eve parties going in full swing now that the sun was setting.

Bon’s place was all lights and noise, barks of pain and peals of laughter, screams of agony or ecstasy or maybe both. I wondered where Jushuh was. I hadn’t seen her since she left school early. I’d gone by her house first once Elder Kohl had dropped me off, to show her how I’d brought Rudi’s cat back to life, but she hadn’t been there. No surprise. Some injuries are harder to heal than others.

Rudi’s mom screamed when I tried to give her the cat back.

OH, CRAP! OH, CRAP! OH, CRAP! OH, CRAP, CRAP, CRAP!

Running.

Sprinting.

Taking a break to breathe and throw up next to some house on some dog, who thought it was awesome.

Flying past the Chasm. Past the school. Past houses with music blaring as they all hosted their own Transgression parties while the cat went crazy in my backpack, which shook and bounced because Rudi’s mom had refused to touch it once she’d recovered enough to speak, to tell me she would never let that abomination into her house. And to tell me that Rudi wasn’t home. That his friend Bon had come by. That they’d left together. Wasn’t I expecting them? They said they were going to my house.

There are things you aren’t prepared for.

Like when you get a present you hate and you want to hide your disappointment, but for a second you can’t and they see it.

Or when she kisses you, and you didn’t even know she liked you.

Or when you turn the corner and see the police lights twirling at the end of the block, in front of your house, and the bottom drops out of the world and your heart floats up into your chest because you’re in free fall, and there’s already a crowd of neighbors forming an arc around the scene like a blast radius of tragedy.

The garage door was open. I could see them from the sidewalk as I half fell, half threw myself through the crowd of neighbors and strangers and cops and saw them.

Jushuh and Rudi knelt to either side of Granddad’s chair, their eyes empty, faces masks of incomprehension.

“Hey, dude.”

Bon stood between them, in front of the empty chair, naked. His skin was a relief map of a confessor’s country, covered in burned, abraded, and slashed flesh. His nipples were gone; his naval, a melted puddle. His arms and legs above the wrists and ankles looked like burned hamburger meat. He was holding Granddad’s old bone-handled knife. The empty chair behind him looked like an open mouth waiting to chew something.

“How’s it hangin’?” Bon said. He pumped his hips. They made a broken, grinding noise. “Almost midnight. Happy Transgression Day.”

It was then that I noticed Bon’s father curled up on the garage floor behind his son, bound and gagged, barbed wire strapped around his chest and wrists and ankles. Bon must have used Rudi and Jushuh to bring him here. From the look of his wounds, he’d been dragged.

The Elder’s head lolled to one side, glared up at his son with exhausted terror, tried to say something, but succeeded only in moaning.

“NO!” Bon screamed down at his father. “You don’t get to talk!” He kicked his prisoner in the gut with a foot that was missing most of its toes. Curled on the concrete floor, Bon’s father coughed up bile and blood, wheezed for breath as the barbed wire dug into his chest. The smooth skin of chest. That perfect, unmarked skin that always looked so young next to my father at company picnics. So improbably, impossibly young.

Bon met my eyes, saw understanding there. Whatever look of surprise or pity or horror that contorted my face then made him laugh. Not some big evil cackle. Just this little chuckle. Like he was thinking about something that had happened a long time ago that always made him laugh a little when he thought about it.

How long has this been going on, I wondered.

“Since always,” Bon said, the answer to the question written all over my face. “Before I was born, dude. How many came before me, Dad?”

Bon put his hand on the shivering skin sack at his feet.

“Eight? Nine? I’M TALKING TO YOU!”

Another kick. Another bitter laugh under his breath.

“But how?” I heard myself say.

“What?” Bon said. “What’d you say, dude?”

“Your . . . your talent,” I said, stepping forward. A coldness crept up my skin, though not from fear. It was Granddad’s chair. It pulsed cold. Waiting. Hungry. “If you weren’t doing all that to yourself, how did you get your talent so fast? Was it Rudi?”

I didn’t ask to get him talking, to put the brakes on the situation. I’m not that smart. I asked because I wanted to know.

That laugh again.

“Are you serious?” he said. “Oh man, you are serious. You still think that the worst thing you can take from someone, the most valuable thing, is their blood.”

Then he gave me this long, sad smile. He looked at Jushuh, then at me, then at whatever waited for him when he closed his eyes, and smiled so wide, like he’d taken the longest, most refreshing drink.

That’s when I knew. Granddad’s chair wasn’t empty. It had been occupied for weeks. Ever since Bon saw the way his best friend looked at this one girl.

“Your friendship has meant so much to me.” Bon opened his eyes, tightened his grip on the knife.

And drove it into Jushuh’s heart.

A sound came out of me, ripped from me. The sound a stone makes when time breaks it. The sound a house makes when the tornado wins. The sound a soul makes when it’s separated from its body and is drank down by your best friend like water while he stands naked in your garage next to the ashes of a chili bonfire.

Jushuh folded over the knife, eyes wide, mouth open. Bon drew out the blade. He spoke to his father.

“You see what I am now? What I’ve become without you? Despite you? Now I’m gonna untie you. And I’m gonna give you this knife. And you’re gonna cut Rudi’s head off with it because I told you to. And then you’re gonna shove this knife into your own —”

The blade was still in Bon’s hand when I pushed it into him, somewhere under his naval. Bon jumped a little, startled. He glanced down at the knife, then up at me with this look of confusion. Blood bubbled out of his wound, so hot it scalded my hand on his hand on the knife. With a grunt, I drove him back across the concrete floor until he thumped against the altar.

What happened then, what I saw, or, perhaps more accurately, what I was shown . . .

To this day, I still sleep with a light on.

My hand still on his, I dragged the knife up toward his chin, ripping through the scarred flesh of his abdomen. Bon’s intestines unspooled between our feet. The blade scraped a trajectory over his breastbone until the knife’s point reached the soft sponge of skin where his collarbones came together. I brought the knife’s bone handle up and plunged it down through the roof of my best friend’s heart.

The fire started there. In the furnace of his rib cage, on top of the altar I’d finished with my mother’s bones when the greyhound ran out of raw material, using the talent I had only begun to know when I brought the cat back. It was then — staring at Bon’s uncomprehending face, at Jushuh dying on the floor, at Bon’s father writhing in barbed wire, at my own hand on the knife — that I understood the true mechanics of power, the nature of sacrifice, and realized what I would give for that power, what I would sacrifice to save Jushuh.

Everything.

That was my magic spell. My abracadabra. One word. A word whispered into the heat pouring out of Bon. A word screamed in silence, a promise that I would burn the whole world to bring Jushuh back.

I don’t know who heard my prayer, my offering, whatever it was. The Void. The Wyrm. The Leviathan. Some minor fecal imp or the Father of Fear himself. But whatever it was, it was there when I opened a door inside Bon with the tip of that knife and told it to take what it needed but to leave the girl.

Some stories said that the Mother of Mercy was mortal, a Redkind like us, only vastly more powerful. As powerful as the Father of Fear.

These stories go on to say that this Redkind woman fell in love, but that her lover died. She would not accept this. Driven mad by grief, the Redkind woman rebelled against the Father of Fear. She rebelled against death itself and became something beyond the Redkind. She became a god. Ever since then, she has waged her war, rendering us like unto children so that nothing would ever have to die, and no one would ever again feel the pain of love or loss.

That’s the story I believed.

The fire burned for a month, a house fire that spread through the neighborhood, then moved on to consume the whole south end of town, becoming a finger of blue flame that scraped Heaven’s cellar when it reached the power plant and just ate and ate and ate, until the contract I’d offered it was fulfilled and half the city was ashes and Jushuh finally woke up. Scared but unhurt, unscathed but not unscarred.

I was there when she woke. Outside her hospital room, my father stood with the Ministry Elders, who watched me through the window. They’d taken me into custody on the night of the fire, one minute after midnight, on Transgression Day.

Standing over her, I took the iron tongue of the Speakers Without Mouths from around my neck, got into bed between her and Rudi’s cat, and spread my black robe over the three of us.