The word of God gave her some comfort. But Sasha’s stomach still churned. As she scrubbed the grime from her body she confronted the fact that this was all Real now. She’d fled her home and her family, traveled to a warzone and now she was here. It was done, her great sacrifice was now real, not theoretical. The excitement she felt at that realization was marred by an anxious kind of horror at the things she’d never do now.

She hadn’t really thought about that before she’d left. But now Sasha realized that she was never going to graduate high school. She’d never go to college. She’d never see her father’s face again–

She started to cry. It surprised her a little. For days now her emotions had felt stunted, buried under the very immediate concerns of escape and survival. But as soon as she had a minute to breathe, everything she hadn’t been able to let herself feel flowed out of her, eyes first. She tried to fight it. But then she remembered something Pastor Mike had written in one of his columns for Revelator, “Embrace your pain, for you will hurt again. Embrace your grief, for it is a gift. Lean into the wounds the world gives you. Have faith that the Lord God does not send us burdens we are too weak to bear.”

She’d left behind a world where people denied their age with science, salved their pain with narcotics, and fought the natural order of the world the Lord had built. Sasha had wanted authenticity. She’d wanted to live the truth of Christianity without compromise. That meant leaning into this pain and letting it lift her up into the arms of God.

So Sasha leaned in. She sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, shook and shuddered with a pain more profound than any she’d known before. And then she stopped. She dried herself off, pulled her one fresh pair of clothes out of her backpack, and got dressed to go and meet the Heavenly Kingdom she’d sacrificed so much to join.

Darryl banged twice on the door, right as she slid on her socks.

“Ma’am, I gotta get movin’. Maybe do the make-up later?”

Sasha shoved her dirty clothes into her backpack, zipped it up, and opened the door.

The Heavenly Kingdom included rather more shit and bullet casings than Sasha had expected. She’d known, of course, that it was a warzone. The whole Kingdom was less than two years old. Plano had been taken just days ago. It had all been won by blood and violence. She’d just…sorta figured the Army of God would’ve cleaned up after itself.