He was an excellent teacher – patient and good at explaining things – but I could tell he never forgot that in just over ten weeks, he had to have everyone trained for what might be humanity’s only real chance against the angels. Though he never even hinted to the others that he had reservations about being in charge, I knew how heavily the responsibility weighed on him. It showed in his face, his eyes, making him look so much older than eighteen that it wrung my heart. And while I’d never met his father, as I watched Alex explaining diagrams at the kitchen table with everyone crowded around him, I somehow knew he was his dad all over again.

The TV showed that the world had changed already. Before, it was possible to go a day or two without hearing a reference to the angels. Not any more. Almost every time you changed the channel, you got a talk show where los ángeles were being discussed, or a documentary about true-life angelic stories, or a music video with everyone bopping around in angel wings. We got CNN and a few other American channels on cable, and it was exactly the same in the US. There were new TV shows galore: Who’s The Angel?, Angelic Paths, Angels 1-2-3. They all looked sort of cheesy and rapidly thrown together, but were obviously meeting a huge demand; everyone wanted to drown themselves in images of their predators. On the news, random street shots always showed people wearing angel wings: a new fad meaning you’d seen an angel. The camera often caught someone gazing dreamily into the distance too, basking in the glow of a beautiful creature only they could see.

With all that, it wasn’t surprising the problem of overcrowded hospitals was getting worse. I remembered the documentary I’d seen back in Tennessee: the beds lining the hospital corridors; the teenage girl with exhausted, angel-burned eyes. That was only a couple of months ago, and now those images seemed practically upbeat. In both the US and Mexico, people were literally dying on hospital floors. You sometimes couldn’t even get an ambulance now, or find a hospital that could take you in. Protests were springing up all over, with people demanding that the government do something. Here in Mexico City, things were even worse, because renovating the cathedral to become part of the Church of Angels had been paid for with taxpayers’ money. Most people were all for it, but a group calling themselves the Crusaders for People’s Rights were furious that the funds hadn’t been used for medical care. Protests here were turning into sizzling confrontations, with the “Crusaders” and the “Faithful” screaming at each other on a regular basis.

We saw Raziel once on TV too.