She nodded. “They didn’t start calling themselves that until much later. By then I was being trained to be a fighter. Saint John knows every kind of evil move there is. Karate and all that. Dirty fighting. Hands, feet, knives, strangle wires. He taught me all that stuff, and I was the head of my class. Hooray for me.” She touched her scalp. “This stuff was actually a health thing first. We all came down with the worst case of lice in the history of bugs. Couldn’t shake ’em, couldn’t wash ’em out, so Pa suggested everybody shave all their hair off. Worked, too. But while we was all bald, somebody took it in their head to go and get tattooed. Not sure who started it, but everyone in the Night Church did it. Saint John, too, and he called it the mark in flesh of our devotion. Some crap like that.”

“Why don’t you grow your hair back?”

She ran her fingers lightly over her scalp. “I tried, but it don’t grow in right. Comes in all patchy and nasty. Better to keep it like this. Besides, the reapers can’t stand that I have the mark and I ain’t one of ’em. Drives Ma nuts too.”

“Your mother is still with them?”

“My dear old ma,” said Riot acidly, “is the high holy muck-a-muck of the Night Church. Calls herself Mother Rose. An’ she’s the only one who didn’t get her head tattooed. Grew her hair back, and Saint John somehow spun that as it was a special mark that only she could have. No, don’t look too close at it, ’cause you’ll hurt yourself. It don’t make a lick of sense.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I wised up,” she said. “I guess I kind of had what you might call a ‘moment.’ I was fourteen by then and leadin’ my own team of reapers. All girls, daughters of the inner circle of the church. We were getting ready to hit this little walled-in town in Idaho—and the thing is, I never even found out its name—and the night before the raid, I was on recon with a couple of the other girls when I heard something from over the walls.”

“What?” asked Chong.

“Weren’t much, just a lady singing a lullaby to her baby.” She paused as if looking into that memory with perfect clarity. “I was up in a tree where I could see over the wall. The guards don’t watch trees because the gray people can’t climb.”

Chong nodded.