Do I think He exists? Heaven, Hell, all of it?

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

So I sit beside Theo and pray too. I pray for everything I can think of. For this world to hold together for as long as it can. For the Angels to stay away. For all the survivors to make it another day. For everything to turn out okay this time. O Lord, we need You today and every day. Please lend us Your strength, lead and guide us—

“Amen,” Theo says out loud, startling me.

“Amen,” I say in turn, even though I wasn’t done.

His eyes flutter open, and he looks at me, jerks back, and says, “What the hell.”

There it is. I offer a smile, but Lord knows how it looks on my face. “Told you, I had a bad day.”

“I—” Theo stammers, mouth uselessly flapping as he scrambles for words.

“To fear and to keep,” I remind him.

“I know. God, I know.” Finally, he collects himself. He blinks, slowly. Wrangles his breathing into something even. “Does it hurt?”

“Not really. Not anymore.” I run my tongue over my exposed teeth. “But my pain scale is screwed, considering everything.”

He pulls me closer, hands lingering on my hips, shoulders, arms, cheeks, the way they always have.

“Look at you,” he says. It’s so soft it almost scares me. “It’s still you.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I mean it,” he insists. “It’s still you. I’ll prove it.”

He takes off his mask and kisses me.

He what?

I push him away. “Theo. Theo, what are you doing?”

“Kissing you?”

There’s a smear on his cheek. Flood rot. Infected blood.

Seraph isn’t contagious. Sister Kipling made sure it couldn’t be transferred through any of the usual paths—spit, blood, nothing. The way Mom put it, Seraph was always meant to bear the weight of salvation alone. It wouldn’t do to have the gift of God’s strength be diluted through the unworthy. It wouldn’t do, she said, for an army to be half generals. Just like there is one God, one king, one leader, there shall be one Seraph.

The point of Seraph has always been control.

“That’s not—you can’t seriously—”

His face falls. “Do you not want me to kiss you?”

I don’t know if the idea disgusts me or intrigues me. Both, probably. I don’t want to find out. “You don’t have to.”