“I’m—” Whatever he’s trying to say gets caught in his throat. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean to—”

He scrapes at his cheek. His hands are shaking a little. I want to grab them to hold them still, but I shouldn’t. Instead, I reach into my pocket and pull out the I’m sorry. I hold it out to him, keeping it open with my fingers so he can see exactly what’s written there.

I’ve never been good at saying it, either. I don’t like hearing it, and I don’t like saying it, but this little token already means so much.

He takes the paper.

“I shouldn’t have lost it with you,” I say. I shouldn’t have brought the Angels here. I should never have come here. This is my fault.

“I deserve it,” Nick mumbles.

“I really shouldn’t have compared you to my mother. That was a dick move.” He was raised an Angel, he read the announcement to the faithful—he knows exactly who my mother is. “So. Yeah.”

We look at the bodies instead of each other. The Angels have hurt so many people. So many it’s almost unfathomable. It’s a number so big, you can’t even start to wrap your head around it—a number in the billions, whittling humanity down to a bottleneck, down to scraps and stragglers. They find any way to hurt you they can. It’s their duty.

“You could have told me,” I say. “How you were feeling, I mean. I would’ve understood. I feel the same way sometimes.”

“I didn’t want to think about it,” Nick says. “I was scared.”

“Why?”

He takes the bead lizard from his pocket and pulls down his mask so he can chew on the beads of its tail. “Why what?”

“Why you were scared. Why you were calling me it. Why anything.”

“I was scared of you. And what you meant. I thought it’d be easier if you weren’t you.”

If I weren’t me?

“I wanted to pretend you weren’t a person,” he says. He sounds like such a little kid, barely the teenager he’s supposed to be, let alone the adult he’s convinced us all he is. “So I wouldn’t think about how much of the same person we are.”

The same person. Just like Erin said.

Are we really that similar? The only thing we have in common is being gay boys who ran away from home.

…Who ran away from the Angels. Who suffered under them and survived.

“You didn’t want to think about us being the same because I’m a monster,” I say.

“No.”

“It’s fine. You can say it.”

Nick makes a hiccupping sound. I can’t place it, and I don’t want to.

“I’ve seen the monster,” I say. “I keep seeing it.”

“Is it scary?”