—The Truth by High Reverend Father Ian Clevenger

Nick catches me at the chore board the next morning while I’m debating between cleaning duty or helping Carly fix the rain barrel, which sprung a leak in the night. He takes the chalk out of my hand. “You’re with us today. Meet me in ten.”

That’s how I end up at the back door of the ALC with Nick, Salvador, and the sunburned boy, Cormac. Cormac is tall and sharp with long red hair and a rifle, and he greets me with, “Great. We have to babysit a middle schooler too.”

Um?

“Nick,” Salvador says, clasping xyr hands together in supplication. “I am literally begging you to let me hit him. Please? Just once. Trevor would want me to.”

Nick goes through each of us in turn. “Benji, ignore him. Salvador, not funny. Cormac, one more word, and I will look the other way. Am I clear?”

“Clear,” Salvador chirps. Cormac scoffs.

My contribution is ignoring Cormac altogether and saying, “So what are we doing, anyway?”

Salvador slings an arm over my shoulder. The sudden touch startles me, but xe is warm and strong, and I don’t exactly mind it. “You know how Cormac’s been cutting off all those ears? Believe it or not, he doesn’t just do that for fun.”

Cormac snarls, “Choke on a dick,” and Salvador shoots back, “Maybe you can give me some pointers!”

Nick shoves them out the back door and into the courtyard like unruly children, and they squabble for a second before disappearing farther into the grass. A clatter of wood and metal later, they’re dragging a wheeled cart toward the gate to the street.

“If you’re thinking about joining the Watch,” Nick says, “might as well get a taste for what we do.” I step out into the sun, squinting up at the early-morning clouds. It’s a beautiful day. “Don’t want to keep the Vanguard waiting.”

The city park—Wagner Commons, according to the sign—has become an infant forest between skyscrapers and dead streetlights. Benches line a gravel path grown through with weeds, and the pond is choked with filth. Squirrels chase one another around a towering maple with a body lashed to its trunk. Flies buzz in a shifting cloud, surrounding the caved-in skull and cross carved into the stomach.

Bodies like this hang in a long, stinking row on both sides of the New Nazareth gate. They’re everywhere in this city.

“Shit,” Cormac mutters. His trigger finger twitches. “Is that—”

Nick holds out a hand. “It’s old.”

“Still,” Salvador says.

The four of us give the execution a wide berth as we trudge toward the meeting spot at the edge of the pond. It’s a pavilion, a roof on stilts above a concrete slab, the kind of thing families used to rent for birthday parties. There’s even a sad little grill, blackened with ash. Nick and I pull the sled up beside one of the picnic tables—I switched off with Salvador a few blocks back because I felt bad for not helping—and Cormac glares out over the wavering fields.