Nick replies, simply, “Don’t touch me again.”

Alex flings open the back door and flees into the ALC. Cormac shakes awkwardly for a second, looking from face to face, waiting for someone else to speak up. Nobody does. Aisha, Faith, and Salvador all turn away.

Giving up, Cormac grunts and follows Alex inside.

And all that’s left is me.

The burning is stuck under my fingertips, searing hot, my cells breaking and bursting. My thoughts are an angry swirl of words, none of which I can get past my tongue. Everyone saw that they started it, right? I did what I had to. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t look at me like that.

One word gets past the block in my throat: a bloody, rot-splattered, “What?”

Nick breaks from the group and hauls me to my feet, not at all gently.

“I think,” he says, his face right next to mine, “it would be best if you turned in for the night.”

It isn’t until I nearly try to pull his arm out of his socket just for touching me that I manage to take a step back from myself and realize.

Something is really, really wrong with my head right now.

I don’t do this kind of thing. This isn’t me.

So what was it?

As the church is to Christ, a wife is to her husband, and Graces are to our Seraph.

—Reverend Mother Woodside’s notes

The Flood works in stages, but they pass so quickly—you’re dead by the fortieth hour, tops—that they blur together. It moves more like a parasite than a virus, devouring everything it touches. It starts with the insides, unraveling your organs for spare parts, and it gets into the brain so quickly that you don’t notice your spine growing out of your back until you’ve already tried to put your teeth through the nearest piece of flesh.

Seraph, though, is slow and meticulous. It has a vision in mind, and it’s going to do it right. I get to see the stages play out perfectly, all in order, ticking off each box as it goes. I watched it happen to the failed Seraphs before me, and now I get to watch it in the mirror.

This is the second stage. Sister Kipling had a specific word for where it happens: the blood-brain barrier. The virus gets from the blood into the brain and starts twisting it the way it twists the body. The way toxoplasma makes rats love cats, the way cordyceps makes bugs hang from the stem of a leaf. It makes you more likely to pass it on; it makes you angry. First you start puking up your organs, and then you get pissed.

I can’t say I didn’t know what came over me, because I do. And I can’t join the Watch if I’m going to hurt the people I’m supposed to be helping.

So I am going to do to Seraph what I can do to any other Grace: Look it in the eye and control it.