And the bodies. Always the bodies. The Flood is in their bones—splinters break off from femurs and jaws, strange structures grow through chest cavities. I mouth my cobbled-together prayer for the dead as we walk between the beds, because Mom isn’t here to stop me.

This is what Seraph was made for. To turn every human being into this. To destroy what’s left of the world.

“Maybe there’s a back room,” I offer. My voice is too loud in the silence. “There’s just bones.”

Nick goes back to the front desk and sticks his hand in a trash can.

I say, “Um.”

He pulls out a glass bottle, weighs it for a second, and smashes it on the floor.

“Christ!” And it feels good to shout it, to mean it. It burns through me like blood rushing back into my fingertips, and I do it again because I can. “Christ, what the hell!”

A low, long wail keens from the far side of the hall. It rattles in my ribs and puts every hair on edge, the way a child’s scream gets under your skin.

A Grace.

I’m across the room before I can stop myself, holding on to the edges of cots to keep myself together. My fingers snag moth-eaten sheets. A Grace. A Grace.

I’m at the edge of its bed, wavering on my feet.

This is me.

This is what I’ll become.

Its mass of white, whirling eyes lock on me, and it begins to scream. High, shrieking, choked with phlegm. Nick stops a few steps away, but I don’t. I move forward because I have to.

It’s more human than not, more human than some but less human than the inside-out man Dad and I saw on the apartment floor days ago. A head, a torso, close enough. But its ribs open into a second set of teeth, gray organs pulsing underneath like fat, heavy tonsils. Its lower jaw has melted into its chest, and molars stick out of its collarbones. One desiccated arm is wrenched above its head, lashed to the bedframe by a pair of old handcuffs.

It. I can’t keep saying it. That’s not right. I want to press my hands to its, their, their skin, reach into their organs the way Theo brought the flesh to his lips, whisper to them, We’re the same thing, we’re the same, can you tell?

Nick says, “Are you all right?”

I’m so much more than all right. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

The Grace makes a pitiful sound, scared and small. I press my hand to the broken expanse of their chest.

“Hey,” I whisper, and I make sure to whisper it too. Softly. Gently. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

They’re in so much pain. They’ve spent two years like this, kept alive by the Flood and nothing else, alone for so long. Their skin is mottled all kinds of colors, green and black and yellow, looking like it might come off in my hand when I take it away. It won’t, though. Grace skin is tough and hard, impervious, intensely painful. It’s why people like Nick have to get them in the soft parts—the mouth and eyes, into the brain.