There is a sudden, intense calm. Like something terrible being held back.

I’m here. It’s okay.

Reverend Brother Morrison says, “Let us pray.” Every hand clasps; every eye closes. Even the handler, even the soldiers.

I brace my back against the railing and aim the pistol at a beautiful window above me. Blue and gold and red and green dances on white robes like sun streaming through the leaves of a forest.

The Flood burns.

I pull the trigger.

CRACK.

The pistol jerks back painfully in my hand. Glass shatters. I whisper, and the nest shrieks. I whisper, and the Grace lunges forward to tear their handler’s arm from its socket. The sanctuary shatters into gunshots and hellfire.

And I’m not in Reformation Faith Evangelical Church anymore.

Chapter 12

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is a thirst of the fountain of the water of life freely…. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake, which burneth with fire and brimstone.

—Revelation 21:6–8

It’s quiet on the culling fields. It’s always quiet on the culling fields, sure, this little grove at the back of campus where a tiny stream cuts through the woods. But this is the quiet of the dead. The kind of quiet colored by the creaking of rope and the rush of water and wind—all the things that aren’t the quiet that make the quiet so loud it hurts.

Sunlight sinks its teeth into the back of my neck. Trees rustle their dying leaves. The dry grass hisses at my presence, and the stream runs red.

And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of water; and they became blood.

A body hangs from the sturdiest tree, a branch laden with rotten fruit. One crow watches me, and another flutters its wings as it pulls on the eye dangling from the optic nerve.

I’d know the body anywhere: a boy with two broken legs and a Flood-swollen skull.

And all the fowls were filled with their flesh.

The death squads dragged him to the culling fields because he was a failure whose body was burned out by God’s light. He couldn’t survive taking upon the mantle of holy war, so the soldiers gave him mercy by putting him down. Theo stood beside me as we watched; we had to watch him die, Theo wiping the last bits of rot from his mouth, knowing that could have been him if God’s plan had fallen just a little bit to the left.

I am in New Nazareth again.