It takes me a few minutes to track down Nick. One of the sniper girls points me in the right direction: the roof. “Said he’d take over for a bit. I ain’t complaining.” I head upstairs—which is just storage and a few doors, one of which has a key that gets passed around if you want a place to hook up or jack off in peace—and open the roof-access hatch.

The roof is flat and full of gravel, peppered with useless HVAC units and other little metal and plastic things. Nick sits in a lawn chair looking out over the street, a rifle leaning against his knee and binoculars in his lap. It’s hot up here, and the sky is perfectly blue.

I let the hatch door drop.

“Did Erin send you?” Nick says, not bothering to turn around.

“That obvious?”

“She worries too much.”

“That’s kind of her job.” I come over and sit on the concrete wall running along the edge of the roof. Nick is tapping his fingers the way he was at Reformation. His leg is bouncing too. “I promised I’d check on you, so if you want me to piss off, give me something good.”

“Something good,” he repeats.

“Yeah. So I can say, We had a good chat. He’s doing okay. She deserves that much.”

“I’m fine.”

I throw his words from the corner store back at him: “Too vague.” His nose wrinkles. “Just give me something to work with—”

“Already did.”

“—that isn’t I’m fine because holy shit, dude, none of us are.”

Nick kicks his feet up on the wall.

“Or we can just hang out,” I say. He snorts, almost as if he finds it funny, which would be a first. “That’s cool too.”

Theo and I used to do this kind of thing. New Nazareth rose from the ashes of a university in the northern quarter of Acheson, and we imagined the students would be jealous of the free rein we had of restricted areas and old basements. Our favorite place was the roof of the student union, where we would chase carrion birds, hide from our parents, and study the world beyond the gates. At first, we watched endless streams of cars and the flashing lights of the city, telling stories of the lives of nonbelievers far beyond us. Then, after Judgment Day, we stared at utter silence, at lights slowly snuffing out, at the world grinding to a bloody, sin-soaked halt.