At least I can hide it for now. I tried talking to myself, and the words don’t come out too badly. But there’s more coming, and it hurts, and—

I’m doing the right thing. I’m being good. I’m just not telling anybody.

When darkness falls, the night before the Watch is called to the Vanguard, I sneak out the back. This time, I make sure Nick isn’t following me.

Brother Hutch and Reverend Brother Morrison weren’t the only ones who spoke at Theo’s and my engagement ceremony. Mom did too. She read a passage from Kimberly Jones’s book on marriage, A Biblical Love. I remember because I saw her flipping through the book for hours beforehand with a pen, trying to find a passage that would hammer home my place as a wife. Like that could somehow beat the boy out of me.

Kimberly Jones was a writer in the early Angelic movement—still alive, I think, in a settlement in California—who got really popular a few years before Judgment Day. She was especially beloved by white women thirty and older and was one of the best propaganda machines a fascist Evangelical terrorist cult could ask for. It’s amazing how locking down one key demographic, white people in rich countries, means you can get your claws into the world so tightly, you can tear it all to pieces around you.

This is what’s best for you, Mom told me. It was that or be shamed for giving up my body before marriage. As if I hadn’t been forced to give up my body to something far, far worse.

I could at least pick Theo. I could pick the when and how.

I’d never gotten that anywhere else.

By the time I reach Reformation Faith Evangelical Church, it’s late. The moon is high in the sky, cradled by the Milky Way and all the thousands of stars. Maybe Mom is looking at this same sky right now, thinking it will all be okay when she brings me home.

Me, with a knife to Theo’s throat. I’m not going back with you.

I step through the back door to find nothing. No ambushes by death squads, no Angels lying in wait. I hate that I was thinking it, but I’m always thinking it.

Anyway, Reformation reeks. It smells like bodies and Flood. The nest howls my arrival, rattling all the dead of Judgment Day. I’m sorry, I whisper. I didn’t mean to disturb you. It quiets, slowly, murmuring and rasping through the rafters.

I take the bobby pins out of my hair like a housewife taking off her wedding ring before meeting up with her boyfriend.

“Theo?” I step into the dark hallways, into the belly of the church. “You still here?”

“In the back.”