Instead of Seraph’s warmth, there is a deep, rough sound. The sound of grinding teeth.

Of breaking bones.

Her face shatters into a spray of pieces, coming apart in chunks barely held together with stretches of sinew and Flood—eyes, teeth, tongue. Rot splatters my mask and hair. Her fingers curl back, and bones tear out into claws. She shrieks loud enough she could bring the world down around us, and she yanks me closer by the lapels of my jacket until her massive, dripping teeth are inches from my face.

I say, “Stop.”

She stops. Trembling. As her body crumbles and breaks apart around her, she stops.

And there’s a crack like thunder and her body jerks once, crack, again. Black-red blood seeps out of her shirt as she stumbles and tries to hold on to me, but it isn’t enough, and she hits the grass, dead.

Her body doesn’t make nearly enough noise for how loud it feels.

Exodus 21:23–25—But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. Those boys died in Reformation, and she will die in turn because that is how the world works. In what world was my God ever a benevolent one? I didn’t even try to save them, so what gives me the right to save her just to make myself feel better? How dare I call myself good? How dare I even try?

She convulses once. Her insides leak into the dirt just like Dad’s insides did, her face broken like Dad’s face. Bile rises in the back of my throat, and I swallow it because I can’t throw up here, not in front of the Vanguard and everyone else. My eyes water with the strain of it, and it’s the closest I’ve come to crying in a long time. I hate it.

A stick snaps behind me. I turn, trying to breathe and failing. Nick is stepping down from the pavilion. Every member of the Vanguard has their guns trained on me.

He holds out a new mask, taken from the Vanguard’s cart, still wrapped in plastic.

“Catch,” he says.

He tosses it to me. I fumble, it hits the grass, and he backs away to let me pick it up. We do the same dance with a rag taken from the Vanguard’s stash, wet with water from Faith’s bottle. I clean myself and show off the gore-stained rag, fingers splayed. It goes on the ground too.