When I was little, I used to dream about flying.

  I don’t anymore. Men aren’t meant to fly. That’s a truth we learned during the return of the gods.

  My name is Glen. I’m sixteen, and my family is one of the lucky ones. We were farmers when the fall happened, and my grandfather set himself up with a minor fiefdom in the American heartlands.

  The only lines on the old maps that matter are the old roads, which today are cracked and broken. The cities are gone. The governments that used to claim that the borders mattered are shattered.

  It’s much better now.

  At least that’s what the priests say. They talk about how the world was being poisoned and how close we had come to killing Mother Earth before the gods returned to give their guidance.

  The gods had made the hard decisions that we had been unwilling to make for ourselves.

  I wouldn’t really know anything about any of history though. My older brothers might know more; I’m the third son. Neither the heir nor the spare. And I’ve got three older sisters as well. So by the time I came along, my parents were more or less worn out on answering every little question that came out of my mouth when I was younger and a lot of what I got was from my older siblings.

  It took me a while to realize they were full of shit and didn’t know much more than I did. The old school building still stands in the center of town, but nobody uses it for school anymore.

  It’s a fortress.

  Most of the kids I grew up with are pretty much completely uneducated, but I know my letters and I know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, and grandpa says that’s all I really need to know from schooling anyway. Everything else I know, I learned on Sundays or out in the field.

  The Archangel Michael was the one who answered my grandfather’s prayers during the great whatever you want to call the Return. The Angels claimed most of America, actually, but Michael is the one who governs what used to be eastern Kansas.

  Outside of town there’s an old city limits marker that names the town Prairie Bend, but the priests renamed fiefdom after the old family name—we’re the Ashfords—and six old towns got gobbled up by Grandpa’s rule.

  For reasons that only really make sense to the elders, we’re called the Ashford Benders.

  On my sixteenth birthday, my Grandpa took me aside to give me my Ruger and thirty bullets for it. He told me that meant I could kill thirty of the serfs, if I wanted to. Not that I should, of course. But that I could, and I should think about what it meant to have that kind of power.

  It’s not like there wouldn’t have been questions if I’d done so, of course. If I killed a hard worker for no good reason I’d probably be whipped or something. I dunno really, since the thought of killing anyone makes me sick.

  But I carry the Ruger strapped to my hip all the same to show everyone that I’m an Ashford man and not to mess with me.

  Most of our serfs are pretty good people. They’re just not Benders, that’s all. The divisions between us and them happened before I was born, but basically when the gods struck down the blasphemous skyscrapers and laid the cities low, the survivors were all marked.

  The faithful like my grandfather and our family rule by the grace of the gods.

  Anyway, they might not be around for too much longer. Gramps says that in three or four generations, the serfs will have either succumbed to the gods’ curse, or they’ll have been forgiven.

  In the meantime, they’re just trying to get by, same as anyone else, and I don’t really see any reason to make life worse for them just because I can. The truth is that I feel sorry for them. It’s not their fault that the old governments tried to fight the gods with Prometheus’s fire and lost.

  But at the same time we have to keep the bloodlines pure. It’s only logical. The serfs are a dying race, with three in five of their children being born mutated or monstrous.

  One of my friends growing up, before I really understood any of this, was named Dumb Tom. Because he couldn’t talk. But he wasn’t stupid or anything. He was as hard a worker as any of us other kids once you explained what he had to do, and he was great to play with.

  Until the day where he just sat down in the middle of the field and died. Nobody knows why.

  Well, that’s not the truth. We know it’s because of the curse.

  That’s why it’s us and them. Not because we’re not good folk and they’re bad folk or anything like that. But because their parents or their grandparents or their great-grandparents lived in a city when the Return happened. Now their kids are mutants and die young, and so we can’t breed with them unless we want the curse to affect our kids too.

  That’s all there is to it.

  Nobody said the gods were fair.

  #

  I was supervising some of the kids who were picking rock when I heard the thunder. I frowned and looked at the heavens, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I cursed.

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  “Get your lazy asses over here!” I shouted at the kids, but I didn’t really need to. They had ears. Except for Sophie, who didn’t. But she could still hear, so she came running the moment that she realized what was going on.

  “Right, you know the drill,” I said once the kids were all lined up. “Last one to the old school gets their ass whupped.”

  The kids groaned, but it’s for their own good. Probably it was just nothing, but if the gods were going to be fighting then we needed to get them into the basement beneath the school as soon as possible.

  We set out at a run. It was three miles, but these kids were tough and they could handle it. I wouldn’t have brought them to the western field if they were weak.

  One of the serf kids started falling behind and I fell in beside him. He was eleven.

  “You got a problem, Nels?” I asked him.

  “Stone in my shoe,” he complained.

  “Tough shit,” I commented. “Either stop and fix it or keep up. We’re not stopping for you.”

  He cursed and stopped, kneeling down to take off both shoes and carrying them with him as he ran barefoot behind us.

  The threat of a whupping wasn’t idle talk. It wasn’t my idea, it wasn’t my rule, but I’d be the one holding the switch. These were my kids today, which meant that it was my responsibility to make certain they got back before anything happened, but I had more responsibilities than just that.

  I was older and faster than the kids, and excluded from the rule about whuppings. It was my job to get them there and maintain discipline, not to race a bunch of little tweens. So I hung back and kept an eye on the stragglers like Nels and a few of the other serfs. One of them had a funny foot; they were missing a few toes on their left foot, and they had a bit of a limp when they tried to run. Nels was running hard to overtake her, while she was running hard to maintain her lead.

  I didn’t really care who won. And I was careful not to cheer them on. They knew the stakes and if I cheered it would seem like I was mocking them.

  We ran along the old dirt roads that led into town. The heavens thundered twice more. Each time I shouted at the kids to get their asses in gear.

  When we arrived in town, the old tornado system was blaring. We sprinted through Old Bends, where the houses had been deconstructed for parts. Some of the Serfs who couldn’t work lived in some of the old foundations, but mostly it was empty. If they couldn’t work they got by by stealing from the nearby fields, and Grandpa pretended not to know. Because if he knew for certain, then he’d have to do something about it. And nobody liked killing serfs who were just trying not to die of an empty belly.

  It was looking like Nels was in for a whipping when another boy up front suddenly tripped. He tried to get back up, cursed, and limped. I jogged up next to him.

  “You hurt, Pike?” I asked him.

  “It’s twisted,” he said.

  “Tough shit,” I said.

  “Help me?” he asked.

  “Can’t take the whipping for you,” I said.

  “I know. Help me limp back?”

  I thought about it for a second, then knelt down in front of him. “Hop up,” I said, offering him a piggyback.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s the fastest way. I don’t want to get caught outside if the sky goes white anymore than you do, and I’m stuck with your sorry ass until you get in the basement. So hop up.”

  “Thanks Glen,” he said, and he climbed onto my back.

  I took off. Not at a run, he was too heavy for that, but faster than a walk.

  The rest of the kids had already filed in through the queue when we arrived. The guards at the gate were waiting for us, and they checked off Pike and I when we passed into the old school’s halls.

  “That’s the last of your group. See anyone else?” the guard with the clipboard asked.

  “We were the only ones out to the west today. Or we should have been at least,” I said.

  The guard passed me a sheet of paper, and I took it without a word. I checked the names on it, nodded, and set Pike down. He could limp his sorry ass downstairs himself.

  I went through the empty halls to the old principal’s office and knocked.

  “Come in,” my grandfather said.

  “It’s me,” I said as I passed through the door. “What are the priests saying?”

  “It’s twenty miles away. We should be safe,” he said.

  My shoulders slumped in relief. “Who’s fighting?”

  “Michael and Thor,” he said.

  “What the hell is Thor doing in America?” I asked.

  “Who knows?”

  I sighed. Then I went up to the wall where the canes were kept and picked one of them. I had sixteen names on the list. Sixteen work groups had been out when the thunder sounded. That meant sixteen kids to punish for tardiness while their friends looked on, and my hand holding the cane.

  I sighed. I didn’t really understand why Grandfather had put me in this role, but I knew better than to take it easy on them. If the adults thought that I was, they’d just administer the punishment again, and then punish me as well.

  “Glen,” my grandfather said.

  “Yeah?” I asked, turning to him.

  “Next time someone twists their ankle, leave them behind. You’re more important than any of those little brats.”

  I swallowed. “Yes sir,” I said. I briefly wondered how he’d known why I was late, but knew it was probably magic. Grandfather saw things sometimes, when he closed his eyes, and that’s why people listened to him despite him pushing eighty.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” I said, and then I went to make some kids cry.

  #