The school bell rang, signaling the start of mass. It wasn’t Sunday, but we always had mass after a Flash for a blessing. After wandering out of the Radio room I had gone to check on my charges, who were mostly crying and scared and still naked in the basement of the school.

  Uncle Nathan says that the scrubbing protocol doesn’t really help with flashes. He says that the exposure to whatever it is that causes them is bone deep and that scraping off a few layers of skin cells won’t help. He says that it’s a leftover protocol from the days when the governments were still fighting back with weapons of mass destruction, but that the gods’ power is different from that.

  Everyone else tells Nathan to shut the fuck up.

  Anyway, Nathan takes his turn in the shower just like everyone else, so I’m pretty sure he’s not too sure of that.

  The kids were being loud and shouting, some crying and some just making asses of themselves in the post-Flash excitement. I looked around for an adult.

  Then I realized suddenly that I was the adult in the room and that it was my job to get these kids ready for their blessings.

  “Alright you little pricks, listen up,” I shouted, and the room quickly fell silent. Everyone here knew that I was one of the overseers now and nobody questioned my raised voice. “If you haven’t found your clothes yet, tough shit. We’re not keeping the priests waiting, and you don’t have anything they haven’t said before. Get in line. Youngest up front, same as always, and follow after me. Get your asses moving! Come on, come on, go!”

  Once they were all lined up, I marched them upstairs to the auditorium, where the priests were waiting for us. We knelt before the stage in three lines and Father Phillip began slowly making his way through the kids, one by one, placing his hand on their foreheads briefly and whispering their benediction.

  “By the Grace of Archangel Michael, may you live,” he was saying to each of them, touching their forehead only briefly. His voice would be sore by the time he finished blessing everyone in town, but the blessings always started with the youngest first.

  They needed it the most. And we needed them to live the most as well.

  Once Father Phillip had finished with the rest of the kids, he turned to me, and I too knelt before him to receive my blessing. And just like it always did, the ring on his thumb-and it was slightly too big even for that, flashed crimson briefly when he touched my scalp.

  It wasn’t any big deal. I was just an Ashford, that’s all. The ring was a token from the Archangel and it recognized me as being part of the Ashford bloodline. It flashed for all of my brothers, sisters, and cousins as well.

  Once he’d finished blessing us, I moved my gaggle of kids into the back of the room and did my best to keep them quiet to witness the rest of the blessings. The older kids were marched in by other wranglers, and they were blessed, and then they were marched off to wait in front of us, and so on.

  Before long the auditorium was completely full, with about five hundred people waiting. Father Phillip stood on the stage and spoke briefly.

  I tuned him out. I’d heard it all before. It’s not our place to question the gods. They are the saviors of humanity; without them the earth would have been utterly destroyed; they deserve our faith and devotion by the right of their power, etc.

  It’s not that I didn’t believe. It’s pretty hard to not believe in a power that can destroy your life the way that I could drown an ant-colony just by pissing on a patch of dirt. But I wasn’t gearing up to spend the rest of my life in the priesthood, either.

  “May the light and grace of the Archangel remain always in your heart,” Father Phillip finished.

  “And also with you,” the congregation concluded, and we broke up. I started shouting at my kids to get them back to the basement so that they could find their clothes and stuff while the next line of citizens began filing in for their blessings and sermon.

  #

  The women began serving sandwiches after mass. The men began drinking their moonshine and passing it out to anyone they deemed old enough to get drunk with them while we waited to see if our world was ending or not. Almost everyone was dressed again at this point, but our skin was still raw from the scrubbing and some people had dried blood in their ears or red eyes.

  Drinking after a Flash exposure probably wasn’t good for you. But drinking wasn’t good for you at the best of times, so when someone passed me a shot glass I choked it down, coughing and handing the empty glass back to the guy. He tried to pass me another but I blocked him.

  Everyone was a little loose now that it was clear that our exposure wasn’t so bad, and someone got some of the old band equipment. They began playing in the background while everyone socialized, and I wandered about with the adults for a while.

  I ate a sandwich or two and spoke patiently with the adults who had the right to hang out in the school during the heavenly battles. Most of them weren’t Ashfords, but they were all Benders, and they were important people in the town, so I was on my best behavior.

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  Not that I was normally an insufferable little shit or anything like that.

  Anyway, one of the runners came in through the front entrance while this was going on, spotted me, and came running over. She was a fifteen year old girl, and her left side marked her as one of the Serfs. If it weren’t for the red blotches on her skin she’d have been very pretty.

  “Lord Glen,” she said. “I’ve got a message from city hall for your grandfather. Do you know where he is?”

  “I’m not his secretary,” I said.

  She frowned, hesitated. “I don’t know my way around. Might you help me find him?”

  I sighed, sticking my hand in my pants. My hand bumped up against the Ruger, and the stray thought that I could kill this girl with it popped into my head. I frowned and shoved it down.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to kill her, or anyone else for that matter. Most of the time I completely forgot I was wearing the gun on my belt at all, but every now and then I’d remind myself of it and the power that it represented.

  Thirty bullets.

  Bang. Bang. One less serf.

  Some of the adults thought that it would even be a mercy. That living with the curse was worse than being dead.

  I thought they were full of shit. The serfs weren’t stupid, if they didn’t want to live they’d have found a way to end their lives by now.

  But I did wish they’d stop trying to have kids. Even when they were only marked like this girl instead of missing arms or legs or worse, it still didn’t end up well. In the few instances where a serf did give birth to a healthy child without the curse, they were still marked by the priesthood because it was still two or three generations too soon to start mixing the bloodlines, according to them.

  I pulled myself back from my musings. “Come on then, follow me,” I said to the girl, and we went looking for my grandfather.

  We found him in the principal’s office again. I knocked, explaining that a messenger from the city hall had arrived, and he told us both to come inside. I was a little surprised he was involving me, but didn’t bother to question it.

  His wrinkled skin was raw from the shower and he was showing his age. He was close to eighty years old now, I knew.

  Nobody quite knew why he’d been blessed by the Archangel, back during the war between us and the gods, but the way his irises glowed faintly blue gave proof of his divine right. That much hadn’t faded one bit over the years, I’m told, and he remained a stubborn old bastard, even if he did probably have one foot in the grave.

  My father was next in line, of course, but Grandfather was determined to retain control of his little fiefdom right up until they put him in the ground.

  “What is it?” he asked once the door was closed.

  “Lord Norman, I was sent to tell you that the team dispatched to check on the livestock has returned, and I was to tell you that half of the calves from this year are starting to show signs,” she said.

  Grandfather cursed. The girl flinched.

  “Is that it?” he asked her.

  “That’s all I was told to say,” she said.

  “Good lass,” he said. “Get on out of here now.”

  “Yes sir,” she said, and she left me alone with him. I was about to leave too, but he called my name and I stopped. The door closed behind her, and he looked at me.

  “I’ve been thinking about what to do with you, now that you’re a man,” he told me.

  “Yes sir,” I said flatly, waiting to hear what my assignment would be.

  “Your brothers are fine enough heirs. It’s not any reflection on your part that you were born third, but you must understand it’s unlikely that the lordship will fall on your shoulders,” he continued.

  “Yes sir,” I said again when it was clear that he was expecting a response. The truth is that I didn’t want it anyway. Too much responsibility. “I’m happy serving the community however I can, sir. I’ll support my father and brothers however they need me to.”

  “Good lad,” he said. “There’s a caravan coming through town in a week, assuming that they’re not caught out by the battle. I want you to go with it and help represent the Bend.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Sir? I don’t know—“

  “It’s a learning experience. You won’t be in charge of anything but jack and shit. You’ll just be in the room listening to your elders and learning the ways of the world outside the bends. Understand?”

  I nodded. “Yes sir,” I said.

  “Good lad. Say goodbye to your friends and start getting ready. You shouldn’t need much more than a few changes of clothes, but you can bring up to twenty pounds of gear, understand?”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  “Now get the fuck out of here,” he said fondly, and I nodded and left him behind.

  #