“I told them not to, after the breach.” She glared at Miss Virtue. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about that, by the way.”
“There will be plenty of time to harass me about getting through your precious wards,” Miss Virtue said. “Let’s just stop the angels from going on a murder spree for now.” She seemed amused at how she’d turned the safe house upside down with her arrival, but she was the only one taking any pleasure from it. Several of the Assata kids still shot her mistrustful glares as they left the kitchen to go get ready. Miss Virtue caught Bitter’s eye and winked at her.
Aloe tugged on Bitter’s hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you something to eat.”
Bitter followed him to where Alex and Blessing were pouring out bowls of cereal. Miss Bilphena came up to them, and a brief look of horror crossed her face.
“I know that’s not what y’all tryna have for breakfast,” she said. “Did you even eat last night?”
Bitter tried to think when last she had actually eaten. “I’m not that hungry,” she said, but it was half of a lie. Really, she just felt numb, like everything inside her that she recognized had been carved out and tossed aside, like she didn’t know where to go and look for it, let alone find it again.
Aloe stared at her. “You didn’t eat?”
“When did you eat?” she shot back.
“With Eddie! She had soup and I had pizza.”
“Like Aloe would ever miss a meal,” Blessing pointed out, and Alex snorted.
Miss Bilphena shook her head at them. “Thank goodness we made some real food this morning.” She opened the door of a large toaster oven on the counter and started handing out bowls of cheesy grits that had been kept warm in there. “You have to eat, baby,” she said to Bitter. “We don’t go out on empty stomachs. You eat meat?” Bitter nodded and received a bowl with chunks of sausage and tomato sinking into the savory grits.
“Ooh, can I have one of those too?” Aloe asked. He and Bitter took their bowls to the table while Miss Bilphena handed Blessing a bowl with a fried egg and sliced avocado.
“You going to be okay going out there?” Aloe whispered to Bitter. “You don’t have to go. We can handle it.”
Bitter’s stomach dropped. Out there. The protests were still happening, worse than ever with these fires, and Lucille was still the chaos she’d spent years hiding from. What had she been thinking when she’d said they had to stop the angels? To go right to the center of Lucille, where angels were holding the most powerful man in their society hostage? For a quick moment, Bitter was back at the Eucalyptus gate—what, just the day before?—panicking and running back inside. What would be different now? They were walking into a worse unknown, a scale of violence they literally could not begin to imagine, because who had ever heard of angels coming to shed blood for a revolution? But how would it look if she stayed back while everyone else went out there to stop the cascade she had started? She forced herself to take a deep breath. She was not the same girl who had frozen and run back the day before. She was someone who had painted an angel, brought it to life with her own blood, and faced it down. That had to count for something, the way her world had changed into an unrecognizable reality and she was still here, still breathing, still facing things. “I’ll be okay,” she told Aloe. “I’m not alone this time. You’ll stay with me, right?”
Aloe kissed her shoulder, even though she couldn’t feel it through her sweatshirt. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll stick with you the whole time.”
*
Outside, Lucille looked both the same and completely different. There was so much smoke in the air that Miss Bilphena had made everyone put on masks before they left the safe house. Miss Virtue had refused. “Leave me and my lungs alone,” she’d said, with a sharpness that brooked no disagreement. It wasn’t difficult to confirm where the contingent holding Theron was heading. Crowds of Lucille citizens were flowing toward the city center, and the energy was almost crackling through the air, it was so tense.
“We just have to get to the angels,” Ube said. He’d made Eddie stay behind, ordering her to rest, and had argued with Miss Bilphena until she agreed to stay as well and watch over the little children. Eddie still hadn’t so much as looked at Bitter, and Bitter tried to pretend it didn’t cut her as deeply as it did. Was Eddie mad at her? Did she blame her for the angels being here? There was no time for any of these questions, not with such a large crisis at hand.
“How the fuck are we gonna do that?” Alex asked. “You hear all those sirens? It’s going to be chaos the closer we get.”
“Leave that to me,” Miss Virtue said, stepping to the front of their little group. “Don’t walk past me and we should be fine.” She narrowed her eyes at them and repeated the instruction. “Stay behind me, you hear?” A wall of stubborn silence greeted her question, and Miss Virtue raked a piercing gray look over all the Assata kids. “We not taking a damn step until y’all tell me you heard what I said.” A round of grudging assents sounded off, and Miss Virtue nodded, her white snakeskin glistening in the sun. “Let’s go.”
It was unreal to witness. With every step she took, people moved out of her without even looking at her, not as if it was a conscious choice, but as if they suddenly had somewhere else to be, even if that was just a few yards away. Aloe kept Bitter in the center of their small group with Blessing and Alex, while the Assata kids took the perimeter.
“What did you tell them?” Bitter asked.
“The truth,” Aloe replied. “You’re not used to this and it could fuck you up.”
Shame filled Bitter. They were going to think she was weak, she was a coward—everything she’d been trying so hard not to be. “I can handle it,” she said, but her voice wobbled and tears stung her eyes. “You don’t have to baby me.”
Blessing and Alex both opened their mouths to object, but Ube spoke up before they did, pulling alongside Bitter. “Hey, listen,” he said. “There is no shame in having anxiety around this. You don’t have to force yourself through trauma just to prove something to us or yourself. We’re trained to handle this. We just need to get you close to the angel, and we’ll figure it out from there.”
Bitter wiped tears from her eyes. “How? All I did was make a fucking mess by calling it through.”
“Are you kidding me? You got some wild power in your art, Bitter. You saw how fucked up Lucille is, and you tried to make a difference. That’s all we can do: try. We try over and over again, and sometimes it goes okay, sometimes it goes sideways. We’ll find the angels and we’ll try again. Okay?”
A muffled explosion sounded a few blocks away, and Bitter jumped, her hands trembling. Ube reached into his backpack and pulled out a pair of headphones. “Noise canceling,” he said. “Put these on.”
She knew he was telling her it was okay to not be okay, but Bitter couldn’t hold back a sob, and suddenly she was crying, her feet stumbling over each other as she struggled to keep walking, the headphones useless in her hands. Ube let out a sharp, trilling whistle, and the group came to a halt. Miss Virtue looked back at them. “What’s going on?”