Blessing’s eyes were red from crying as she put her arm around Bitter. “I don’t think it thinks like us,” she said.
“It does think like a fucking monster.” Bitter hissed the words as she stood with her friends at the mouth of the alley. “It can go to hell.”
The others exchanged worried looks just as one of the Assata kids returned, pulling down his mask to update them. “Everyone’s gathered in the park,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Blessing and Aloe flanked Bitter, propelling her along, because every fiber in her was calling her back to the dead-end alley. She wanted to stay there with Mr. Nelson and be done with this. It was obscene that the rest of the world could move on, that they could continue with a mission as if his life stopping wasn’t the atrocity that it was. Blessing seemed shaken, but Aloe and Alex were eerily calm. Bitter wondered if that was what it meant to work with Assata, if death started to mean something else.
“We shouldn’t have left him,” she whispered to Blessing.
Her best friend glanced at her and seemed to pick up on her feelings in a heartbeat. “Hey, we’re doing the right thing,” Blessing whispered back. “There will be more like him if we don’t stop the angels, remember?” She squeezed Bitter’s arm as they reached the outskirts of the central park. The energy there was at a fever pitch, and the park was full of people, pressed so close together that no one could see the city square in the middle of it. Lucille had seen the angels, and its citizens were frantic with a mixture of fear and hope and bloodthirsty excitement. They were chanting together, words thudding into the air, weighted with anger and years upon years of injustice. “Eat the rich! Eat the rich!”
The Assata kid who had come to get them looked worried. “It’s escalated,” he said. “I was only gone for a few minutes—what the fuck?”
Ube came up to them. “The angel is … convincing.” Miss Virtue was behind him with the rest of the crew. He looked at Bitter, who was standing with her fists and jaw clenched tight. “You ready to go in?” he asked her. She nodded grimly, holding on to Blessing’s words. There couldn’t be more deaths, more Mr. Nelsons. She wouldn’t allow it.
“All right,” Miss Virtue said. “Behind me.”
They gathered quickly, and she started moving toward the center of the crowd. “How come I cyah see Vengeance?” Bitter asked. “Even with all these people, we should be able to see the angels.”
“Unless they went back to those smaller shapes,” Alex said. “You know, to not scare the humans.”
Miss Virtue snorted lightly. “Wise of them,” she said, and there was something sour in the back of her voice. Bitter glanced over at her but then stumbled as she was shoved by the crowd. There were too many people in the park, bodies amassed thickly, and those who were trying to get out of Miss Virtue’s way had nowhere to go.
Dread began to crawl down Bitter’s spine, but she shoved it away, replacing it with anger. “We’re not going to get there in time,” she said.
“We will try,” Miss Virtue replied, pushing through, her white suit a snakeskin beacon homing in on the angels. The chanting suddenly stopped, and an uncanny hush spread over the park before Vengeance’s voice glitched through, ice cold and charming. Psychopathic, now that Bitter thought about it. The voice of a thing that understood nothing about life.
“It is time for a purge,” it said, and the trees shook from the volume of its voice. “Evil has lived in Lucille for too long, and it must be cleansed.”
Miss Virtue was still trying to get through the crowd, and it seemed like they were a little closer now. “Almost there,” she said over her shoulder. Bitter could see the angels now, and yes, Vengeance was back in its vaguely human form, standing with the other angels in a semicircle behind it. Theron was there, his hands bound behind his back, his mouth gagged. His skin was pale and clammy, and his eyes were wide with naked terror, but he seemed unharmed. He looked nothing like he did in the headlines and on the news, where he was always polished, always gleaming with the fat of billionaire wealth. Every photograph Bitter had ever seen of him had Theron wearing a small smirk, like nothing and no one could ever touch him. Except, today, something terrible had.
“Is this man a monster?” Vengeance asked the crowd, and they roared assent with a thousand throats. Vengeance looked at Theron with its unforgiving yellow eyes, and Theron whimpered, cowering away from the angel. He didn’t look like a monster to Bitter then, even though she knew what he was, what he’d done. He just looked like a weak man, his expensive pants wet where he’d pissed himself, humiliated in front of the whole of Lucille. Bitter didn’t know how she felt about seeing him like that, but she couldn’t summon the wild brightness she saw in the eyes of so many in the crowd. It looked like something contagious, something that bared their teeth and pulled at their skin. Was this what justice looked like? This frantic hunger?
Vengeance stretched its mouth into a smile, and Bitter’s blood crackled around the edges. “All monsters must die,” it said.
Miss Virtue stopped short with a gasp, whirling around just as Vengeance grasped Theron’s head. Bitter’s vision was suddenly enveloped in the cool white of Miss Virtue’s suit as the woman pressed her close, blocking her view. “Don’t look, baby girl.”
Bitter opened her mouth to say something, but the sound of a sharp crack took over, piercing through her ears and stabbing into her head. It was followed by a dull thud of something heavy being dropped, and Bitter knew with a clear and sick certainty that Vengeance had snapped Theron’s neck like it was nothing, like a human life was nothing to it. Blessing gave a short, strangled scream, but Bitter couldn’t break free of the principal’s hold to turn to her best friend. Her whole world was the echo of those short death sounds and the white blur of Miss Virtue pressed against her face. To her surprise, the crowd did not cheer. There was a horrified silence; then Bitter heard someone gag and a child begin to cry. She wondered who would have brought a child out to something like this, her mind skirting the horror of what had just happened, pushing her into numbness. Miss Virtue released her, and light stung Bitter’s eyes.
It was strange to be so close to the principal, to have been wrapped in her arms. Bitter was sure Miss Virtue had hugged her at some point in the years she’d been at Eucalyptus, but her memory felt fuzzy. Everything felt blurred, like she couldn’t be sure who or what was real. Miss Virtue’s presence was still an anchor—nothing bad could happen to Bitter when she was with the woman, although now she was learning that Miss Virtue couldn’t stop other terrible things from happening. Bitter wanted to reach out a hand to Blessing, who was sobbing quietly, but her muscles felt frozen and stiff. Theron was dead. Theron was dead?
“We have to go,” Miss Virtue was saying. “Quickly now.”
Vengeance was speaking again, but its voice was a loud ringing in her ears above the maddened rush of blood in her veins. Miss Virtue was leading all of them out of the park at a much faster pace than they’d entered it. People got out of their way without thinking, moving in shock now that they were no longer pressing to see the front. It was a surprise that they weren’t stampeding, but Bitter didn’t think she would’ve moved either if Miss Virtue hadn’t commanded them to. There was something about the angels that had fixed her feet to the ground once Theron’s neck had snapped, like the world had become immediately different, something you couldn’t flee from, like staying motionless meant perhaps it would pass you over. Where was there to go? The very air of Lucille had changed, and it smelled like a different kind of death.