Hell Followed with Us(25)

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Nick spends a lot of time being grateful to Erin, and this is why. She sits on the office floor with him, silent and un-pitying, while he pulls himself together.

His lizard isn’t enough, so he digs his palms into the rough carpet until his skin stops trying to crawl off his body. The Vanguard, the Grace, then Calvin. He has to keep it together. His job is to keep it together. He scrapes his palms red on the carpet, shakes them out, and presses them against his temples, right where he can feel the heartbeat pounding in his skull.

“Can you talk?” Erin asks.

Nick shakes his head. He can, technically, but the idea of it, God, the idea of it. He wants to hide his whole face behind a mask, not just everything below the eyes. Cover the eyes too. Cover everything.

Erin says, “Okay.”

It takes a while for the vice to loosen its stranglehold on him. It happens slowly, the threat of a shutdown fading like shadows come noon: still there, technically, but not nearly as noticeable. His breathing slows. He doesn’t feel like he’s drowning anymore. His leg is still bouncing, but it always does that.

Nick says, “All right.”

Erin says, “Aisha’s okay. Faith offered to buddy up for a few days, keep an eye on her. Sadaf offered too, but we’ve been keeping her busy lately.”

That makes sense. Faith has been glued to Aisha’s side since Trevor died. She wouldn’t even leave her long enough to go out to the Vanguard—she had been his first pick, but she refused to budge. A sudden knot presents itself: Are they dating? Not that he particularly cares about the details, but he needs to know for strategic reasons. As soon as he tries to inspect the tangle, though, it fizzles out. It’ll be easier to ask Salvador. Xe knows a lot about these things.

“Good,” Nick finally says. He puts his work voice on, the low one that never wavers or cracks. If he can’t cover his whole face with a mask, this is the next best thing. “I’ll keep an eye on Calvin.”

Erin leans against the desk, studying him. She’s picking at the ends of her braids, which is never good. Nick knows how delicate her hair is. She must be really stressed. “You have better things to keep an eye on. Like Benji.”

Seraph. That’s why Nick was looking for Erin in the first place. The whole reason he crawled out of bed this early in the morning, even after he spent half the night out in the city.

“Seraph will be joining the Watch today,” he says. “And it’ll be going to the church.” Erin cringes at the word it, but they’d had this argument already and agreed to hate the other’s opinion on the topic in silence. “Just wanted to keep you updated.”

“I was wondering when you…,” she mumbles, then stops. “Wait, where?”

“The church. Next week.”

“I know that,” Erin says. “What I mean is, why?”

The way she’s looking at him, like he’s a child missing something obvious, makes him hate himself a little more, so he pulls the lizard from his pocket to play with. It’s the least rude of his stimming options in the middle of a conversation, and even with Erin, he finds himself trying not to be too autistic.

And the thing is, there are a lot of ways to answer her question. Because Seraph is desperate to prove itself loyal. Because it wants to be helpful and offering it the opportunity would twist it around their finger. Because there’s no reason not to use Seraph while they have it.

Because they might not have Seraph forever.

He decides on, “I’ve seen what it can do.” The memory of the abomination pressing its face to his bubbles up, all the teeth and skin and stench. “It’ll make the church survivable.”

Erin doesn’t respond. Nick looks up from the lizard—which has fourteen blue beads and thirty-six yellow beads, which he knows because he’s counted them a thousand times—to find her staring at nothing.

“We shouldn’t have done this,” she finally says. “This was a bad idea.”

A heavy weight settles in Nick’s stomach. “Explain.”

“Him,” Erin says, and the pronoun feels pointed. “Benji. Seraph. This whole mess.” She shakes her hands helplessly; not the way Nick shakes his hands, but the way non-autistic people do, like she’s trying to conjure something out of thin air. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You don’t have to lie to it,” Nick says. That must be what she’s upset about. All he has to do is reassure her. “That’s my job.”

She breaks out the patient tone of voice that means he’s missing something. “And I’m grateful, but that’s not what I mean.”

It hits. Again. The iron pipe to the back of the head.

He says, “You feel bad for it.”

It’s an awful thing to say. Saying it out loud means the words are going to stick. The words are going to stay there in his head, and he’s going to keep thinking about them, and he can’t let himself do that.

“I feel like shit,” Erin says. “It’s cruel!” Nick doesn’t flinch, only because he’s been called cruel before. “Asking Benji to risk his life when he’s practically dying? When we’re wondering if his dead body will convince the Vanguard not to abandon us? There has to be some other way. Something else we can do.”