I led everybody to the thicket where I’d found the berries.

“You ate some?” Thrasher asked.

“A couple handfuls.” I’d had a lot more than that, but I wasn’t going to tell him so. All he wanted to know was I was still alive after trying them.

He nodded and pushed his way to the closest bramble, picked a few off, and chewed them up.

“Good,” he declared.

Everybody spread out through the thicket, picking and eating. I perched on a branch, watching for trouble. It was getting dark, but it didn’t feel like night. The rainfrogs screamed out, singing down the rain. Moonsinger joined in, unable to stop herself when she heard a good song. Working together, they got it to sprinkle some.

After a while, Johnny took my lookout spot, and I picked and ate. The berries were sweet and warm, everything you could want. You could taste the sun in them even though it had disappeared behind gray sky.

Thunder crashed, and all that gray spilled fat drops of water everywhere. The rainfrogs screamed with joy and Moonsinger joined them, trilling up to the top of her range. I laughed.

All you could see was black and white, dark blue, gray, and silver and blonde as the witch queens, Johnny, Moose, and the bearded ladies split, heading back toward the usual haunts to find some cover.

Moonsinger ducked under a tree and waited to see what Thrasher and I would do. I could tell she wanted to stay out, but she wouldn’t do it unless we were still out.

“I’m not going to hide because of a little rain,” I promised her.

“You should,” Thrasher said. “I’m going back.”

“What about the god drop?”

“After that,” he said.

“I need to go to the god drop, too,” Moonsinger said. “I want a new shoe.” She showed us her bare right foot. Her toes curled, crunching the dead leaves.

The god drop was back through the trees a ways. I saw a couple trampled trails through the foliage and places where Moose’s wide wingspan had lost some gray feathers, but it didn’t look like he’d stopped at the pile to pick anything out. Some angels just don’t like rain.

The gods had dropped off a bunch of stuff this time. Weird plastic squares, a couple new outfits that Moonsinger picked through. She found an airy sundress that hung off her little body like longmoss off a tree branch.

I grabbed a pair of shorts to replace the ones I was wearing through. They were pretty big, but I found a belt to cinch through the loops and tighten them up.

Thrasher found a thick pair of pants with rips in the knees and back of the legs for his spurs. We kicked through the plastic stuff for a while, ignoring crinkling bags and useless squares that just sat there doing nothing.

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I found a glass bottle that’d be good for drinking from and stuck it in my belt. Then I found another belt, girlish, so I tossed it to Moonsinger.

“Try this.”

Her cheeks turned pink under the freckles. She took the belt and tied it around her stomach.

“It’s perfect,” she said. She spun around, lifting her wings so I could see the dress front and back. “How do I look?”

“Like you need a shoe.” I kicked some more plastic junk out of the way. Something shiny caught my eye. “Hey.”

It was a knife with a blade as long as my hand, tied up in a piece of cloth with sunflowers on it, like its very own little knife carrying pouch.

“Need a knife, Moonie?” I held it out.

Her green eyes went wide.

Thrasher snatched the blade out of my hand. “She doesn’t need a knife. She’s got us. We need knives.”

“We’ve got spurs, Trashbrain.” I kicked the back of his leg and tried to grab the knife away, but he threw open his wings to knock me back.

Then we were on the ground and both our spurs were out. Thrasher swung his elbow spurs at me, six-inchers.

Moonsinger screamed and ran. She wasn’t going to stick around where a stray spur could injure her.

I ducked and jumped for his gut with my heel spurs, keeping my wings beating at him the whole time. Mine were only four-inchers, but I was smaller and faster. I fought back until Thrasher got me across the nose and started going for my throat.

That’s when I realized we weren’t just scuffling over a knife. Thrasher was in this to the death.

I flipped onto my stomach and buried my head in the god drop pile. Some of those plastic things fell on me.

Good, cover me up. Protect me more.

Thrasher hacked at my back with his heel spurs. One scraped my right wing, breaking off some feathers and ripping a cut across it. Better the wing than my guts, though. I wiggled farther into the pile, trying to get my soft spots into the plastic junk, but he grabbed me by the foot and dragged me back out.

Maybe Johnny was right, maybe this time Thrasher was going to kill me.

I curled around my gut and kicked and slashed at him with my spurs.

“I submitted,” I screamed. “You’re the king. What is wrong with you?”

Thrasher wasn’t hearing me. His spurs were already dripping with red. It was splashed all over him. But his eyes were holes, sucking in everything and not giving it any meaning.

Something slammed into my side.

I tumbled across the god drop and slammed into a tree. My head rang.

Thrasher grunted in pain, so at least he’d been hit, too. He was lying dazed against a fallen trunk. His eyes were back, though, so he probably wouldn’t still try to kill me.

A god stood next to the drop pile, staring down at us. Almost as tall as the trees, wingless, with smooth, shining skin.

We’d all seen them before. They came and went through the range. Sometimes they left behind these piles of stuff for us, sometimes they dropped food or drinks or chunks of mineral to chip pieces off of and eat. Seeing them is a terror, but not like an attack from a monster. It’s a terror like not knowing what to do.

The god said something. You can’t understand a god when they talk. That’s like trying to figure out what thunder is saying. But I knew it was talking because its mouth moved as it looked from Thrasher to me. It was talking to us.

Then it stepped toward Thrasher, long legs gliding up, up, up, then down, down, down.

Thrasher let out a strangled scream, then thrashed his wings and shoved himself to his feet. He ran into the trees.

The god turned to me and knelt down. It was still talking. Its hand on the end of its long arm stretched toward me.

I crouched, ready to run, too. But my back was against that tree.

The hand kept coming. Its fingers slipped across my bloody face and onto my cut wing. I whipped around and bit the finger as hard as I could.

The god’s voice rose, shaking the ground, and it jerked its hand away.

I stood up, spurs out, with god blood in my teeth. It tasted like mud and those mineral chunks.

The god held its hand up to its shining face, inspecting the bite. It looked at me.

I jumped at it, foot spurs out.

It slapped me, and I went skidding in the grass. The god shook its head and clearly said “Angelpunk” in that thunder-flooded-river-driving-snow-tornado voice.

Then it stood up and left.

I flapped up into a tree, shaking and shedding drops of wing blood, and collapsed on a high branch where I wouldn’t have to move again for a while.