Pel dug her nails into the leather of her car’s steering wheel, holding on for dear life as her Pirouette-13 raced ahead at zero miles per hour, staying in place and going nowhere.

At least, not yet.

She squeezed the leather so hard, she worried her fingers would snap open at the joints.

Even Jules was staring.

“Mom…”

Pel huffed. “I did what had to be done,” she said.

She looked our daughter in the eyes.

“We’re gonna make it, honey.” Her voice broke. “We have to.”

It was agony to say those words. Pel hated lying, but what else could she do? She couldn’t get herself to believe those words, no matter how hard she tried. So she’d lied to her children, and that was a sin. And it wasn’t her first sin, either, nor would it be her last.

She was an apostate, now.

Back in their prison in the compound down below, Pel had given in. She’d put a message in the console by the door, just as the maroon-scaled Norm had told her to do. The second she’d done so, the door swung open and Henrichy—who’d been standing there, waiting—then escorted her and the kids back to the dive bar, where Margaret was waiting, languorous among the corpses.

As she stepped out of the kitchen, Pel told herself that she could smooth things over with ease. Her mother had been making unusual, excessive demands for as long as she’d known her, so she knew how to deal with them. She just needed to ignore that a demon had taken over and transfigured her mother’s body and treat this as yet another attempt to earn her mother’s henpecked praise.

For the first few minutes, at least, it was pretty much exactly that: she repudiating her initial outburst; she even apologized to Eyvan.

“I was just scared,” she’d said, and everyone but Henrichy and her kids seemed to believe it.

And for a moment, Pel believed she’d done it.

But then steel-scaled Norm slithered over the bar and looked her in the eyes and demanded that she prostrate herself before Verune and the other divine beasts, and renounce her ‘former’ faith, and Pel hadn’t expected that at all.

She also hadn’t expected her mother to be so cavalier about the fact that she’d been bankrolling terrorists for years—the Innocents of the Mountain—and had built the dive bar to serve as a front for one of the Innocents’ main bases. But, by this point, the horrors were so numerous that that particular revelation and slid off her like oil off water.

Or maybe she had, but just didn’t want to believe it.

That was the thing about hope: it just refused to die, even when all it brought was misery.

“You still have an icon of the Angel on your chest,” the Norm had said. “I’m glad to see Margaret’s daughter is a woman of faith, but… please, get rid of it.”

“Why?”

“It was proper to have it before the Last Days. But now that the Angel’s Blessèd are here, it is no longer necessary. Verune has come to us, Angel-sent, to make to fulfill the promise in the Bond of Light. The covenant is complete. Why contemplate candlelight when you can behold the Sun?”

As he’d spoken, holes had started opening in his cheeks, forming muscular pores that lent musical inflections to his heresies.

“Prove your contrition,” he said. “Renounce the old ways, just as we have shed our human forms. Our truth is the last truth, and there can be no other.”

And then he’d pointed at Rayph and Jules.

“They’re you children, aren’t they?” he asked, slithering out onto the floor. “Be a good mother; show them the right path to take.”

She wanted to be dreaming, because then she could wake up. But there was no waking up.

There was no way out.

Pel had no choice but to debase herself in that den of monsters. She forswore the one, true faith.

“The Angel’s Covenant is fulfilled,” she’d said, repeating the words he’d told her. “We are bound to it no longer. Paradise awaits.”

Apparently, the demons had gotten around to crafting the words their converts would have to speak to pledge their faith to the Last Church.

Pel had to work very hard to keep her hands from shaking. With those words, she’d abandoned the rock of her being. She was adrift now, lost and irredeemable.

There was no undoing what she’d done. She had blasphemed against the Angel—a sin that cried out to Paradise, and Pel hated herself for not being strong enough to endure that trial.

She just loved her kids too much. When push came to shove, she’d failed to do the right thing. She’d been selfish. She’d let her desire to see her children live overcome her obligation to love the Holy Angel and His one, true Church.

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God was goodness itself, and she’d forsaken that for worldly gain. She’d thought herself better than Goodness itself.

Pel’s fingers dug a little deeper into the steering wheel.

Jules and Rayph had to survive, otherwise, the eternity she’d spend in Hell would be truly meaningless.

The console on the car’s dashboard lit up—an audio-only call.

“Are you ready to go, Pel?”

It was Margaret. She was speaking to them through a PortaCon of her own. It hung from a string she’d put on around her neck, like some kind of barbarian totem.

Pel remembered staring in shock as Verune had levitated Margaret into one of the vans.

What could she do against something like that?

She looked up at the rear-view mirror.

1337 Petta Drive’s garage was abuzz with unholy activity. Her mother’s cult of terrorists were loading Norms and guns into the many vans scattered around the garage. For years and years, those vans had rested quietly in their reserved parking spots, and Pel could never get her mother to explain what they were for.

I’d made a game out of getting the kids to imagine what the vans might actually be used for.

Maybe they were where the Revenels stored all their money.

Maybe it held the bodies of all the architects they’d used up.

Maybe they were used by private investigators to stalk the Revenels’ enemies.

“Remember when Dad joked Grandma used the vans for terrorism?” Jules muttered.

“Pelbrum?” Margaret said, when Pel failed to reply.

“Mom…” Rayph said.

“Y-Yes, Mother,” Pel said, relaxing her grip on the steering wheel—but only a little. She looked at the kids: Jules in the front passenger seat; Rayph in the backseat behind it. “We’re just about ready.”

Pel waved her hand over the ignition. The Pirouette-13’s engine revved awake.

“Good,” Margaret said, “we’ll be leaving shortly. I’ll keep in touch.”

There was a moment of silence after the call ended.

“Mom…” Jules said.

Pel stayed quiet.

“You did a really good job of convincing them,” Jules said.

Shuddering, Pel sighed. “I know, Jules. I know.”

Vehicles started revving up all across the garage.

Pel turned on the window tints. She didn’t want anyone looking at her, or the kids. Her shame was already more judgment than she could bear.

Setting the stick shift to Reverse, Pel slowly pulled out of her parking spot, and then pushed the shift into Drive as she turned the car to face the exit ramp at the far end of the garage—right where the Norms were.

Right where Verune was.

The Lassedite stood in front of the closed Flood Protection Door at the base of the exit ramp, flanked by several of his most monstrous followers in a V-shaped formation. He stood with his back facing the Pirouette, which gave Pel a clear view of the Hummingbird Robe’s glittering iridescent cope.

One of the Norms snaked their body to the side, bringing their claws within reach of the Flood Protection Door’s control button. The demon pressed it.

Pel’s grip on the steering wheel tensed as the doors receded back into the ground. The contact made the raw spots on her fingers sting.

Verune hobbled forward and his Norms slithered along with him, maintaining their formation.

One of the Last Church’s human followers stood in the middle of the garage. He started waving the vans by, one by one, as they pulled out of their parking spots and left the garage.

By the time her turn came around, Pel felt like she was going stir-crazy. The vehicles were advancing at a crawl, and any relief she might have felt from getting to move was crushed by the unnatural strain she felt at having to drive the Pirouette-13 forward at a snail’s pace. She could feel the wheels creak in their slow, inexorable turns.

Slowly, she drove up the ramp, and out onto street level.

Jules gasped. Pel would have gasped, too, but she felt too broken to care anymore.

The section of Petta Drive outside the building was in shambles, littered with pieces of corpses. The hunks of flesh were so ruined and mutilated that Pel couldn’t tell where they’d come from: human, animal, monster. Like the cars on Seacrest Avenue, the gore seeded the fungus everywhere it touched. The pavement had cracked where the chunks of flesh had sent out their rhizomes and haustoria and taken root. The growths weaved together in a veiny network that covered the street—a forest floor, without the forest.

Slender, rodlike structures prodded out from the rain gutters.

Pel could have sworn it was still the middle of the night, but the Sun was up. It was mid-morning. Noon was near. The realization only made Pel feel that much more disoriented.

Rayph and Jules couldn’t resist peeking through the car’s windows, hoping to get a better view.

Rising columns of smoke and ash darkly tint the mid-morning sky.

Up ahead, from where he stood in the middle of the street, among the skyward-dreaming fungus, Verune turned around and spoke. His voice was loud, almost choral voice.

“We march on the Melted Palace!”

Then he turned forward again and led the way, and the convoy followed.

The trip was agonizingly slow. It wasn’t a journey, it was a parade, and it advanced at walking speed.

To think, a parade, in the middle of a dead city.

Every once in a while, Verune would call out in a rousing, joyous voice, beckoning the people to join him.

The first two blocks they passed were deathly still. The streets were littered with corpses, trash, and abandoned vehicles. Verune’s words echoed over them, down festering alleys and deserted boulevards.

On the third block, two Norms—early on in their changes, by the look of it—crept out of an alley, drawn by Verune’s call. The whole convoy came to a standstill as the Lassedite lovingly welcomed them into the fold.

“Mom,” Jules hissed, “this is it. Let’s make a break for it.”

“No,” Pel replied. “We’re in clear view of the others. They’d see us.”

The Norms and the attending vans were packed together somewhat closely. Though the Pirouette’s petite build would make it relatively easy to peel away from the convoy and hide in a shadowed alleyway, the problem was that the car was near the center of the group, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to move toward the edge without attracting attention, especially at these slow speeds.

By now, the convoy had gotten far enough away from Petta Drive that the influence of its neighborhoods had waned. Petta Drive’s silent chrome skyscrapers had given way to older, shorter models. Though not as imposing as their modern descendants, the shorter skyscrapers still cast shadows over the shrubby two- or three-story tall buildings that grew beside them. They were like crosses between jukeboxes and stout office buildings. Their colorful façades—bright red, green, or yellow—formed fanciful frames, the gaps filled in by panels of windows.

From where they were, the convoy would just need to turn onto Imperial Promenade, and then it would be a straight line to the Melted Palace, but, at the rate they were going, they’d be lucky to get there by noon. About halfway through the journey, the convoy came to an unexpected stop.

“More converts?” Jules asked.

Raising her head to look, Pel saw the street up ahead was blocked by an abandoned bus.

“No,” Pel said, “look.”

Jules did, and then groaned. “What now?” she asked.

Two of Verune’s Norms had moved to either side of the back of the abandoned bus, and were using the monstrous strength of their monstrous bodies to turn the bus and push it out of the way.

Pel noticed that Verune had raised one of his hands.

“They’re moving it…” Jules muttered. She turned to her mother. “Why are they moving it?”

It took a second for the gears in Pel’s mind to turn. Given that the world had ended, it shouldn’t have.

And yet…

“I think… he wants to be there for Convocation,” she muttered. “He doesn’t want to backtrack.” She gasped. “That’s why he’s going slowly. He’s gathering followers.”

“But for what?” Rayph asked.

“Maybe there’s something happening,” Jules said, “something we don’t know about.”

Pel wished she had the audacity to pray.

Rayph’s eyes widened. “Holy crap!"