I don’t anymore. Men aren’t meant to fly. That’s a truth we learned during the return of the gods.

  My name is Glen. I’m sixteen, and my family is one of the lucky ones. We were farmers when the fall happened, and my grandfather set himself up with a minor fiefdom in the American heartnds.

  The only lines on the old maps that matter are the old roads, which today are cracked and broken. The cities are gone. The governments that used to cim that the borders mattered are shattered.

  It’s much better now.

  At least that’s what the priests say. They talk about how the world was being poisoned and how close we had come to killing Mother Earth before the gods returned to give their guidance.

  The gods had made the hard decisions that we had been unwilling to make for ourselves.

  I wouldn’t really know anything about any of history though. My older brothers might know more; I’m the third son. Neither the heir nor the spare. And I’ve got three older sisters as well. So by the time I came along, my parents were more or less worn out on answering every little question that came out of my mouth when I was younger and a lot of what I got was from my older siblings.

  It took me a while to realize they were full of shit and didn’t know much more than I did. The old school building still stands in the center of town, but nobody uses it for school anymore.

  It’s a fortress.

  Most of the kids I grew up with are pretty much completely uneducated, but I know my letters and I know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, and grandpa says that’s all I really need to know from schooling anyway. Everything else I know, I learned on Sundays or out in the field.

  The Archangel Michael was the one who answered my grandfather’s prayers during the great whatever you want to call the Return. The Angels cimed most of America, actually, but Michael is the one who governs what used to be eastern Kansas.

  Outside of town there’s an old city limits marker that names the town Prairie Bend, but the priests renamed fiefdom after the old family name—we’re the Ashfords—and six old towns got gobbled up by Grandpa’s rule.

  For reasons that only really make sense to the elders, we’re called the Ashford Benders.

  On my sixteenth birthday, my Grandpa took me aside to give me my Ruger and thirty bullets for it. He told me that meant I could kill thirty of the serfs, if I wanted to. Not that I should, of course. But that I could, and I should think about what it meant to have that kind of power.

  It’s not like there wouldn’t have been questions if I’d done so, of course. If I killed a hard worker for no good reason I’d probably be whipped or something. I dunno really, since the thought of killing anyone makes me sick.

  But I carry the Ruger strapped to my hip all the same to show everyone that I’m an Ashford man and not to mess with me.

  Most of our serfs are pretty good people. They’re just not Benders, that’s all. The divisions between us and them happened before I was born, but basically when the gods struck down the bsphemous skyscrapers and id the cities low, the survivors were all marked.

  The faithful like my grandfather and our family rule by the grace of the gods.

  Anyway, they might not be around for too much longer. Gramps says that in three or four generations, the serfs will have either succumbed to the gods’ curse, or they’ll have been forgiven.

  In the meantime, they’re just trying to get by, same as anyone else, and I don’t really see any reason to make life worse for them just because I can. The truth is that I feel sorry for them. It’s not their fault that the old governments tried to fight the gods with Prometheus’s fire and lost.

  But at the same time we have to keep the bloodlines pure. It’s only logical. The serfs are a dying race, with three in five of their children being born mutated or monstrous.

  One of my friends growing up, before I really understood any of this, was named Dumb Tom. Because he couldn’t talk. But he wasn’t stupid or anything. He was as hard a worker as any of us other kids once you expined what he had to do, and he was great to py with.

  Until the day where he just sat down in the middle of the field and died. Nobody knows why.

  Well, that’s not the truth. We know it’s because of the curse.

  That’s why it’s us and them. Not because we’re not good folk and they’re bad folk or anything like that. But because their parents or their grandparents or their great-grandparents lived in a city when the Return happened. Now their kids are mutants and die young, and so we can’t breed with them unless we want the curse to affect our kids too.

  That’s all there is to it.

  Nobody said the gods were fair.