1900 B.C. – the Babylonian desert. White sands stretch on, and the scene turns from idyllic to barbaric when severed limbs and a battlefield littered with dead bodies comes into view. A young boy, the only survivor, clambers to his feet and starts running when a shaggy-haired Michael in leather armor lands a few feet away from him. Michael offers him a bloodied hand, which the boy takes while he tells him not to be afraid.

Present day, Gabriel’s aerie. Gabriel sends away his peers to be alone. He closes his eyes and tries to get into Louis’s head. He’s getting better at higher angel possession.

Out in the desert, Michael is hunting Eight-balls. He captures a particularly nasty one called Dirge. It soon becomes clear why: Alex wants to practice evictions. Fittingly enough, Michael and Alex’ practicing ground is an abandoned sex shop. As it so happens, Dirge isn’t very cooperative and Alex has a hard time evicting the lower angel. In the end, he takes a gun to his head and puts a bullet in the guy’s brain. It looks like Alex hasn’t mastered the art of eviction quite yet.

In the aftermath of David’s run-in with the Black Acolytes, William is keeping him confined in a bed. David is barely able to move from the pain the broken ribs cause him, and William is taking full advantage of having the upper hand for once. His father’s contempt for his actions rolls right off William’s back, because he is still convinced that following Gabriel is the only way to salvation.

Claire has good news for William as well. She wants to move the wedding forward to the following week. It seems a bit sudden, but Claire wants to take the political burdens off her father’s shoulders sooner rather than later.

In the middle of the night, Alex uses the AAC dorm downtime to take a shower in private. Little did he expect for Noma to join him, but of course there is no hiding the tattoos, now that she’s seen them in all their glory. She’s seemingly unimpressed, but one thing leads to another, and before they know it, they’re in the supply closet, quenching a mutual physical desire.

Gabriel, still borrowing Louis’s body, visits an old friend in the hospital — Brother Jeffrey who works there as a medic. Jeffrey refuses to take sides and wishes to stay neutral, but of course Gabri-Louis has to plant the idea for him to join Gabriel’s cause.

Consul Thorn is out for a run, but something’s fishy when she finds that she’s stepped into a puddle of blood. The sight that present itself to her when she looks up is nothing other than gruesome. Brutally mutilated higher angels are hanging from the side of a building, one of them medic Jeffrey. Their blood is still dripping on the concrete below.

Michael is as appalled by the murders as the rest of the city. And everyone’s upset that Michael knew there were higher angels hiding in Vega but didn’t tell anyone. He walks away, and General Riesen speaks to Becca. He wants her to examine the higher angels’ bodies to study them, find out what she can about them.

Michael first accuses Alex of having a hand in the hangings, and we get a first glimpse into the well-hidden anger that lingers just beneath the archangel’s stoic surface. However, Michael realizes this may just be a first warning. He asks Alex to approach Louis, who needs to warn the other neutral highers that they better leave the city.

David makes an escape attempt from this plush prison, only to find that William had been expecting nothing less. He lets David get a taste of his own medicine and locks him in a pen with Samson, his lion.

Up in San Francisco, Michael meets with Uriel, who confesses that Gabriel made her give up the list of names of all the higher angels living in Vega.

Alex seeks out Gabri-Louis in his home. He gives Gabri-Louis the message from Michael to warn the other highers about the threat to their lives. Of course Gabriel can’t resist to plant a little seed of doubt in Alex’s mind, hinting at the fact that Michael wasn’t always who he seems to be. Gabriel suggests that the Bible’s great flood was nothing more than a metaphor for something else entirely. Noah’s Ark wasn’t a ship but a bunker, and he was not saving animals but humans. But from whom?

In the lion’s den, the only weapon David is given is a revolver with a single bullet. They let the lion out of his cage, and he starts prowling around David. David makes a grand speech about rather dying than to bow to any angel. But it’s the survival instinct that prevails over pride. The gun goes off, and Samson is no more.

Gabriel’s clever scheming is already paying off, because Alex is starting to doubt Michael. How well do they really know him, he asks Noma. He is soon summoned to the Stratosphere tower by Gabri-Louis — an emergency of some kind, it seems.

When Alex gets there he is puzzled to find only Louis lounging in a chair by the window. Gabri-Louis claims to know who the killer is, and at that exact moment Noma enters the room. Gabriel wants to prove a point about why they should not trust Michael. He throws Noma out of the open window without warning. Alex watches her fall until a pair of wings unfurl from her back and she flies away.

When Michael joins them, Alex is understandably angry. How could he not tell him that one of his closest friends is a higher angel? Michael’s explanation is that he put Noma in place to protect Alex from himself, the reckless mess that he is. Tensions run high when Alex figures that it’s not about what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s about Michael’s guilt.

Michael calls Louis on his murderous actions, but it’s then that Gabriel reveals himself as possessing force. The brothers are at each other’s throats, but Alex surprises them by making another eviction attempt. Gabriel’s arrogance soon turns to surprise to find that Alex is more skilled at it than he expected. It doesn’t take long for Gabriel to be forcefully released from Louis’s body and ends up on the floor of his throne room.

It is Uriel who is waiting there for him. They both gloat about how all of the recent actions wound up Michael to the point where another flood might not be long in the making.

David Whele is back in his bedroom prison. He is a shell of himself— blank stare, red-rimmed eyes, utterly lost. William has made him into a broken man. He wordlessly eats the soup that William is feeding him.

The next day, the full extent of Gabriel’s workings becomes clear to Michael and Alex. All of the higher angels in Vega with the exception of Louis and Noma have been killed when they tried to flee the city, their bodies now piled up in a warehouse. Alex calls Michael on the vague innuendo about his past, but Michael won’t hear any of it and just walks away.

We’re back in the Babylonian desert two millennia B.C. The boy takes Michael’s hand, but it’s Gabriel who then intervenes. He tells Michael to let the boy go and can only just stop Michael from killing the child. Just as Gabriel is about to attack Michael, Uriel comes Gabriel’s aid to arbitrate between the brothers. It’s Michael’s belief that Father’s request was to have Michael slaughter every man, woman and child because they were beginning to worship angels over God. He justifies his actions by explaining that he is just ensuring the natural order of things.

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