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cleaning the dried blood away from Jove’s mouth.
    He’s a mess. His bumps and bruises have gained definition, changing the lines of his face and darkening his skin in places. He barely looks human.
    “At least he’s not awake to feel it,” I say as I wash off his knuckles.
    “Careful,” Tobin warns. “Only clean his skin, not the wounds. The sugar could give him an infection.”
    “Don’t you tell her to be careful, Toby,” Anne-Marie snaps, but she listens well enough to skirt the split on Jove’s eyebrow. “You should thank her for stopping you.”
    She takes a long swipe down Jove’s cheek, accidentally snagging one of the cuts. Tobin presses a clean bandage against it to stop the bleeding.
    “You know you didn’t have to hit him, or you could have just hit him once, but you didn’t. If Marina hadn’t made you stop, you could have killed him.”
    Apple juice sloshes out of the bottle as she shakes it at another bandage to clean off Jove’s cracked lips.
    “He’s burning hot, Toby. Feel his face.” Anne-Marie grabs Tobin’s hand, not giving him a choice. “When he wakes up you’re going to apologize or . . . well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but you’re not going to like it!”
    Her voice dies down to half-mumbled threats. If Jove weren’t already unconscious, she’d talk him into a coma.
    Tobin and I ease away once most of Jove’s injuries are checked, leaving Anne-Marie to take care of him.
    “We need a clock in here,” Tobin says.
    Or windows. Or a radio. Anything to tell us how close it is to dawn, and what might be happening outside.
    I check my personal alarm, hoping I can figure out a way to coax information from it, but the face is still flooded with blinking red light. It’s a shock to see the burn from where I’d hit the wall during the run. I hadn’t really registered the pain until now.
    That claustrophobic feeling that had Anne-Marie so keyed up settles in. It really is a small room once it’s packed full, and yet I somehow end up picking a spot close to Tobin rather than one where I’m alone. He doesn’t flinch away from me like the others would.
    “You know what it is, don’t you?” Tobin’s voice is distant.
    “What?”
    “Why they’re afraid of you?” He nods to the room. Every once in a while, someone will glance my way, but they divert their attention as soon as they realize I can see them.
    “They blame me,” I say.
    He shakes his head. “It’s your ears.”
    “My ears?” I grasp at them, confused. They feel normal.
    “I don’t know what the stories are like where you came from, but here people who can hear the Fade and those who can see in the Dark are bad omens. They’re the ones we lost first. You know, before.”
    “But I can’t see in the Dark anymore.”
    “You can still hear,” he says. “You try to hide it, but I’ve seen you with your head cocked to the side, like you’re counting off a rhythm that doesn’t exist. Honoria tells us stories, and . . . never mind. It’s not a time for stories.”
    “No. I want to know. Her stories are about people who could hear?”
    “Some of them.” He nods again without looking at me. “They walked into the Dark on their own. They said they heard voices calling them out . . . people they knew. . . . The next time they were seen, if they were ever seen, they were Fade. It hasn’t happened in years, but Honoria’s brother was one of the last. They grabbed him on a forage run or something. He was just a kid.”
    “But I don’t hear voices,” I argue. “I hear real sounds.”
    “It still scares them. My dad trained himself to do the same thing, but he doesn’t tell people. You have to hide it better.”
    I don’t mean to stare at Tobin, and really I’m not, but he’s been so many different people in such a short time. He’s gone from the boy slinking into rooms after everyone else was in place, to my protector, to the hurt son defending his father’s memory with feral