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that we don't actually — or
accidentally — touch.
    I push myself up and face him. Neither
of us seems able to look each other in the eye. We each focus on
something else in the room, which lately has been feeling more and
more cramped.
    There's very little that's welcoming
about the place. I've tried to give it a homey touch, decorating
the walls a bit with drawings, but they're poor representations of
the things I remember from before. Bren tells me that if I tried
harder, I could be a lot better at art. She's tried to show me. But
my hands don't seem able to follow the instructions from my head. I
can't make them do what I want.
    Maybe it's a good thing, because some
of those images are truly horrifying.
    There's a sort of mat on the floor,
woven from strips of the material some of the food came in. It's
scratchy, but it's better than the permanent chill of the bare
concrete, especially in the winter. The light seeping under our
door glows dimly on my father's face, making it appear bruised and
pale.
    “ What time is
it?”
    “ Almost
morning.”
    “ You didn't wake me when
you came back last night?”
    “ I am just coming back. The
senior members continued discussing matters. We finished about an
hour ago. I decided to do my walkabout before retiring.”
    I frown at him. “You met all night?
What did you talk about that whole time?”
    “ We didn’t talk the whole
time. Eddie was having difficulty breathing, so we took a break.
Doctor Cavanaugh pulled me and Seth in to work the respirator and
to keep an eye on the IV lines. It was . . . .
Well, it was touch and go there for a bit.”
    He takes my hand and squeezes it, and
I can see that his eyes are filled with tears. He so rarely cries,
even when we talk about the rest of our family.
    “ That man is one tough
son-of-a-gun.”
    “ But he's going to
die.”
    Dad doesn't deny it.
    “ He couldn't have known
that pipe was going to burst right then, Dad. I tried—”
    “ Nobody's blaming
anybody.”
    Does he mean me? Or
Eddie?
    “ He just ran inside the
boiler room. It was filled with steam already. We couldn't
see.”
    “ I know.”
    “ I wanted to tell him to
stop.”
    He straightens up and gives my hand
another squeeze, hard this time, then looks me in the eye. “No one
can manage the past, Finn, so it's no use trying. The best we can
do is to keep preparing for the future.”
    I turn away, suddenly disgusted with
myself, with my own paralyzing fears. “What future?” I spit.
“Counting food stores until there's nothing left to count? What
then? Jonah says—”
    “ Look at me,” he tells me.
“Finn, look at me.” But when I do, the steely gaze I expect isn't
there. Just the pain. “I hope it doesn't come to that,” he
whispers. “But right now isn't the time to be talking about
leaving. To even be thinking about it. It's a distraction.
Winter'll be coming soon.”
    “ No one's seen a Wraith in
months, Dad.”
    “ You think we should leave?
Is that what you're saying, Finn?”
    He's throwing my fears back in my
face, and it enrages me, especially after all Bren said to me
yesterday.
    “ I don't know!
Maybe.”
    “ One touch,” he reminds me,
snapping his fingers. “One touch is all it takes, and you're gone.
Nothing you do can stop it.”
    He means that the moment that touch
happens, you have a few minutes when you know you're dead. Or
whatever passes for dead on this side of the line. You know your
mind is leaving you.
    There is no cure, no treatment, no way
to stop the inevitable decline. In those last few minutes before
your humanity slips away, you know it's happening. Those are the
worst moments, because you're still human enough to understand that
soon you won't be.
    “ We can't risk it,
Finn.”
    He studies my face. He knows I'll be
the last person to leave this place, if and when it happens. He
knows that it'll take a lot of convincing to make me go. I've tried
a few times these past three years to make him think otherwise,