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it out of her hands but she won’t let me keep it from her. She weaves her belt through the sheath.
    “You don’t think I should have it,” she says.
    She’s right.
    I watch as she takes the knife out a few times, faster and faster with each draw, getting the feel of it and I wonder if she just decided to do it, how quickly she could slice her wrists up. I wonder how quickly it would take her to bleed out if she did.
    “You should worry about yourself,” she tells me.
    Fury turns my insides out fast enough for me to call her a bitch before I can think if that’s something I really want to do. It stumbles out of my mouth pathetically, but I can’t deny it wasn’t satisfying, that some of the tension I’ve been carrying since we left Cortege doesn’t go away. It crosses my mind too late if her dad ever called her that.
    I can’t look at her once I’ve thought it.
    I step into the kitchen, feeling her eyes on me as I go. I keep my back to her until she heads upstairs and then I start searching places I’ve already searched and I don’t know if any of this is what we should be doing or if it only feels like it’s what we should be doing.
    I let it go on for a while, my uselessness and the space she put between us, and then I wander to the stairs, expecting to find her in the corner of that room, waiting for me to drag her to the car but when I reach the bottom of them, she’s halfway down and she doesn’t look right.
    She says, “Rhys,” and it feels like the only time she makes herself say my name now is when something’s wrong.

 
    When we were in the school, they surrounded us.
    We couldn’t account for it, how they sought us out, seemed to know we were there when we hadn’t given ourselves away. The most we could figure was they remembered
places
meant
people
. They didn’t have to know we were there to know that once we
were
there, that we could be there again, whether they’d ever seen us there before with their own dead eyes. Sloane and I crouch by the window at the end of the hall on the second floor.
    We’re surrounded.
    It’s a sick feeling, that you’ve done everything wrong. That you should have kept going, even when you were too tired to see. Should’ve siphoned from the Prius, should have put the gas in our car and kept going. Would’ve been in Rayford by now, maybe. So easy, really. But we didn’t. So how the fuck we get through this next part, I don’t know.
    There’s got to be at least … fifteen of them that I can see from here, this side of the house. Could be more on the other side. Fifteen. That’s bad. All it takes is one and they run. I’ve fought off groups before and making it out in one piece was pure dumb luck. That’s it. These days it feels like
alive
is an accidental state of being.
    One of them, a man in a ratty, shredded suit, stares up at the house. He (it?) reminds me of a dog that’s gone still in the middle of a hunt. Listening. The others almost seem to take their cue from him. They are still and listening too.
    “I saw them,” Sloane says. She moves away from the window, careful not to be seen, and sits on the floor and wraps her arms around her legs. “When you came to get me.”
    I ease down beside her. My heart is pounding so hard I think it’s going to explode and my stomach hurts and my hands are shaking. I clasp them together so they stop and I try not to let the rest of it show on my face.
    “We could wait them out,” I say.
    “I think one saw me.”
    This is bad.
    “The suit?”
    “Yeah.”
    This is really fucking bad. Christ. Fuck getting this far and it’s not close enough. They’ll wait. They’ll outlast us. But that’s only if they don’t bust their way in here first.
    I don’t know what to do.
    “I’m going to check the front,” I say.
    She stays where she is while I crawl away from the window and move halfway down the stairs on my ass until it’s safe to stand and as soon as I do, the Ave Maria’s in my head. Hail