The phone sat in front of me. It had been almost a month since I last talked to Kate. I really wanted to call home.

No.

The phone company assured me that reverse dialing no longer was an option, but the risk was too great.

I had to go back to Honeycomb. Jasper had taken two people with him on his little outing. He would’ve told them about the job. Someone in the Gap knew something about it.

Getting dressed was an effort. I powered through it on sheer will and went to the stables. Thick clouds pregnant with rain crowded the sky. The air was still and humid, baked in oppressive heat. It would storm before long.

Tulip was in her stall, but her mouth was bloody again, so she had clearly gone out this morning.

“See this? This is perfectly fine feed. Premium quality oats. Delicious hay. Would it have killed you to stay put?”

Tulip snorted at me. I cleaned her up, saddled her, and we were off.

My buddy the homeless man was back at his post at the intersection, looking starved and pitiful. I rode by him, bought two oversized kolaches from a stall again, and brought one to him. He eyed me as if I were Sophia’s cobra but took the hot pastry.

“It’s going to rain,” I told him. “You might want to get inside.”

He ignored me.

The Methodist hospital was my first stop. I sat by Douglas’s bed, held his limp hand, and watched the liquid slowly drip from his IV bag.

He was a good kid. Brave. Kind. He tried to protect someone who was smaller and weaker than him even knowing he would get hurt. He tried to protect me, even though he didn’t know me, and he owed me nothing. He had so little in life.

I wanted him to survive. But all I could do was sit by his bed and stare in helpless rage. I remembered sitting just like this behind the bars of Moloch’s cages inside his citadel and watching people around me rot slowly. Beaten, exhausted, filthy, they had given up. They had no names. They had let go of their memories. They didn’t live, they existed in agony waiting to die.

It was almost impossible to pummel hope out of human beings. It was an irrepressible part of our spirit. Hope kept us going, but as I’d sat in the middle of that sea of human bodies, I knew with absolute certainty that their hope was dead. I’d watched them suffer, and I’d cried to keep the helpless blinding fury from tearing me apart.

It didn’t matter how powerful you were. Life always found ways to stab you and twist the knife in the wound. Nobody was immune.

*

I chose the long route to the Honeycomb Gap. It took an extra ten minutes, but it let me ride by Galina’s Bakery. The little shop was still there after all these years. I bought a strawberry hand pie, munched on it while Tulip carried me through the streets, and thought about the box, the divine beast, the weird color of yellow that someone had painted the car forcing its way down the street in front of me... Anything to avoid thinking about Derek.

I had many failings, and the overwhelming need to be in control of myself was one of them. I didn’t care about controlling other people. I didn’t micromanage, and I delegated when someone else was better suited for the task, but I had to maintain an iron grip over myself at all times. There was probably a host of deep-seated psychological issues behind that urge that would take a dozen psychiatrists ages to sort out, but it boiled down to one thing: I kept my emotions divorced from my actions. I hid my weaknesses. Even when anger crested in me in a hot, red wave, I surfed it to my goal. I never lost my hold in front of other people unless they were family. If I screamed, it was calculated. If I wept, I did it for impact.

Derek made me lose it. I kept going over our conversation in my head. It was the way he had looked at me. The way he sat, the way he smiled, the way he spoke. Everything he did reminded me of what I’d left behind. Somehow, he bypassed my armor and got an honest, instinctual response out of me. I hated that so much.

He was one of the reasons I’d learned to control myself. Not the main one, not even close to the most important, but still one of them. Even as a kid, I recognized that if I openly threw myself at him and told him how much I loved him, how happy I was to see him every day, it would make things irreparably awkward. I didn’t want him to avoid me.

Now I would give anything to avoid him.

There was no reason for us to interact again. Sooner or later Ascanio would catch up to him and his motley crew of shapeshifter badasses. Derek would have other things to worry about and leave me in peace.

We had arrived at the building with the phone line. I finished my pie in one bite, jumped off Tulip’s back, and headed up the ruined stairs. The phone line was back on the pole. They had repaired it again. I loved it when a plan came together.

I took off my cloak and climbed the pole. I was two-thirds up, when a familiar raspy voice asked, “What are you doing?”

I had excellent reflexes, which was why I didn’t fall off the pole and land on my ass.

Son of a bitch. Fuck, shit, fuck.

Derek leaned against a crumbling wall. He wore khaki work pants, stained with cement dust and rust, a green long-sleeve Henley, and a robin-hood, a hood that fit over the shoulders and came with a face mask that covered the nose and mouth. The reclamation crews wore them to keep the dust out of their lungs and sun out of their face. He looked like he had just walked off one of the salvage crews from Ted Turner Drive. I couldn’t even see his face, let alone his scars.

Why was he here? Why, why, why, why…