I see the moment when she goes. There’s a light inside people, their souls shining brightly through their eyes. I’ve witnessed that light go out many times before. I recognize the moment for what it is—whatever made Lacey Lacey leaving her body—but I just can’t believe it.

I don’t even believe it when her hand falls limp in mine. It only hits me when Zeth chokes out a single sob. When he lets go of her hand and carefully places it on top of her chest. When he stares down at her lifeless body, a look of utter shock written on his face.

I go to him. I wrap my arms around his shaking, battered and bruised body, and I hold him. He doesn’t acknowledge me. He just continues to stare at his sister. On the floor beside us, Lacey’s body lies in a pool of her own blood. Her expression is strangely serene, and it hits in a wave of hurt that she was right. Everything really is okay for her now. Everything really is okay.

The poor girl who only ever ate the moons out of her favorite cereal because she hoped it would make her invisible. The poor girl who made herself small to feel safe. The poor girl who only ever wanted peace. Conceived of violence. Lived a life of violence. Poor Lacey, the girl who only ever wanted peace…

She dies in violence, too.

I. Can’t. Breathe.

Michael picks up Lacey’s body, his face blank and lost. We follow him. Zeth doesn’t say a word. He’s still completely shut down, apparently nothing going on in his head. Tears still streak silently down my face as we make our way out of the rundown movie theater, leaving Charlie and O’Shannessey’s bodies behind us, along with the dead bodies of two other men I don’t recognize. Michael says they’d come to kill Zeth. I feel no remorse for their deaths.

We’re in a car then. Not one I recognize. It’s bright outside. The sun is shining. I sit in the front with Michael, while Zeth sits in the back with Lacey, her head in his lap. He doesn’t touch her. He stares out the window, blinking at the world. It doesn’t even occur to me to ask where we’re going. The towers and high-rises, the concrete teeth of the city, grow smaller and smaller in the rearview. Seattle disappears.

An hour passes and not a single word is spoken. Michael pulls off the freeway at an obnoxiously big home-and-hardware store, the kind where you can buy chainsaws in bulk. While he’s gone, I reach my hand back through the gap down the side of my seat, and Zeth puts his hand in mine. Michael returns bearing two flat head shovels and a flat look on his face. The shovels go into the trunk. I don’t need to ask what they’re for.

After that, it’s the sky and the freeway and the spreading forest, dark and ominous, that invite us in, deeper and deeper. We don’t see another car for twenty minutes as we pull off the freeway again and wind our way down roads that start off as blacktop and end as dirt tracks, choked and bumpy with the roots of so many trees. I don’t know how long we sit in the car before I realize we’ve stopped moving. A long time, I think.

“We have to move,” Michael says eventually.

Zeth’s fingers twitch, his hand still in mine, but other than that he doesn’t move.

“Zee? We can’t take her back to—”

“I know.” Zeth takes a deep breath and it’s as though he comes back to life. Unwillingly, but…alive. He opens his door, and then with the greatest care, climbs out and lifts his sister’s body from the backseat. It’s cold out, but it’s not raining. The sun spears down through the tightly packed trees, golden pillars of light that seem to be holding up the sky over our heads. Michael retrieves the shovels from the trunk and heads into the forest first. Zeth clenches his jaw, watching him go for a moment, and then nods, some inner battle waging inside him perhaps, and then he follows. I am last. I watch the muscles in Zeth’s back twist and shift as he walks ahead of me, and I want to stop him. To hold him. To comfort him. But I can tell he doesn’t need that right now—he needs a moment to figure out what he’s feeling. We all do. 

I feel like shit. My body’s hating the fact that I’m still demanding more of it, when I should be resting in a hospital bed. The blast was just the icing on the cake. I’m still in pain from being shot, from running, from abusing my body a hundred different ways since I met these people. But it’s my heart that hurts the most. I don’t know how it will ever stop hurting.

Michael stops after a while. The trees have thinned out into a small glade, which overlooks a brook, carving its way through the mountainside. The ribbon of water throws sparks of light from its surface, gold and white and warm.

“Here?” Michael says.

“Here,” Zeth agrees.

I wish they’d brought three shovels. The men get to work, digging slowly, clearly hating the job. I sit with Lacey, brushing my fingers through her hair. Her body’s started to stiffen. The doctor in me knows it will be well over twenty-four hours before the rigor mortis loosens its grip on her muscles and we’ll be able to move her arms and legs again, so I gently settle her so her hands are resting across her chest, her legs out straight. Michael sees what I’m doing and climbs out of the hole.

“She always slept on her side. All curled up,” he tells me. “Like this.” For such a lethal man, he moves Lace with so much care and love. When he’s finished, her body is arranged in the fetal position, hands pillowing her head, knees tucked up into her body. She really does look like she’s sleeping. I turn to find Zeth, but I can only see the very top of his head. He’s sunk down, sitting in the hole they’ve half dug, his back to us. I try to stand, to go to him, but Michael takes hold of my hand.