I untangle myself from the bed, hissing as my swollen feet hit the floor. I walk over, leaving only a thin line of emptiness between us. “It’s not your fault.”

He shrugs. “I’m the Immune. You’re the bait.” There’s acid in his voice. I can hear how much he hates himself and it isn’t fair.

I press my hand to the back of his neck and he winces as if he’s not used to being touched. “Thank you for returning. I don’t know what would have happened.”

A muscle along his jaw twitches, contracting and relaxing as he grinds his teeth. “I was worried. I shouldn’t have left you like that.” He pauses before softly adding, “I’m sorry.”

My cheeks flush when I remember our confrontation. Me grabbing his hand and pushing it against my chest. Him shoving me away when I tried to kiss him. I move toward the bed and cross my arms, feeling the sting of vulnerability all over again.

But that doesn’t dissuade Catcher. He takes a step closer and then another. I press my lips together, trying not to hope that he might have changed his mind. That he might touch me.

“I was worried about you, after…,” he says. He stops just out of my reach. Keeping me out of his reach as well. “After the other day. After what I said and you said.” He glances away and then back to me.

He’d called me beautiful. “Do you take it back?” I ask, breathless.

My heart pounds a million times as I wait for him to answer.

“Never.” He licks his lips in a nervous gesture and I can’t help staring at them. Imagining the feel of them.

I think about what my sister asked me as we stood huddled together outside the wall. How I didn’t know how to answer her. “What would you do if you knew you had only a few days left to live?” I ask him.

He raises his hand to the back of his neck, a nervous laugh brushing over his lips. “You don’t have to worry about that, Annah,” he says. “I’m going to take care of you. And everyone else. You’re safe.”

I step forward and place my hand on his arm, feeling his muscle flex beneath my touch. I press against him, pushing his hand from his head, pulling it down to his side, threading my fingers through his. The movement places us even closer together. His chest barely touches mine. Now I can feel his breath on my skin. I can feel his heat wavering between us.

“What would you do?” I ask again, softly.

His eyes become serious and I can almost see the emotions roiling inside him. “I’ve already been there, remember?” He pulls at his shirt, loosening the buttons and sliding it over his shoulder. Pushing me away in the process so that cooler air drives between us. He takes my fingers and places them against the flesh of his arm, forcing me to feel the two half-moons of red scars.

Bite marks.

I know he’s trying to remind me—remind both of us—that he’s infected. That he doesn’t know if he can infect me. That he’d never take the risk.

“What did you do during those days?” I ask, wanting to understand him.

“I waited,” he says, his voice distant. His eyes flicker, a flash of something that disappears.

“Waited for what?”

“To die.” That same flicker again. “Alone,” he adds in a whisper.

I open my mouth to ask for more but he cuts me off. “I’ve already had my days of waiting to die,” he says. “The question is, what would you do, Annah?”

The same question as last night, except now I actually have an answer. I’m tired of just surviving. I’m tired of waking up each day simply to make it to the next.

That isn’t enough anymore. It’s been what I’ve done for too long and when I look back on those strings of days they’re all empty. I want more. More than closing myself off, more than being afraid to let someone care about me and me about them.

I want Catcher.

And I’m tired of his fear that he could somehow infect me. So what? I’m already dying anyway—every day I live is closer to death. It’s like I told my sister before: what matters is what you do with the time you’re alive.

“I’d live,” I tell him. Then I step forward, slide my hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck and press my lips into his.

He’s so stunned that at first he doesn’t react and I take advantage of his hesitation, deepening the kiss. For a moment—one tiny space between heartbeats—he falls into me. He whimpers slightly, his head tilting to the side as he pushes hard against my mouth and fire engulfs me, races through my veins.

He tries to speak, his tongue forming words that I fight with my own. And then he lunges back, breaking us apart. I step forward, tugging his head to me, but he places his hands on my shoulders and pushes me away.

His eyes are wide, his lips parted and face flushed. He’s breathing fast and his hand shakes when he raises it to his neck. “God, Annah, what were you thinking?” With each word his voice hardens.

“I told you …” He paces in a tight circle. “God, Annah, I could infect you. I could have already infected you! I can’t believe you did that.”

He shakes his head, presses a fist to his chin and closes his eyes. Carefully, I shift closer to him, rest a hand on his forearm. “It’s okay,” I tell him softly.

He explodes. “It’s not okay! This”—he gestures back and forth between us—“isn’t okay!”

Grabbing my head between his hands, he pulls me close, until our lips are almost but not quite together. His breathing is fierce and fast, matching my own. I can tell that he’s angry and scared and panicking.

“You could die,” he’s telling me. “That kiss, it could kill you.”

I smile. “Don’t you get it, Catcher? With the horde already consuming the Dark City? With the Recruiters and their death cages? I’m already going to die. This Sanctuary isn’t safe—nowhere’s safe. Even without the horde, one day I’m going to die. Just like one day you’re going to die—”

“But that’s the difference, Annah! I’m. Not. Going. To. Die. Ever.” He drops his hands from my head and paces away from me. I feel the chill of the morning air on every spot Catcher just touched. “One day something will happen to me. My heart will stop working, I’ll get stabbed by the wrong person, I’ll drown or fall from a bridge or a building will collapse on top of me. And then I’ll come back.”

He spins to face me. “I could die today right here in your room and I’d come back.”

“But it’s oka—”

“Don’t tell me it’s okay!” he shouts. He seems shocked at his own rage and he storms away from me, arms crossed tight over his chest. I approach him slowly.

“Don’t tell me it’s okay,” he repeats, this time more in control. “Because it’s not. When I come back, I’ll attack you if you’re anywhere nearby.” His voice is shaking now. “Don’t you realize how dangerous that is? Don’t you understand there’s already that monster inside me, waiting for my heart to hesitate for only a moment before it becomes unleashed?”

He whips around, grabs my upper arms. “I can’t do that to you, Annah. I can’t.”

He starts to pull away but I stop him. “You asked me what I’d do knowing I only had a few days left and that was it,” I tell him. “That’s what I’d do. I’d stop worrying and being afraid and living in the past. I’d stop trying to keep my emotions safe. You know as well as I do what the horde is doing to the City—how it will eventually come across the river. And if it doesn’t, Ox and his men will find a way to kill us anyway. You know my time is limited.”

He closes his eyes. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” he whispers. “I’m going to keep you safe.”

“And then what?” I ask him. “I’ll survive only to be alone again? To have you slink away? That’s not what I want. I want you. And I want you to understand that you’re not broken.”

Taking a deep breath, he presses his lips together until they disappear. I let the silence flow around us. “There’s something you need to understand about me,” he says. His voice is too even, too devoid of inflection or emotion.

“What?” I ask him, my heart starting to thud.

He reaches out his hand to me, cupping my cheek gently. “Do you think you could ever feel beautiful?” he asks.

I’m so taken aback by his words that I’m stunned speechless. I think about the night Elias made me feel beautiful, remember the touch of his fingers over my scars.

I remember how long I’ve waited for someone else to find me beautiful. How I push people away before they can see the ugliness. I’m too afraid of the pain that I know comes with losing love.

And I know he was right on the roof. I’ve been waiting for the validation to come from everyone else, hoping their words can heal the scars that rip through my skin and into my heart.

“I don’t know,” I answer him honestly. I don’t add that I hope so.

“Then how can you ask me to feel unbroken?” he says. I open my mouth to answer but nothing comes out. Because I don’t know what to say to him. He’s right, how can I ask him to heal himself when I don’t know if it’s even possible?

Chapter XXX

Elias and my sister don’t want me leaving the flat. I understand their fear—it’s not like the Recruiters don’t have enough reasons to cause me trouble. Under normal circumstances I might have listened but I’m not willing to sit around and hope that someone else finds a way off the island.

There has to be another place we can go because I don’t see the point of staying in the Sanctuary if it’s not ultimately going to keep us safe. And I certainly don’t feel safe here anymore.

For the day my sister and I do as Elias asks and stay in bed. My muscles still spasm from the memory of being frozen the night before and my hands and feet are painfully swollen. My head pounds and I have a hard time keeping food down, but Elias is persistent: he will make my sister and me healthy again.

Long after dark, when the flat is silent and I’m sure they’re asleep, I pull on clothes dried stiff by the woodstove and find Elias’s machete by the door. I slip it into my belt and sneak down the stairs, wincing until my body gets used to moving again and the ache in my joints subsides.

Outside the night sky’s clear and sharp, a million tiny lights exploding overhead—more stars than there ever could have been people in this world.

I think about how fascinated with space Elias always was growing up. How one year I saved every credit I had and traded them all over the months so that on the winter solstice I could present him with an old book mapping the stars. It was the longest night of the year and he spent the entire time on the roof, staring up at the sky and comparing what he saw to the little book in his lap.

It was freezing outside and I’d hauled every blanket we owned up to the roof. While I drifted in and out of dreams, he read to me stories of the stars, origins of their constellations. Over the years I’ve forgotten most of it, but there’s one detail I’ve always remembered: he told me how long it takes the light from stars to reach through space to us.

How most of the points of light we see actually no longer exist. We’re just seeing the remnants of what was—ghosts of what used to be.

I glance at the Dark City across the river, a few buildings still flickering with light as the handful of survivors huddle behind thin curtains slung across broken windows. All of them tiny little stars in their own constellations waiting to fall to infection and become ghosts of what they used to be.

It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We’ve spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it—scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out.

And what of the rest of the world that’s already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star’s just dying and we’ll never know about it. Somewhere another’s being born whose light we’ll never see.

The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothingness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything—all of us—will simply cease to be.

They’ll finally find peace only when we’re all dead.

Once I’m inside the headquarters my footsteps echo down empty hallways, and at first I cringe with every noise, waiting for someone to turn a corner, spot me and cause trouble. But it’s a huge building with warrens of twisting corridors, and the ones I walk are dusty and unused.

In the map room I light a few lanterns, knocking the door closed behind me with my foot. It’s as I remember: walls covered with faded drawings of the world as it used to be. Pins scattered along the floor, desks piled with neglected stacks of papers and journals.

I flip through a few of the pages—notations from scouts returning from various outings, reporting on enclaves of survivors. There are columns with neatly ordered numbers counting men, women and children. Noting resources and defenses, listing quotas to be met in order to be considered under the Protectorate control.

All this information pulled together and sorted down to one small colored pin on a map. Most of those even gone by now. I wonder how many people mentioned in these pages are dead. I wonder if those who wrote these letters, the ones who traveled to all these places are dead as well.

The reality is that everyone dies. Whether safe in bed asleep or trapped in an alley facing a Returned friend or family member or lover. Whether shot by a Recruiter or just left to float in a boat in the middle of a snowstorm, your body slowly eating itself as resources run dry.