I take a deep, shaking breath. Part of me wants to throw the book against the wall. I’d gotten my hopes so far up.

Maybe Elder’s right. Maybe this whole thing is pointless.

Still, I take the book with me as I head back to my room in the Ward.

The Hospital’s still busy even though it’s nearly time for the solar lamp to turn off, but the third floor is almost empty. Only Victria sits in the common room, staring out the window. I start to say something to her, but I remember the angry look she gave me when she found me in Harley’s room and in the cryo level, so I move straight to the glass doors leading to the hallway. She glances up at me as I pass, but not with an angry glare.

She’s been crying.

I think of saying something to her, but I doubt she’d care to speak to me. I hear her sniffle as I reach for the door. She hates me. There’s a muffled sound behind me, like she’s holding in a sob. But I hear anyway.

I let the glass doors close and head over to the couch.

“Go away,” she says, but there’s no heart in her voice.

“What’s wrong?”

She turns back to the window.

I lean into the seat cushion and cross my legs. “I’m just going to stay here until you tell me.”

She waits a long moment, as if testing me. When I don’t move, she finally speaks, her words fogging the glass of the window, “I just miss him. The worse things get, the more I think about what he might have done.”

“Is this . . . is this about Orion?” I ask.

She chokes out a laugh, a wet sound marred by her angry tears. She swipes her arm across her face. “It’s stupid really,” she says, still talking to the window more than to me. “He . . . he was older than me. I was just some stupid little kid to him. But . . . I’ve always loved stories. Books. And I’d go to the Recorder Hall, and he’d be there.”

My lips twitch up in a small smile, and I think back to what I knew of Orion before I discovered he was a murderer. He wiped my face and hands clean when I’d been crying once, and I sort of wish I could do the same for Victria now.

“The thing that makes me so upset,” Victria continues, “is that I never had a chance to tell him. I mean, I think he knew, but I never actually said the words. I’d go to the Recorder Hall almost every day, and we’d talk and joke, but . . . I never said what I wanted to. And now it’s too late.”