Leah covers my hand with hers. The shirt we used as bandages has shifted and opened. The scratches are wider now, like she pulled at them the way I do. Her hand is red and warmer. Her eyes are still distant, but she pulls me close enough, our foreheads touch. “You want to stay here, right?”

I nod.

She sighs deeply. “Yeah. I think—I don’t know what’ll happen to us outside. I don’t know how to protect you. I don’t know…” Her voice trails off, and I wait until I’m sure she doesn’t want to say anything else.

“I don’t need you to protect me.” I pull back enough to make room for my signs. “We can stay here for now. Until it gets better outside. It can’t stay like this forever.”

“If it gets better, the guards might come back.”

I frown. “We’ll have to be careful to find the right moment then.”

“Yeah, we will.”

“We’re in this together.” My signs hold somewhere between a statement and a question. Our only option is for us to be in this together. Right?

Leah nods. “Always.”

“And always.”

My shoulders drop a little. My jaw unclenches. In the end, this is really all that matters. The two of us, together. Even in here. Even if the world is ending.

Hunter’s new crew counts seven when he stomps out of the room. Four boys from the west wing—excluding Hunter himself—plus Joshua, Josie, and Saoirse. Everything I know about all of them bounces through my head. Josie and her knives. Saoirse and her fourth nonviolent offense. Hunter, who killed someone.

It means Andrew Riker will be the only one left in the west wing. He’s quiet. The only boy in the west wing who didn’t join Hunter’s group. Leah thinks he’s intimidating. He has a history of violence.

I like him because he barely speaks more than I do.

It means there’ll be twenty-two of us left. Seven in the south wing. Seven in the east wing. Seven in the north wing. Andrew on his own.

“We’ll figure out how to go from here in the morning,” Grace says. She appears to ignore the fact that the sky outside is a little brighter than it was. I like it. I want to go back to normal too. “None of you are obligated to stay, but I hope you do. We can be safe here, together, until help comes. We’ll hack into the computers to find more information.”

At the front of the crowd, someone raises their hand. “I can help with the computers.” I almost smile. Isaiah Wood. He’s a soft-spoken Black boy everyone knows as the Professor because he knows everything about everything. Of course he can hack into the computers.

Grace nods. “We’ll make it through, I promise. They’ll find a way to stop the spread, and this will all be over soon.”

She makes it sound like she knows what she’s doing, but she can’t possibly. No one can.