Her mother says, You’re sixteen, you have plenty of time to fill your life with love, but only if we keep you alive long enough to do so. She says she’s already filled her life with love, she loves him, she’s staying. Her father says, You’re too young to know what love is, and she thinks about Jack, about the touch of his hand, the silent laughter in his crooked smile. She thinks about him holding an umbrella over her head to protect her from the rain, about him asking her to teach him to fight, so he can protect himself. She thinks about training him, how he loves that she’s stronger, faster, better, and thinks about sitting with him, still and silent, watching the waves.

She is young, but she knows. She loves him.

Her father says they are leaving in the morning, all of them, a family. He says no more sneaking out.

So she runs out the door in plain sight, openly defies her parents for the first time, and they are too slow, their warnings too familiar, to stop her. She leaves, with nowhere to go—Jack is taking care of some typically vague business somewhere vaguely downtown, and so she walks the deserted streets, skirting freeways, melting into the shadows of underpasses, murders the minutes until she can be sure her parents have gone to sleep. She knows exactly how to slip into the house without waking them, but there’s no need.

The doors are flung wide open.

Her mother’s body is in the grass, in pieces.

Her father’s blood is pooling across the marble entryway. He is holding on for her. He says, They found us. He says, Promise me you’ll disappear, and she promises and promises and promises but there’s only his corpse to hear.

She flees without ID or credit card, nothing that could be used to trace her, not that the enemy uses technology to trace, but these things can never be counted on, and her parents are dead.

Her parents are dead.

Her parents are dead because she slowed them down, because they knew it was time to go and she insisted they stay, she fought, she complained, she sulked, they loved her and she held it against them and now they are dead.

She waits at Jack’s favorite bar, the one by the Shadow Market that tries its best to look like it doesn’t exist. She waits for him there, because he always comes back eventually, and when he does, alarmed to see her, and to see her covered with blood, she collapses in his arms.

Then she tells him the truth.