“We hardly counted as rich,” Cormac says.

“You have a four-hundred-dollar bottle of grape juice. I’m literally going to kill you.”

Cormac wrinkles his nose. “I hate you all. Do you want any or not?”

The lot of us—the Watch, minus Nick—sit in a back corner of the bank in the late afternoon. Sunlight comes in through the high, dusty windows, dappling the carpet in gold and making everything just a little too warm. Our exhaustion seeps into the walls, deadens our eyes as we try to laugh and pretend we aren’t terrified of Angels, starvation, and the summer. Of everything now.

I want to tell them that there’s a plan. That they’re going to be okay, that we all are. I want to wipe the pained looks off their faces, the ones creeping behind their masks even as they act like they’re smiling. The looks of people who are realizing that in a month, we will probably be dead, and there’s not much they can do.

But I need a little more time with them before everything changes.

“I thought you were saving it for a special occasion,” Aisha says.

Cormac stares at the bottle, its beautiful black glass wrapped in gold lettering. “I was. But it almost burned with the rest of my stuff, and wine is shit after it gets too hot.” He pulls out his knife and pops the cork with it. “And, you know, we’re fucked! Might as well get drunk. You guys better thank me.”

He drinks straight from the bottle before grudgingly handing it to Faith, who takes a large swallow to the hooting of Aisha and Salvador. Cormac grumbles that you’re supposed to savor the taste of something like this, even if it isn’t as good as it should be. Aisha makes a show of taking a dainty sip with her pinkie finger up, and Salvador somehow manages to drink without picking xyr head off the floor.

Xe taps the bottle against my leg. “Hey, short stuff. Want some?”

I shake my head. It’d mean taking my mask down, and besides, I’ve never actually had alcohol before. This doesn’t seem like a great time to start. “I’m good.”

Cormac wrinkles his nose. “You sound awful.”

“Seriously,” Aisha says. “Everything okay?”

I try to force a smile, but as soon as it reaches my eyes, I find I’m not faking it at all. They’re my friends. I don’t have to fake it for them.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just trying not to think about, you know, everything.”