Erin doesn’t respond. Nick looks up from the lizard—which has fourteen blue beads and thirty-six yellow beads, which he knows because he’s counted them a thousand times—to find her staring at nothing.

“We shouldn’t have done this,” she finally says. “This was a bad idea.”

A heavy weight settles in Nick’s stomach. “Explain.”

“Him,” Erin says, and the pronoun feels pointed. “Benji. Seraph. This whole mess.” She shakes her hands helplessly; not the way Nick shakes his hands, but the way non-autistic people do, like she’s trying to conjure something out of thin air. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You don’t have to lie to it,” Nick says. That must be what she’s upset about. All he has to do is reassure her. “That’s my job.”

She breaks out the patient tone of voice that means he’s missing something. “And I’m grateful, but that’s not what I mean.”

It hits. Again. The iron pipe to the back of the head.

He says, “You feel bad for it.”

It’s an awful thing to say. Saying it out loud means the words are going to stick. The words are going to stay there in his head, and he’s going to keep thinking about them, and he can’t let himself do that.

“I feel like shit,” Erin says. “It’s cruel!” Nick doesn’t flinch, only because he’s been called cruel before. “Asking Benji to risk his life when he’s practically dying? When we’re wondering if his dead body will convince the Vanguard not to abandon us? There has to be some other way. Something else we can do.”

Nick told her it would be difficult. He said that Seraph would play at being human, and they couldn’t let themselves be weak. They’ve spent the past year killing Angels. This one should be no different.

It can’t be different.

“This is our best chance.” Nick jams his finger into the carpet. “Do you want to let everybody starve?”

“No, I don’t!” Her chest heaves. “Nick, look. Logically, I understand. I do. Don’t pretend like I don’t understand exactly where you’re coming from because I do. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who is fine with sacrificing a kid.”

Nick’s face is doing that thing where he can’t figure out how to move it, and he is so grateful for his mask because she can’t see the way he’s sucking on his teeth and chewing on his lips as if that will help, which it doesn’t.

“You get me,” she says. “Right?”

Deep breaths. “I do. But this is different. Seraph isn’t a person.”

The words snag on the way out. He tamps down how Seraph looked at him under the pavilion, the way it sagged in relief when Nick offered a little bit of himself in return—I’m autistic—to ease the tension in its shoulders. It looks like a teenager, it sounds like a teenager, it acts like a boy exactly his age, reflecting his worst nightmare back at him, desperately grasping for a friend, and Nick cannot be that.