Everything happened in slow motion. Slopper let go of a pot of beans, and they spilled into the mud like lava dipped in pork fat.

“Holy hell,” he exclaimed, but stayed where he was, brown sauce splattered across his shins.

Wab—who was huge now!—and Chi Boy looked at each other as if registering the truth before breaking into huge smiles. I thought there may have even been tears in her eyes, but it was hard to say. Could have just been a flash of anger; that was more likely from her.

A short woman with the longest, blackest eyelashes I’d ever seen crossed her arms and observed how the camp reacted to our appearance, how everyone seemed to be coming undone. Later, I’d learn this was Rania, the nurse who was going to lead us across the border. At dinner, I would meet the other nurse, Theo. But right then, I didn’t care about a new face, not when I was searching for the old ones.

“Look who we found.” Zheegwon clapped me on the back, squeezing at the tension buried in my neck. He walked ahead, tucking his baseball cap into his back pocket. He stopped by Slopper, still standing with the upended pot in one hand, beans pooling around his taped-up sneakers, and pointed at the mess, “Apparently, lunch is ready, if you guys are hungry.” Then he laughed, jogging over to the thick brush where tents were hidden from aerial view.

“Where the hell have you been?” Wab reached up and touched my cheek with a delicacy I didn’t know she could hold in her body, finding the scar newly etched there. “We heard you were dead!”

“Dead? Nah, I’m good.”

“Obviously.” She punched me in the arm. There, that was more like it.

Chi Boy grabbed me in a one-armed hug, pushing me back while he rubbed my hair. “Nice cut.”

I ran my palm across the top of my head. “Yeah, I know. The barber wasn’t taking any new clients.” It was hard to be casual. I searched the area for her; I had been searching since the twins had found us. Where was Rose?

“FRENCH!” Miigwans yelled from the edge of the clearing. At the sound of his voice, my breath caught. This was what it felt like to come home—relief and joy and new pain for the time away and the unshakable need to be held, all at once.

He pushed past Slopper, his pace all off—fast, then slow—his head held at different angles as if trying to see from them all at once. Then he rushed toward me, stopping just a few steps away. “But…but you were dead. You…you died.”

“I didn’t. I got out.”

“But then…” He leaned in, looking clear into my eyes, tilting his head one way and then the other, looking, searching for something—the truth of me, of who I was then.

I closed the gap between us in two strides and clasped him in a hug, burying my face in the front of his shirt. He smelled of smoke and fire and sunlight and hide, and I had never smelled anything more beautiful in my life. I’d never thought I would be here again; I’d never thought I would know what it was to have him this close. I took him in and tried to remember each nuance of his smell, his skin, the way his hair felt when the breeze blew it suddenly over the back of my neck. The next time I was in a dark room, I would need it. Or I would die. I knew that now. This was oxygen. This was why I breathed.