One summer, her mother surprised her with a satellite dish, and Rose stayed inside for two whole months. During this time of discovering real horrors on late-night movies and, from reality TV, just how big and stupid the world actually was, she grew four whole inches. So by the time she was dragged to her grandmother’s house for a dinner to celebrate the new school year, everything looked different. She kissed her granny hello, now having to stoop to reach her head, and slipped out onto the back deck before she could be put to work. Suddenly, the stairs looked just like stairs—surmountable, unremarkable. And no one had managed to cut the grass in a while, so it was up and out in all its wild glory.

The stairs were not to be feared. They weren’t actually scary, like the zombies she’d watched ripping into scalps or the crooked cops she’d seen chasing the good guys into old factories. So she positioned her newly elongated feet at the top and stepped like a normal person. No more climbing on her hands and butt. She was past all that.

But the first step never rose to meet her feet. She underestimated the distance and faltered before she could find purchase, pitching her upper body off balance. And then she was in the air.

Every place her bones could connect with the splintered wood, they did. She smashed her cheek, her shoulder, her ribs, her tailbone. It was like a slow-motion blast from a shotgun, each pellet finding its mark with heat and sting. After what seemed like an excruciating amount of time, she lay at the bottom, gasping through bruised ribs for air, trying to keep the tears from coming before her breath did. No one had seen her fall, so no one came, and maybe that was better, because the thing that hurt the most was the humiliation, the shock of it all. She wasn’t past a slow climb after all. Thinking she was safe when it was clear she was still vulnerable broke her to pieces. She was breathless.

That’s what it felt like in the days after they ran into the nurses, walking back into the camp without French, knowing that she would never be with him again. Even now, Derrick was filling the Council in on the truth of it, that the French they’d lost was dead and that a new kind of predator was out in the woods wearing his skin. She hadn’t considered that they wouldn’t get him back, not for one moment—not when he’d been taken, not even when she’d been strapped to a cot, being drained of blood. There wasn’t one moment she hadn’t thought about finding him, holding him, surrendering to the truth of how she felt about him. And now? Now she was breathless.

There was only one place she could imagine being, only one place left in the world that could hold her together.

“Where’s my family?”

Clarence glanced at Bullet and stepped toward her. “Listen, my girl. Things have changed since you were gone.”