Chi Boy, always the doting partner, shuffled down the log and patted the space beside him for her to sit. She shook her head and paced. He kept his mouth shut but his eyes open, taking in each line on her face, every falter in her step. Not that he spoke much to begin with. This last month had been difficult now that the baby was asserting its presence. He wasn’t sure she’d make it to full term, not with all this stress: the regular day-to-day stress of being hunted in a broken world, and then this new anxiety over a missing relative.

“But what are we going to do?”

Rose was frantic, had been since the scout had jogged back with news of a Recruiter van sighting and they’d realized French hadn’t made it back to the camp. They had all been laughing, dancing almost, at Miig’s miracle, the return of his Isaac, and what that meant for all of them, the beautiful possibility of it all. Now she was rushing around the outside of the circle, all twitch and adrenaline, checking and rechecking the sharpness of the blade on her belt knife with her thumb. “We need to do something… and now!”

“No, that is exactly what we shouldn’t do,” Wab answered. “That’s how we make mistakes.”

“Oh, like misplacing a whole boy, you mean? That kind of mistake?”

Her black eyes flashed, her curly hair bouncing at her shoulders with each movement of her head. Rose was always quick to any emotion. It was one of the things French loved about her, this intense and deep ability to feel, even when every hour was filled up with just getting by. She was just sixteen, but she’d already lived a life made long with grief. She switched directions, exasperated at her own inability to do anything of use. Her heart was breaking at the potentials of what might have happened. They had been ready to be a real couple—finally, after all the careful dancing around each other, all the running that stopped conversation short. And now he was gone.

“’S no one’s fault, Rose.” Chi Boy spoke just louder than a whisper.

“It’s everyone’s fault!” Rose shouted back. “Every one of us.”

She’d unsheathed her knife in one quick motion and used it to point at the group around the fire—Miigwans, Isaac, Chi Boy, Wab, Bullet, Derrick—pausing at each one so they understood they had been implicated. She placed the tip of the blade over her own heart to include herself in the accusation before pushing it back into its case.

“French would never have left one of us behind. He never did. Ever!” Tears broke loose and made tracks down her cheeks, cutting through the dust and dirt of a frantic search.

She swiped the back of her hand across her face. There was no time for tears. There was never time for tears. Not out here.

“Things don’t happen right away,” Isaac spoke up. His voice was melodic, made deeper by fatigue. “In the schools, I mean. If they have him, he should be okay… for a while.” He shivered, and Miig rubbed his arm. The school would probably never leave him, even though he had escaped with the help of a network of nurses for whom harvesting humans was just not an option.