“Mal,” her father says, this time with confidence. “Oh, my God. Malorie.”

They’re hugging. Malorie’s fold is wet with tears. Her fingers don’t feel strong enough to grip his shoulders, but that’s what they’re doing. They’re digging into him, deep as she can make them go.

“Dad…”

“Malorie.”

Sam Walsh is crying. He’s trying to talk, and she feels a fold on his face, and she laughs because Dad has lived by the fold, too. Because Dad is alive.

“We knew it,” Sam says. And his voice is unfathomable relief. “We knew if we came here we’d find you.”

Olympia is talking. Then, so is Tom, near now. He’s asking if Malorie is okay. He’s telling Olympia his idea worked. He’s asking Olympia why her eyes are open. “I saw them open from the stage,” he’s saying, “from behind the mirror. I saw your eyes were open.”

And a creature, too. He’s telling Olympia he saw a creature.

But through all this, a chaos more confusing even than the arrival of the creatures themselves, Malorie still hears what her father, her impossible, living father just said.

We knew if we came here we’d find you.

“Dad,” she says, her lips touching the fabric that’s wrapped around his face. “Dad, why did you come here?”

Sam laughs, and in his laughter she hears boundless, painful reprieve.

“You were always our rebel,” he says. “You took risks we were always too afraid to take.”

He’s hugging her, hard. And Malorie thinks, I was once the kind of person who took risks…

Where did that person go?

She hears dignity, elation in Tom’s voice. Astonishment in Olympia’s. The community surrounding them is getting louder, and Malorie realizes that, despite what Tom claims to have done, despite the unadulterated, unsafe joy of this crowd, she isn’t scared.

For the first time in seventeen years, she isn’t scared.

And for a second, a flash, she remembers the girl her father described. She remembers pushing back against a world she felt was unfair.

She remembers being like Tom.

“Your mother,” Sam says. And the pause worries her. “She would’ve…”

“Mom…” But Malorie can’t finish the sentence out loud.

Mom is dead.

Sam rises and makes to help her up. Then Olympia’s and Tom’s hands are upon her, too.

Together, they’re trying to help her to standing. But as Dad speaks again of Mom, as Dad stands with her two teens, as the most dangerous community Malorie’s ever known celebrates on high, Malorie, here, unable to process this new reality, unable to see it as anything but a fantastic variety of madness, Malorie passes out in the arms of those she loves.

THIRTY-ONE

When Malorie wakes, she does so with her eyes closed. She is lying on something soft. A blanket covers her to her chest.