Kira squeezed her eyes shut, willing him to understand. “Stay with you and what, Marcus?” She opened her eyes again, looking deeply into his. “You want to get married? You want to have a family? We can’t do any of that until RM is cured. Whether or not they lower the required age, I will spend the rest of my life pregnant: Most of those women average one a year, and all the children die. Is that really what you want? We get married, we get pregnant, and twenty years from now we have twenty dead children? There is not enough room in my heart for that; there’s not enough strength.”

“Then we’ll leave,” said Marcus. “We’ll go to one of the farms, or to a fishing village, or we’ll join the Voice, I don’t even care—anything to make you happy.”

“The Voice and the Grid are going to tear the island apart if we don’t find a cure, Marcus, we’re not going to be safe anywhere.” She stared at him, trying to understand him. “Do you honestly think I could be happy in some tiny little village somewhere, ignoring everything while the world dies?” Her voice cracked. “Do you even know me at all?”

“It will never be cured, Kira.” Marcus’s voice was small and pained. He took a deep breath, setting his jaw firmly. “You’re an idealist, you solve puzzles, and you look at something unsolvable and all you can see are the things nobody’s done yet—the crazy, harebrained things that nobody has tried because they’re crazy and harebrained. We have to face the truth: We have tried everything, we have looked everywhere, we have used every reasonable resource, and RM is still not cured because it is incurable. Dying across the river is not going to change that.”

Kira shook her head, trying to find the words she wanted. How could he say something like that? How could he even dare to think it? “You don’t…” She paused, crying, starting over. “How can you live like that?”

“It’s the only way we have left, Kira.”

“But how can you live without a future?”

He swallowed. “By living in the present. The world is already over, Kira. Maybe one day a baby will live, maybe not. It’s not going to change anything. All we have left is each other, so let’s enjoy it. Let’s be together, like we’ve always said we’d be, and let’s forget all this death and fear and everything else and just live. You want to leave the island, let’s leave the island—let’s go somewhere no one will find us, away from the Senate and the Voice and the Partials and everything else. But let’s do it together.”

Kira shook her head again, sobbing. “Do you really love me?”

“You know I love you.”