They wouldn’t allow her in to see Typhus, so she sat in the hallway, in a cushioned chair. She ran her hand continuously down her bandaged arm, the stinging breaks in her skin where Tyler had grabbed her. She couldn’t quite sit up straight. Part of her refused to believe it was Tyler who had done it, and a darker part wondered if it was the only real part of Tyler she’d ever seen. Would she see him again? Shouldn’t she have known him well enough to know? She watched the middle-of-the-night trickle of visitors and staff pass through the waiting room and lobby, old and frazzled-looking people, tired nurses in sneakers. When Rhea had pictured hospitals she’d always thought of white tile, but Shawnee Valley was like being in a hotel; there was carpet in the waiting room, a grand piano in the lobby, wood paneling, there were planters in the corner. All the times she’d driven past its landscaped grounds, she had never thought she’d see inside. Across the waiting room from her, on the wall inside a glassed-in office, there was a painting of old-timey surgeons in scrubs operating on someone’s chest, and a long-haired, robed man stood among them, holding his hand over one of the surgeon’s hands, guiding his work. Rhea felt like a speck in the midst of it all, as the forces above her moved about and beyond, pulling information from Typhus’s physical symptoms, from the hospital and government’s elaborate records and computers and diagnostics, triangulating her condition with her medical history, her allergies, her name. Was Typhus a murderer? Or was she just defending herself against a threat to her existence? Weren’t they all doing that, all the time? Could anyone be blamed for fighting back?

Rhea was there until the end; she was there until, unbeknownst to her, Typhus’s sister was brought into another room nearby; until Typhus woke up and was no longer Typhus.

And in Beth’s living room, the night before, with the light from the phone, Sarah drew the two intruders out of the shadows—the other kid ran up to keep his friend from collapsing, blood pouring through his fingers from the wound in his face, air hissing out from the channel the razor had dug. Beth slid down the wall, covering herself in shadow. Sarah flashed the phone light across their eyes. She thought she might have recognized them, but then she put the impulse away. She walked them to the foyer, the razor held at their backs. When they struggled with the front door, she shoved them aside and opened it herself. She was greeted by the smell of gasoline saturating the air. She inhaled it and felt instantly nauseous; her head spun. “If I see you again,” she said to them, surprising herself, “I’ll fucking kill you.”