Outside, it was as if the world, the garage had been blown apart. Kids milled about the driveway, in the grass, by the cars parked there—the Nissan had been hit by another car. From the stoop, Sarah saw streaks of blood at the edge of the garage, saw someone pulling up the kid who had stabbed Tyler from a long trail of red, dragging him toward the Prius, another girl sitting in the grass, holding her neck. No one wore masks anymore. The Lexus was gone from the garage. Crushed beer cases and weapons lay scattered about the driveway and garage. Tyler, Rhea, Typhus—she couldn’t see them. She saw no bodies, no one motionless on the ground. Just the ripples of an aftermath, the charged air, smell of smoke and gasoline, kids’ voices, getting the wounded into cars to take them elsewhere. When the two kids from the living room reached the driveway, someone ran to them, helped them limping into the Nissan. She memorized the plate number. The scene was carnage, but equally felt like a moment cut off before its peak, a moment that had broken before it truly began.

A lanky boy with long hair standing at the Prius seemed to notice her standing on the stoop. He closed the door and walked toward where she stood. Again, she wondered if she recognized him. She remembered something David had said, another lie about Half Blessed, or Burst Marrow, or whatever—these kids: they were all from Adena.

He stopped at the edge of the driveway, maybe ten feet from her. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice cracked. “We thought you were dead.” He looked down.

They didn’t even know who Beth was.

In the living room, Beth sat on the carpet against the bookshelves, curled into herself in the dark. When she entered, Sarah felt for the light switch by the doorway, and turned on the lights. In an instant, the black shadows, the moonlight, the shrouded textures of the room were obliterated, thrown into bright, high relief, and in that brightness, their real viciousness was revealed: the glittery spray of glass across the carpet from the broken windows, a cracked glass ball, thick clots of blood spotted across the floor, the traces of footprints within it, some nearly black, all leading up to Beth, naked, herself misted with blood, trembling, her body faintly shimmering with sweat.

The violent remnants of the night finally hit Sarah in that moment, ricocheting through her in a quaking spasm, as if her body was finally registering it, coming to terms with itself, with her complicity in it, as if she hadn’t been a part of it—or she hadn’t been aware of her part in it—and then, all of a sudden, she was.