His expression is steady, unreadable. He takes a long breath. “Please don’t do anything that will get you in trouble, Annah. Not right now, when things are so volatile. We’re safe—just let things settle down a bit.”

“I’ll be careful.” His gaze darts to my bruising cheek and then away.

We stand there for a moment. It feels awkward again, as if we don’t know how to communicate except in the face of trauma: running from Unconsecrated or Recruiters. We don’t know how to just be around each other. How to talk about normal things.

We both fidget as this gulf of what might pass as normalcy widens between us.

“They’re sending me back to the Dark City,” he finally says. “Tonight. Now.”

I nod. “Be careful,” I tell him and this makes him smile. He pauses in the doorway like that, grin breaking over his face and hair flopped over his forehead, and something inside me jerks awake, a heat coursing through my blood. I feel my neck start to flush, feel it climbing over the tips of my ears, and I wonder if he notices.

His eyes widen just for a moment as if he feels the same thing I do. Then his grin falters and he slips into the hallway, leaving me pressing my hands against my stomach to keep the want from spreading too far.

I wake up the next morning to my sister’s voice fluttering around my cracked door. I roll onto my side, gently prodding at my cheek with my fingers as I listen to her and Elias’s conversation drifting down the hallway.

“I wanted to build something, Elias,” I hear her say. “That’s what we were supposed to be doing. Together. We were supposed to stop barricading ourselves off.” There’s such loss and pain in her voice that I wince. It never occurred to me that my sister had dreams like this—the same kind of dreams I once had. I realize then just how little I know about her.

I’ve spent all this time comparing myself to her that I haven’t taken the time to try to see who she is as a person.

I hear a rustle of movement and imagine Elias walking over to her, wrapping her in his arms. “I know, Gabry,” he says softly, his words full of understanding and love.

There’s a pause before she continues. “Maybe we weren’t ever supposed to survive this long in the first place. Maybe we should just be content with what we’ve accomplished since the Return,” she says. But I can tell she’s just testing the words. She doesn’t really believe them. I smile a little—I know that tone well.