I watch him too. He was cruel to me. He’d have dragged me down with him or worse, and yet seeing him like this is almost too much. It’s almost too merciless.

As if it makes me as bad as they are.

“Stop it,” I call out.

The Souler stands, turning to look up at me. My heart stutters as my mind cycles to place the familiar face. And then I remember him: He was the boy with Amalia. He was the one who tried to protect her from the Recruiters.

“What are you doing? What’s going on?” I ask, crawling to the edge of the platform so that none of the other Recruiters hears us.

His eyes are dead, his shoulders slumped. He looks back at the Recruiter floundering in the frigid water, his skin turning blue. “Waiting for him to die and Return so I can kill him,” he says flatly.

I want to ask him why he doesn’t just do it now—why he’s waiting—but there’s still a line between the living and the dead, between mercy killing and murder, and I can understand someone not wanting to cross it.

“How long have you been out here?” I wonder how I could have missed this small group combing the shore, how I could have been so wrapped up in my own world.

He glances up at the stars, the weak light from the fires down the wall making his cheeks recede in the darkness. “Since this morning?” He says it as a question. “Recruiters kept us inside most of the day—said they’d only send us out at night so other people from the City don’t get ideas of coming over and swarming them.”

“But how did you even get here? Where did you come from?”

“We were in the Neverlands—stranded on a roof—and some guy told us we’d be safe if we came with him. He’s the one who brought us to a boat and got us across.”

A sick dread creeps into my stomach. “What was his name?”

He frowns, thinking. “Trapper? Caesar … It was something like that.”

“Catcher.”

He smiles, just barely. “Yeah, that’s it.”

I dig my nails into my palms, thinking about Catcher bringing these people across the river. Giving them false hope to lead them here and then abandoning them just outside the walls. Using them to keep the shores swept clean of Unconsecrated—letting them take the risk so that the Recruiters wouldn’t have to.

“You need to come inside,” I tell the boy. I move around to the ladder, reaching my hand toward him. “It’s freezing out here. You need food and sleep.”