He stares at my outstretched fingers and I see something flicker in his eyes. There’s a spark of hope and life. But then he shakes his head. “They’ll find me and throw me back over the wall,” he says. “The only way for us to earn a permanent spot on the Sanctuary is to serve our time. Keep the shore swept clear so the dead don’t pile up.”

“That’s absurd,” I tell him. “They can’t do that to you. Come on, I’ll take you home with me.” I curl my hand, beckoning him.

I know he wants nothing more than for me to pull him up and take him away. To tuck him into a bed piled with blankets and fill his stomach with warm food and hot tea. And so I know how amazingly difficult it is for him to turn me down. “I can’t,” he whispers. “I can’t leave the others. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“You can’t trust the Recruiters,” I implore, but he stands firm, refusing my offer.

I’m afraid to know the answer but I have to ask: “Is Amalia with you?”

A brief movement of pain flashes across his face. “She’s already gone,” he says. Before I can ask more he walks out into the shallow water where the Recruiter lies still, floating among the shards of ice. I hadn’t even noticed him die. He’d been utterly alone in the last moments, not that he deserved anything better.

The dead sometimes scream when they Return, a horrid eerie cry. That’s what happens now, a plaintive wail that’s cut short as the boy’s blade slices through the Recruiter’s neck and severs his spinal cord. His head tumbles into the shallows while his body bobs in the gentle waves.

In the distance someone shouts, the sound of the Recruiter’s cry still echoing. One last time I try to convince the boy to come with me, but he just turns back along the shore after the others, and I push myself away down the platform and run for home.

Once I’m there the events of the night hit me. There’s no way I can sleep, and the air inside feels stale, like a cell. Leaving the scarf wrapped around my head, I retreat to the roof.

The storm from earlier’s blown past, wisps of clouds still stuck to the stars. The rising moon’s almost full and its glow sets everything around me into an eerie bright stillness.

The muscles along my jaw feel tight, as if I’ve been trying to hold back a scream, and I remember the infected woman on the roof that night that seems like several lifetimes ago. I think of what it felt like to dip my fingers in the colored stains she’d left behind—the feel of release without words, screaming in images.