I grab a few chunks of wood from a long-ago fire and use them for charcoal, long black streaks crumbling under my touch. I shut everything else off but the feel of my body moving, the joy and need of it. Leaving the smallest part of me to listen for anyone approaching, the rest of me indulging in the release of creating.

I draw out lines, shade in contours. Sore muscles along my arms and shoulders protest and I push them harder. Underneath my fingers shapes begin to form, faces and bodies straining against the wall. Sweat breaks out on my neck and down my back and I lose all track of time and place. I forget the pain along my scalp, the way the cold air seeps against the back of my ears.

It’s just me and the wood and the wall. Images that flash in my mind and are translated by my fingers before I can see them and piece them together. It’s like I’m not even involved, just a conversation between hand and subconscious. I sweep lines out and then smudge them with my wrist: a woman’s hair tangling in the breeze. I sketch a child’s lips around a crack: a perpetual scream.

As I step back, I realize what I’ve been drawing. Etched along the length of the wall is an army of people, stretching from side to side and deep into the distance. They shuffle toward me, fingers outstretched and pleading.

The moonlight makes them look almost real. Spirits of people from long ago breaking through the crumbling bricks, needing what’s left of our world.

I’ve drawn myself in there, the shadow of scars along my left side, my hair in angry spikes. My sister next to me, perfect and free, her fingers entwined with Elias’s. Recruiters tangled with the Soulers in their tunics. Everyone I’ve ever known—all of us gone.

All of us shells.

Except for one. Standing in the middle of the crowd is Catcher. The only one with his arms loose by his sides. The only one with his mouth closed, just standing in the midst of it all.

I stare at my drawing of him. I’ve captured the way his eyebrows curve, the slight slant to his eyes.

The loneliness and despair inside him.

Slowly I walk back to the wall. I pull out a thin strip of wood with a sharp black point. Painstakingly, I begin to scratch the bars of a fence over the mass of Unconsecrated. Needing something to hold them back.

Their fingers curl around the links, their faces against the fence. But when I get to Catcher I can’t stand to draw over him. I place the tip of the wood on my lip, thinking.