She squats and presses the points of the bolts to the thin frozen water, cracking it. I can’t see her face and so I walk over and kneel next to her, the icy shore seeping through my clothes, numbing my knees.

“In Vista. I killed someone. His name was Daniel and he was …” She swallows, her lips quivering. “He was going to blackmail me. He was going to make me be with him—marry him—or else he was going to get me in trouble and I panicked. He had me shoved up against the Barrier and I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t know what to do and …” She’s almost hyperventilating, the words stumbling over one another.

In the distance the Unconsecrated moan, their steps crunching as they slowly wend their way along the wall toward us. I wrap my arm around her and pull her to me, tucking her face into my shoulder and resting my chin on her head. She squeezes me so hard that it hurts to breathe. “It’s okay,” I tell her but she shakes her head. I can feel her tears on my skin.

“It’s not.” Her voice is muffled, hard to understand. “It’s not okay. His blood was all over me and he was looking at me as he was dying. I just left him there. If I’d told someone … If I hadn’t let him see me in the first place … There are so many ways I could have done something so that he didn’t have to die.”

She draws in a shuddering breath. “I’m not a horrible person, Annah, I promise I’m not. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know what else to do.”

I hold her tight. “I know you’re not a horrible person, I’d never think that of you.”

She sniffs and lifts her head from my shoulder. Her cheeks are streaked with tears and her eyes puffy. “I told you I wasn’t perfect,” she says as I brush wisps of hair from her face.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “None of us is,” I add. She smiles just a little and her resolve rubs off on me. I stare at the way the tracks of her tears break across her jaw and along her neck, at how it looks like her face, once shattered, has been carefully put back together. And I wonder if that’s what my scars really are: proof that I’ve put myself back together again.

Chapter XXVIII

It’s a frigid day. The snowstorm hits in the late afternoon and makes it next to impossible to see across the river as gusts leave us almost blind and quaking with cold. My sister and I huddle against each other in a nook in the wall, pushing our hands under our clothes to try to keep our blood moving.