Elias and I alternate shifts, placing frozen strips of cloth on her face and coaxing her to let snow melt on her tongue. I pace by the window through the night, waiting for the cable car to start its way across the river, but it doesn’t move.

The next morning I’m on the roof staring at the Dark City when Elias joins me. He wrings out a blanket, damp with my sister’s sweat, and shovels fresh snow into a bucket to try to cool her fevered skin. And then he just stops and stands there, red raw hands limp by his sides.

“She hasn’t eaten or drunk anything since yesterday dawn.” He shakes his head slowly as if he’s trying to figure something out. “I’m afraid she might stop fighting.”

I press my lips together, not knowing what to say, wondering if it’s my fault she’s sick since she joined me on the shore during the snowstorm. I hate not being able to make her better. I hate feeling so useless.

I kick my foot against the wall, my snow-numbed toes barely registering the pain. Elias glances up at me, his gaze flitting over the bright new hat pulled low over my head hiding the healing scabs.

He narrows his eyes, frown lines cutting across his forehead. I know this look. It’s the same one he gave me as the scars from the barbed wire were healing. He feels like he failed to protect me. Like it’s his fault. And like it’s happening all over again with me and my sister.

Thinking about her downstairs, how hard I’m struggling to keep her alive, makes me realize what it must have been like for Elias before he left me—the burden of always worrying about someone you care about. It’s exhausting. I don’t know how long I can keep fighting so hard when it always feels like I’m losing. I sit on the wall, shifting until my feet hang over the nothingness. “Do you ever think it’s the dead that have the happy ending?”

He pauses, his head tilted to the side as he thinks, and then he sits next to me twisting a rag between his fingers. “What do you mean?”

I shrug. “Just that they don’t have to worry about surviving.”

“But they’re dead,” he says.

“Yeah. That means they don’t have to remember anything.”

Elias shakes his head. “That means they can’t ever love.”

I snort. “So they don’t know loss.”

He stares off toward the Dark City, thinking about this. “Do you think the dead don’t know what they’ve lost? Don’t you ever wonder why they seek human flesh? That maybe it’s their way of believing again? Of living again—if even for that one pure moment that blood pulses inside their mouths?”