I reach for him, grab him and run my hands over his body, searching for the wound. “Oh my God, I didn’t mean to. Are you okay? Catcher, are you okay?”

He doesn’t say anything and the realization that I may have murdered someone starts to make me dizzy. I don’t know whether I should leave him and go to the surface for help or stay here. I skim my hands up his legs and over his hips, trailing them along his chest that thankfully still rises and falls.

“Catcher,” I shout at him, needing him to be okay. His skin’s hot where I touch him and he winces as my hands slide over his forearm, blood dripping from his wrist. I fumble in my pack for the quilt, shredding a strip from it and pressing it to the wound.

He grunts and rolls away from me but I keep my hands locked on his arm. “You’re hurt,” I tell him, relief rushing through me that he can move.

He pushes at me but he’s still disoriented from the fall.

“You’re hurt,” I explain again. “Just hold still and let me stop the bleeding. I don’t know how deep the cut is. There’s too much blood.”

He jerks up and swings at me, throwing me back from him. “Get away from me,” he roars. My ears ring with the sound of his voice that still echoes up and down the staircase. I sit frozen, my hands grasping at the darkness.

My breath hitches. I’m confused and don’t know how to respond. I reach for him, just slightly, and I hear him back farther away. “Don’t touch me,” he growls.

His words sting and a low rage begins to build inside me. “I was only trying to help,” I lash out at him, any relief at his recovery now gone.

I grope in the darkness for my knife and when my fingers accidentally brush Catcher’s leg, he pulls away. “I said: Don’t. Touch. Me.” He grinds out the words, harsh and commanding.

Every one of my scars feels like it’s on fire, a scalding blush burning my body. Angrily, I fold the remnants of the quilt and shove it back into my bag, yanking it closed.

Without a word I stand, dizzy and disoriented, and feel my way forward along the wall until I find another set of stairs. My worthless eyes blur with tears at his sudden and unexpected censure but it doesn’t matter in this darkness. I fumble down the steps away from this stranger and his anger and heat. Away from the way he makes me feel.

“Annah,” he says, a tinge of apology and wariness in his voice.

I keep walking, my hip aching where I was kicked and my head throbbing from where I hit it during the fall. The pain becomes overwhelming and I stop and take a deep breath and then stagger away from the sound of Catcher.

He shuffles around on the landing, muttering curses, and I hear him start after me. But I push deeper into the darkness. The stairs end and I stumble on solid ground, not knowing where to turn, where to go next. It’s disorienting having no idea where the walls are or where the platform ends—where the tracks are. I’m lost in a sea of black nothingness that crawls along my skin. Catcher trails after me, his footsteps never far behind.