“You grew up with Abigail?” My voice is nothing but a puff of air in the dark. “But … you’re not from the village.” I try to think about what he would’ve looked like when we were younger. When Elias and Abigail and I played tag in the fields. I don’t remember anyone our age named Catcher and it makes me feel uneasy. How could he know my sister otherwise?

Catcher shifts. “I’m from Vista, remember? Not your village.” His voice reverberates from the wall as if he’s looking away from me, staring into the void below. “Her name’s Gabrielle now—Gabry.”

The floor’s grimy under my fingertips, thick with dirt and dust. The air down here tastes stale and old like we’ve disturbed the past. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to put all these pieces together. “I don’t understand.”

“Her mother found her in the Forest when she was young. She couldn’t speak—couldn’t remember her name. So her mother called her Gabrielle and raised her in Vista, on the ocean down the coast. Gabry didn’t even know anything about it—didn’t remember the Forest at all until her mother told her a few months ago.”

I try not to think about leaving Abigail behind when she skinned her knee, but hearing about the Forest, about her being lost, all I can see is the blood trailing down her leg, the way she begged Elias and me not to leave her behind. She was so scared and I just left her there. Alone in the middle of the path.

I’ve spent my entire life with that moment crowding my nightmares. Remembering the sound of the Unconsecrated thrashing at the fence for her. The smell of Elias’s fear and determination.

It’s haunted me. Tormented me. It’s who I am: the girl who left her sister behind in the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

I never knew if she died because of me. Or if she found a way back. Day after day and week after week, I’ve agonized over her fate—I even welcomed the slash of barbed wire over my skin when the accident happened because it made me not look like her anymore.

I clutch the back of my head with my hands, fingers digging into my scalp as I bury my face in my knees. It never occurred to me that while all I could do was remember, my sister could forget it all. That she could have found a way out of the Forest like Elias and I did, but end up with a life so different from mine.

She grew up next to the ocean safe and loved by a mother. That was why she could keep her head raised high when she crossed the bridge. That was why she didn’t hunch when I saw her, why she didn’t recognize me.

I could see in her everything that I ever wanted to be. I saw what I’d lost, what I could never have. She didn’t recognize herself in me because she could never imagine what it would be like to have lived my kind of life.