“Catcher!” I yell. The Unconsecrated are already stumbling toward me, following the trail of blood from my lips. I swipe my hand over my mouth, smearing red on my palm. My heart screams in my body, my muscles straining with the instinct to defend myself.

Slowly pushing against the storm, the dead advance as if they’ve never known urgency. And they don’t need to. They’ll just keep coming. They’ll always press forward. I can kill the first few, but it won’t take long for them to overwhelm.

They come at me with teeth bared, some with bloody lips where they’ve already found a living person to bite and infect. Catcher threads his way through as if he’s one of them.

My heart lurches at the sight of it: him there among them. Them not even noticing. It’s jarring: He’s alive, they should be scrambling for him, and yet they don’t. He walks through the throng as though he’s used to being surrounded by their moaning death, and it makes me realize that this is his reality.

He’s the line between the living and the dead. He is both and neither at once. He belongs nowhere, and now I understand his hesitation when we were down in the tunnels. I recognize the way he holds walls between him and other people because I’m the same way.

“Faster!” I shout at him, afraid that he’ll be too late. He starts to jog, arms up against the biting wind, fighting to cover the distance between us and leaving the dead to stumble after.

My hand’s curled tight around the sharp edge of the metal door guarding the stairway. One side of it’s scarred and dented while the other’s still smooth and shiny. As I turn to the darkness I catch my reflection: wide eyes, blood smeared around my mouth. I grip the machete tighter, instinct screaming that it’s an Unconsecrated staring back at me.

I can’t catch my breath, startled terror zinging through my body. What if I am one of them? I relive the pinch of the Unconsecrated biting my arm, the feel of the edge of his teeth against my ear.

Catcher finally makes it to the entrance, grasping his arm where the shaft of the bolt still protrudes. Blood trickles over his fingers as he gently nudges me to the stairs and closes the doors, throwing us back into the pitch-black. Cutting the vision of myself as one of the dead away.

“Annah,” he says. I feel his hand wave through the air, seeking me, but I ignore it. Instead I race down the steps, gripping the railing to find my way back to the fire and the light.

Catcher calls after me but I don’t slow. My heart’s roaring in my chest, my thighs aching, but none of that matters.

Back on the platform the fire’s nothing but embers, and I blow shaky breaths over them until one of the half-burned bits of wood catches and sparks.

My fingers shake as I fumble with the buttons of my coat, ripping it from my body and then yanking off my sweater and the shirt and tank beneath until there’s nothing covering my torso.