Her eyes begin to glisten and her shoulders shift as she pretends to laugh. “Oh well,” she says, waving her dirty pipe in the air as if it could clear it all away. “Oh well,” she says again, barely a whisper.

She begins to shake. I’ve seen it before, the infection taking a firmer grasp, burrowing in deep for the kill. Any moment she’ll collapse, her body giving out and dying. And then she’ll Return, clawing for my flesh.

I move toward her, knife tight in my hand, but she jerks her head, waves me away with a fling of her arm. She’s standing on the ledge of the roof. Below us the plague rats moan.

“I just…,” she says, raising a hand to her head, patting her hair into place. She presses her lips together, her nostrils quivering as she takes a deep breath. “I just wanted someone to remember,” she says then. “I just wanted to be beautiful to someone, just for a little while.”

And before I can ask “Remember what?” or “Remember who?” she tips forward and jumps. The rushing air pulls her hair from her face, and her body twists like a ribbon caught in a breeze for a moment before she tumbles into the darkness.

She doesn’t even scream.

I don’t have to run toward the ledge to know what happened to her. I hear the thump of her body hitting the concrete below. The sound of bones breaking, of her skull shattering.

I drop the knife and press my face into my hands, dig my fingers against my forehead, as if that will hold me together. I shouldn’t have been the person here at her death. I don’t even know the woman’s name or who to tell that she’s gone.

And suddenly I realize just how much her situation echoes my own. How no one would know or care if the same thing happened to me. How unlikely it is that any of the few neighbors remaining in my corner of the Dark City could even recall my name, much less notice if I went missing one day.

I’ve never felt so alone in my life. Sure, I’ve spent the last three years on my own but I’ve always focused on surviving and waiting for Elias. This woman’s done something to me, though. She’s made me recognize a kind of gap inside, and now I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out how to close or fill it.

Finally, I raise my head and notice a bundle left in the nook between the two chimneys where the woman was sitting. Numbly, I pick it up. It feels wrong to sift through the contents, but that doesn’t stop me.

Her few possessions amount to not much more than half-empty cases of colored powders and stains. Makeup that could never come close to hiding her age or the desperation seeped into every line on her face.

I trace my fingers through a vermillion red, something about the tone of it calling to me. Then, tentatively, I press my hand against the chimney next to where the woman sat, tracing a red slash across the smoke-blackened bricks.