Usually sleep comes fast and easy. Usually I want nothing more than to be yanked into the featureless dreams, but not tonight.

Tonight I think of the woman. The stars spin outside, chasing dawn across the sky, and sleep never comes. Only the cold emptiness of the flat.

No other heartbeat to keep me company. No voice to keep away the blackness of night. Nobody to share the length of days with.

And I realize that I’ve been spending too long trying to forget that I’ve lost the part of myself that used to belong to someone else. That I once held my sister’s hand and sat on my father’s lap and knew my neighbors’ names. I’ve filled that place with an emptiness, and the woman tonight made me see that that hole inside me is from Elias and that I’ve waited for him to come home long enough. He’s gone. And I’m alone. Crouching here in my empty flat, listening to the moaning of the City dying around me, I remember what I want.

I want to find my way back home, to my sister and my family and my village in the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

There are only two ways off the island: boat or bridge. The boat docks sit on the southeast side, deep in the protected range of the Dark City. A series of gates and fences blocks the City from the docks, and Recruiters patrol with dogs that can smell infection to ensure that no vessels carry it into the City.

The few boats remaining after people fled during the Recruiter Rebellion are fiercely guarded, and I know it would be almost impossible for me to book passage on one. Which means that if I’m going to really do this—leave—I’ll have to travel by foot like everyone else who wants to get off the island. And the only bridges in and out are far north in the Neverlands.

I start my journey in the late morning after a sleepless night standing on the roof of my empty building waiting for dawn. I stared at the few remaining lights flickering in the skyscrapers along the bottom edge of the island and tried to find the strength to leave it behind. Elias fought so hard for our flat in the Dark City, scraping together the exorbitant rent just for the promise of safety, and I feel wrong abandoning it.

What if he comes home tomorrow and I’m not here? What if he’s just over the edge of the horizon, dreaming of me, fighting his way back to me?

But then I remember that woman. Her falling through the air. If I only had a few days left to live would I spend them like her, huddled on a roof, waiting for a stranger to stumble upon me?

And the answer is no.

By the time I arrive at the Palisade wall it’s early afternoon. No one challenges me as I make my way through the series of gates separating the Dark City from the Neverlands. It’s only those coming the opposite direction—those trying to gain access into the Dark City—they care about. People leave every day.