I shove my fists against my eyes as images from the past roll over me. The stupid fences that we felt the need to sneak past. The stupid stone my sister tripped over. The stupid me who chose to leave her there alone, preferring to follow Elias on more adventures that only got us lost.

Curling into a ball, back pressed into the corner of the room, I cover my head with my arms to block out the maps and the light and the thoughts of things past. But there’s one memory that won’t stop spinning through me and I grit my teeth as it unfolds, hating myself even as I relive it over and over again.

Once we escaped from the Forest and found our way to the Dark City, Elias began to call me his sister—it was easier for people to believe we were siblings who’d lost their parents to the Unconsecrated. People asked fewer questions and for the longest time it felt so natural that I began to believe it.

But in the months before Elias left for the Recruiters, something began to change in me. I started feeling embarrassed when he was in the room while I had to change. It was hard to sleep, I was hyperaware of the sound of his breathing at night, his shifting under the worn quilts. I started caring more about the scars running along my face and body, trying any concoction I could get my hands on in the black market to make them fade.

One night Elias teased me about the smell in the flat. I confessed it was a cream I’d traded for in the Neverlands to lessen the scars. He turned to me in the dim light, the moon somehow reflecting deep enough in the alley to illuminate us both.

“Oh, Annah,” he said, his voice a whisper filled with an emotion that I couldn’t identify but that made my stomach drop.

He reached out and with one finger he traced along the scars. The feel so different from anything else between us before. He started at my face, drawing his finger along each one, trailing down my neck. Pushing aside the collar of my nightshirt so that he could reach my shoulder, along my arm and down my side.

I tried to hold my breath but I couldn’t; it came out shaking. So much building inside me, my skin so alive under his touch that I thought I would combust. Every time he reached the barrier of my clothes I thought he’d stop. I thought it must be some sort of dream. But he kept going. Along my hip, down my thigh. Curling around my calf and out to the very tip of my little toe, my feet arching under his touch.