I'm still unsure. I can't climb with the scythe and I'm unwilling to let it go. But then the Unconsecrated horde descends on us and Jed pulls me over the edge before the first one can get me and I drop the weapon into the darkness below as I clamber for purchase in the soft earth.

They begin to fall around us, bumping us, grabbing at us as they tumble down the side of the cliff.

“Hold on!” Jed yells. The stream of Unconsecrated bodies does not stop, their arms reaching for us as they slip past, forcing us to climb lower. We shuffle down until I find a little overhang that protects me from the falling bodies.

I don't hear them as they crash into the water but I don't dare look down.

Jed joins me on my tiny ledge and together we press ourselves into the side of the earth wall, digging our fingers into the mud, grasping at the roots and brush.

The rain still beats on our backs, the thunder mixing with the sound of the rapids and echoing around us. In the flashes of lightning I can see the Unconsecrated thrashing in the water so far below.

I realize that Jed has been talking to me and I have to strain to hear his voice.

“—sorry, Mary.”

“What?” I yell at him.

“I said I'm sorry,” he says. And this time I hear him.

“Why did you come through the gate?” I ask.

“Because I'm your big brother.” He smiles, then laughs. “And I want to believe in hope.” I cannot help but smile a little as well. At the two of us stuck here on the side of a cliff during a storm, unable to see anything around us but Unconsecrated that fall with the rain.

For a moment it's just the two of us, the way it used to be back before there was Beth or Harry or Travis. Before our father and mother turned and we turned on each other.

“Thank you,” I say.

He's about to respond when an Unconsecrated bounces down the cliff, knocks into him and sends him tumbling away from me, out into the nothingness.

“Jed!” I scream. Over and over again I yell for him as I scrabble down the cliff grasping at roots and branches and rocks, sometimes losing my grip and skidding down until I can stop my fall.

Finally, I'm close enough to the water. It churns with branches and bodies. Whitecaps roiling over each other. No order, just chaos.

Sometimes a head will break the surface but never long enough for me to see the face. Arms flail but it's impossible to tell whether the arms belong to Jed or an Unconsecrated. Bodies continue to fall into the water, creating splashes that mix with the waves.

I realize that the current is impossibly fast in places and so I start to move sideways down the cliff, trying to make it downstream. Hoping that Jed was able to find something to grab on to, to pull himself out of the water.