I want to place my arm around her but the space here is too narrow, our bodies too awkwardly arranged with Jacob in her lap.

“There is an end to the Forest, Cass,” I tell her, trying to comfort her. “There's an Outside—

there's more out there.”

“So what?” she says, her voice quivering.

“Don't you want to know what's on the other side?” I ask her. “To see the ocean? To know that there is more? To find a place that isn't touched by all this?” I wave my arms at a thin Unconsecrated man scraping at the fence but the night is so dark I doubt she can see me.

“The ocean has always been your dream, Mary, not mine.” She pauses for a moment and suddenly I feel a hand on my cheek. I flinch, not expecting it, but she keeps her chilled flesh against me. The rain has caused her fingertips to wrinkle.

“It's the only way for us to make it,” I say. “For Jacob to have a chance at a life.”

“Our place is in the village. Jacob's place is with his parents,” she says.

I want to shake her but instead keep my fingers in the fur of Argos's back.

“Don't you see? Everything has changed,” I say. “Jacob's parents may not have even survived.

Nothing will be the same.”

She moves her hand from my cheek to cover my mouth. “I don't want to hear such things,” she says, her voice even and serious. “Don't you see that believing the village is gone means that everyone we have ever known is dead? I won't give up that easily on them. And neither should you.”

Her hand slips from my face. I can hear as she resettles the boy in her lap, hear him groan and then fall back into dreamless sleep. The rain barely dribbles now. Another Unconsecrated has joined the first at the fence next to us, summoned by the moans. It's too dark to see anything but I can hear them scrabbling against the metal. Hear their desperation.

I wonder who those hands belonged to. Which of those hands once stroked the head of a sick child, once touched the lips of a loved one, once clasped together in prayer. I wonder if any of those hands belong to my mother.

“Going down that path would kill us all, Mary,” Cass says. “You're selfish to want to sacrifice all of us for your own whims.”

Her words echo, crashing through my body. For a moment I imagine going back to the village to help beat back the breach. Of returning to the cottage with Harry and continuing our lives, finishing the ceremony, bearing his children instead of Travis's.

Trying to be content.

“Cass,” I whisper. Water slips down my face and into my mouth. “We're already dead. We're surrounded by it every day. And we shuffle along in our lives just like they shuffle along in theirs. It's inevitable that it invade our lives someday the way it invaded our village this morning. We aren't part of any cycle of life, Cass.”