“One dirty bed at a time,” she says quickly, a melody strung through the words. It almost distracts me from the awkward truth that she’s cleaning the bed I sleep in. The bed I dream in. The bed I sweat and toss and do other things in, when I’m alone and I need to feel something good.

Words bully their way out of me. “It’s funny to see you here after . . . you know . . .”

“The woods? The wind? The boy with a hole where his heart used to be?”

“The way you talk is different,” I say. Rush looks up at me sharply, as if I’ve poked her in the side. I don’t know how to tell her that different is the best compliment I can give. I definitely don’t want her to think that I’m making fun of her, so I stumble even deeper into the pit of my own feelings. “I was going to say that I love it, but that sounded like way too much in my head, and people are always telling me I’m too much . . .”

“I have synesthesia,” she says, attacking the long, skinny bones of the brass headboard. “Lexical-gustatory, which means I taste words. Not all of them. And when people talk fast enough, it doesn’t really give my brain time to do it.” She slows down on the last bar, scrubbing at a spot of dull black, but it looks like she’s somewhere else entirely. A place where dirty beds don’t exist. “Synesthesia,” she says again, slowly. “I’m lucky that word tastes good. It’s like cold, cold chocolate ice cream.”

She starts cleaning really hard, and I’m feeling weird about the fact that I’m standing here doing nothing. “Do you need any help?”

She looks up at me. Dark hair. Shining blue eyes. Almost amused. “You want to help me clean your room.”

“I want to help you find your lost friend, but I’m not sure I can do that. Please accept scrubbing instead.”

“Imogen would call that a false equivalency,” Rush says, and goes back to her little cart for more death spray.

“So . . . no.”

Rush crouches again, but this time she doesn’t clean. She sits back on her heels. “I need you to find her.”

Not we. Rush has peeled herself apart from the rest of the Grays, if only for a moment.

I follow an instinct to the point of no return. “You and Imogen were a couple?”

Rush nods slowly. I remember Imogen all at once, the girl we’re actually talking about. The one with the red hair and the winter skin and the hollow stare. She probably used to look at Rush as intensely as Rush is looking at me right now.

She probably used to do more than that.

“I need to finish in here,” Rush says, like she’s all up in my thoughts.

Is she?