A notch, then a tug on the cable, and the machine clicks on. The whirring motor abruptly shrieks with all the ambience of a dentist’s office, only infinitely more terrifying, because we’re in a cave from God knows how many centuries ago filled with enough medical gear for a field unit in Kabul. I inch backward, my hands and feet bound, planting my back against the wall, trapped. My toes point, waiting for the first puncture, as Seb looms closer and grips my left ankle. My teeth clench in the interim, grinding tighter, my molars scraping, looking for purchase, some resistance, until finally the tattoo gun is at my feet.

He leans in. “Do not move.”

The needles stab the skin of my ankle, just above the knotty bone, the lateral malleolus, and along the fibula. Pain radiates outward like a sound wave across my nerves, propelling the awful sensation through each layer of muscle and bone. Their rhythm jars like a jackhammer until I find an almost easy tempo to it that allows me to ignore the screams coming from my mouth.

“Hold still, Shayna!” Seb drops the gun and clamps a hand on my calf. “I cannot tattoo a dead body. I learned that with the hospital cadaver I left in the Seine,” he growls. The whirr of the machine begins again while I steal a glance at Seb’s table of tools. Angela’s quiet stress radiates, and I try to withdraw to somewhere inside me, too.

You can’t logic him to death.

I was wrong. I’ve been wrong for so long that it felt right. Angela’s belief that we are connected via some ethereal twin plane and my obstinate belief in the opposite—in science, logic, and myself—probably grew out of reactions to one another. To how society pitted us against each other, insisted that we were antithetical, and we, foolishly, fed into the idea with our behaviors. I played the favorite with our parents, secretly loving it, insistent that mine was the only way, instead of realizing it was merely half the picture. We have always needed each other to be our best. To push each other out of our comfort zones and help the other be more than what she is—from ganging up as kids to get our favorite food for dinner, to my eighth-grade presentation that Angela completed while pretending to be me. I think of Angela’s unsent emails and the way in which she strove for the middle ground between our defaults—for balance—here in Paris. But it wasn’t enough for her. And moving on to medical school wouldn’t have been enough for me. I am most wholly myself when I’m with her; she is my first friend, my ephemeral enemy, and the only person in the world who would do anything for me, just like I’d do for her. We are better together.