I am Flynn I am Gonzalez I am Young Wentzell Armstrong O’Brien Reeves Farajian Watanabe Mulroney Chernesky Logan Braverman Livingston Martin Campana Cox Torrey Swartz Tobin Hecht Stuart Lewis Redwine Pho Markovich Todd Mascucci Kostin Laseter Salib Hennesey Kasteley Merriweather Leone Barkley Kiernan Campbell Lamos Marion Quang Kagan Glazner Dubois Egan Chandler Sharpe Browning Ellenzweig Nakamura Giacomo Jones I am I am I am …

The sun would do its work. Soon they would be dead, then ashes, then nothing. Their bodies would scatter to the winds. They were leaving her at last. She felt their spirits rising, sailing away.

“Amy.”

Peter was beside her now. She had no words for the look upon his face. She would tell him soon, she thought. She would tell him all she knew, all she believed. What lay ahead, the long journey they would take together. But now was not a time for talk.

“Go inside,” she said, and took his empty pistol from him, dropping it into the snow. “Go inside and save her.”

“Can I save her?”

And Amy nodded.

“You have to,” she said.

Sara and Michael had lifted Alicia onto the bed and stripped off her blood-soaked vest. Her eyes were closed, fluttering.

“I need bandages!” Sara yelled. More blood was on her hands, her hair. “Someone get me something to stanch this bleeding!”

Hollis used his blade to cut a length of cloth from the sheets. They weren’t clean, nothing was, but they would have to do.

“We have to tie her down,” Peter said.

“Peter, the wound is too deep,” Sara said. She shook her head hopelessly. “It’s not going to matter.”

“Hollis, give me your blade.”

He told the others what to do, cutting Lacey’s bed linens into long strips, then twisting them together. They bound Alicia’s hands and feet to the posts of the bed. Sara said the bleeding seemed to be slowing—an ominous sign. Her pulse was high and thready.

“If she survives,” Greer warned from the foot of the bed, “these sheets will never hold her.”

But Peter wasn’t listening. He moved to the main room, where among the wreckage he found his pack. The metal box was still inside, with the syringes. He removed one of the vials and returned to the bedroom, where he passed it to Sara.

“Give her this.”

She took it in her hand, examining it. “Peter, I don’t know what this is.”

“It’s Amy,” he said.

She gave Alicia half the vial. Through the day and into the night they waited. Alicia had lapsed into a kind of twilight. Her skin was dry and hot. The wound at her neck had sealed, taking on a bruised appearance, purple and inflamed. From time to time she would seem to awaken, emerging into a kind of twilight, moaning. Then she closed her eyes again.