She didn’t laugh. “Forty-eight hours,” she said, still not meeting his eyes. “That’s what we have. That’s all we have.”

Finally she let him turn her face upward. He said, “Then let’s spend it the best we can.”

She nodded. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

They embraced.

I knew I was watching something I wasn’t supposed to see, and yet I couldn’t stop.

“You have to take care of Chance,” he said. “He’s tough, but he’s still just a kid.”

The words felt like a slap.

Alex nodded, rolling her lips over her teeth and biting down, trying to fight off tears. They hugged again, squeezing each other tight.

Cassius finished, and I pulled back quietly from the flower bed and headed inside, filled with more feelings than I could make sense of.

Lying on my cot in the darkness, I realized what the worst part was.

It was that Patrick was right.

I was just a kid.

Sometime later my brother crept between the cots and stood over me. His face looked hard, even angry. “When I start to change, you take me out right away. Understand? I want it to be you.”

“Patrick, I—”

“You don’t hesitate. You do it.”

“You won’t change.” I could hear the desperation in my voice, and I hated myself for it, hated him for being right about what he’d said out there. “You can’t turn into one of them.”

“Chance,” he said. “We gotta deal with reality. Now, promise me.”

I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “I promise.”

*   *   *

Thirty-six hours till Patrick died.

The next two days passed like torture, the hours dragging like claws across my skin.

The food was going stale, the sheets getting dirty, and the lookouts reported regular Host activity beyond the fences. They’d mapped the surrounding streets already, sure, but they kept wandering around as if on patrol. Now and then we’d hear a scream carry to us on the wind, and we’d know they’d discovered another holdout somewhere in the neighborhood. Some poor kid dragged from a cupboard or an attic into the open and carried off in a cage.

Bits of the conversation I’d overheard by the flower beds played endlessly in my head.

You have to take care of Chance.

I could stop breathing, but that probably wouldn’t help me much either.

That’s all we have.

I tried to get some sleep but wound up tossing and turning. I looked at Patrick’s back facing me from his mattress and struggled not to think of the clock ticking down. Alex was crammed next to him in the tiny cot, his arm draped over her. They were determined to spend every final minute together.

Twenty hours till he died.