I take his arm and I put it around me again. He closes his eyes. I let my fingers trace the outline of his face and his lips. His breathing is ragged, broken.

“Sloane,” he says.

“What?”

“When we get to Rayford can I stay with you and her?”

“Of course,” I whisper. “Of course you can.”

He starts to cry. I pull him closer to me. He presses his face against my collarbone.

We fall asleep like that.

Trace stares at us through the window.

His eyes are hollow and his jaw is set. Cary unlocks the door to the nurse’s room and pulls it open. I stay behind Rhys and Harrison. If I’m afraid of anything right now, it’s Trace. I don’t want him to lose it on me again. When I woke up this morning, everything hurt a little more and I have to be able to run. He makes no move toward me. There’s no anger on his face but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

He steps past us and then he stops and I know we’re meant to follow. We make an unconscious line behind him, a funeral procession. The only thing missing is the coffin but I feel the weight of it. Her body inside. We shuffle up the stairs, our footsteps in eerie unison. We reach the second floor. He hovers on the landing. We hover with him.

The hall is dark.

He takes a deep breath and moves forward.

We are ten feet from Yee’s room when he stops again.

We wait.

Nothing happens.

“If I go in that room,” Trace says, “I won’t come out again.”

Even though he hurt me, even though he thinks I killed her, I don’t want him to go in there because from here, I see her in him. I never saw it when she was alive but now I do. The shape of his face. His eyes. The way he moves. It’s not as delicate, but it’s her.

It makes me feel like she’s not dead.

He brings his hand to his mouth, considers it. I know he could easily stay here forever with her. He turns to us. His eyes fall on me and I shrink away.

“Lucky,” he says. It’s all he says.

We follow him back downstairs, to the library.

The barricade is down. It’s raining again. Cary says that’s a good thing. It will be an uncomfortable thing, but maybe the rain will mask our scent, keep us invisible when we need to be invisible. He hands out our weapons. Rhys and Cary and Harrison take the baseball bats but Trace refuses one. He lifts his shirt, revealing the gun, and then raises his chin, daring us to say something but we don’t. I take the crowbar. I need the weight. I lace my arms through the straps of my book bag. The other thing I’m taking—my note to Lily. I want it with me even though I don’t plan to die before I see her again. Not now.