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.

“We’re going to jump the fence,” Cary says. “We’ll go through the trees until we’re directly across from the alley—” The alley. Where Mr. and Mrs. Casper died. “And we’ll just keep cutting across street after street, every goddamn shortcut until we hit Sloane’s house.”

“What if we need to stop?” Harrison asks.

“Hopefully we’ll have somewhere to do it,” Cary says. He turns to Trace. “Don’t fire the gun unless you have to. From here on out, no talking. No shouting. No panicking.”

All of these things sound sensible.

If we do these things, everything will be okay.

But that’s not how it really works.