I look around and try to spot the hidden cameras.

Nothing.

We’ve split up to check the barricades. Cary takes the front doors, Rhys takes the back. Harrison is looking after the exit in the library and Grace volunteers for the gym. That leaves me with the auditorium (“Just check for weaknesses,” Rhys told me), staring at all the tables and desks. I don’t touch them. The doors will stay shut or they won’t.

I’m not alone long. Trace comes back.

“What did you see?” he asks.

He heads straight for the stage, for the tray of leftover food. He picks through it before settling on what Grace first offered him—an apple. He tears into it and I watch the ecstasy of that first bite on his face, taste it with my lips as his mouth makes its way around the fruit.

When he’s finished, he sets the core back on the tray.

“What did you see?” he asks again. I press my lips together. “What, you’re not gonna speak to me?”

“It doesn’t matter what I saw.”

“It does to me.”

Trace is Grace’s twin, but there’s nothing of his sister in him, not really. She’s curvy and soft—kind of vintage pretty—and he’s solid in a way that comes from playing one sport too many. His brown eyes are hard, but they can be warm and teasing, like that time I slept over. They’re not like that now. He looks away from me.

“Think they’re dead?”

“I don’t know.”

I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about Mr. and Mrs. Casper disappearing into a horde of infected. Even as they were being pulled away from us, they were reaching for their children and Trace and Grace reached back because they didn’t want to be left. And then they were gone. It’s wrong. The Caspers are the only real family I’ve ever known and they were torn apart through no choice of their own. They wanted to be together.

I think that’s enough reason for them to still be together.

It’s stupid, how it works out sometimes.

“They were totally outnumbered,” Trace says.

“I know.”

So was I, for a minute. Hands, faces, open mouths, milky white eyes. All that disease free-flowing under their skin, trying to force its way into mine. I hold my arms out, look at the skin that’s exposed, that was exposed, and wonder how much of them is still on me. I rub my hands over my arms, slowly at first, and then fast, faster. I itch. A word I forgot existed enters my head: shower. I can smell myself. I smell all of the dirt, the sweat, going to the bathroom when there was no place to go, the blood I got on me that’s dried now—

Trace stares. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I pull at my shirt. The cotton plaid is stained red and brown. Rhys’s voice is in my head, from yesterday, taunting me: Still here still here still here still here.