I sit behind Clara and pull the brush through her hair, letting the silence settle. People are bedding down in the tents around us. With each drag of the bristles through my sister’s butter-blond hair, the sounds of footsteps and voices grow quieter.

“Do you miss Liv?” Clara asks. Her voice is so soft I almost can’t hear her.

I don’t know how she learned about Liv. From Talon? From Mother? And what else does she know that will surprise me? Once, I could anticipate everything Clara said and did. A year apart has changed that.

“Yes. I do miss her,” I answer.

“But are you going to be all right? Without her, I mean?”

My eyes well up. Clara is the only one who has asked me that. Everyone else is too worried about the Aether, or about the Dwellers, or about Cinder and Roar. “You’re back, Clara. So, yes. I will be.”

“I should be too. Because I’m back.”

I set the brush down on my lap. What she isn’t saying is much louder than what she is saying. I can’t pretend I don’t know what she means. “But you aren’t, are you?”

Clara shakes her head.

A lump rises in my throat. “Why, sweetie?”

Her narrow little shoulders shrug. It was a stupid question anyway.

Clara wasn’t harmed in Reverie. The Dwellers treated her well enough, it seems. But she was taken away from us for a year and made into a test subject. Now we’ve gotten her back, but the world is burning, the sky is one great blanket of Aether, and we’re living in a rotten, dark, horrible cave.

Clara isn’t the only one who has changed in the past year. The Tides have. Everything has.

She has every reason in the world to be scared and lost.

“Have you told Mom?” I whisper.

Clara shakes her head violently, and I know we’re thinking the same way. The least she can do—the least either of us can do—is spare our parents any more pain. They have suffered enough.

It’s the same reason I haven’t told my mother how I hurt over losing Liv. How I ache whenever I see Perry. How I even miss stupid, irresistible Roar, who should be here. Roar is exasperating, but at least he’d understand what I’m going through. But he’s not here.

My closest friend is dead. Roar is away. Perry has chosen another. There are no other options for me. I can’t turn to anyone else.

We are all hurting and missing people. Everyone is scared, so you can’t talk about your worries because worries are everywhere. When everyone you know is on the verge of drowning, you don’t stop to tell the person next to you that you don’t like swimming.

You just don’t.