The sound of the crowd mounted, the distant rumbles and rattling echoing. People brushed across Love Lost’s arm, in greater and greater numbers—

⊙

Rain found himself in the room. He didn’t reach for the chair. He didn’t move.

The view of Gold Morning had been the third of seven scenes.

All punctuated by the same repeated event.

It had been the same way, every fifth night for the last year, with little variation. Sometimes more scenes, sometimes less. He’d seen all of these before.

It never hit him any less hard.

Snag was up, standing at the dais. Cradle, too, had approached it. Rain could hear the murmurs of their conversation.

He hated to look, but he looked.

Love Lost was in the small chair. The same chair that had been in Everlyn’s room.

Rain recognized the stuffed animals, the toys, and the little belongings. Nothing too personal, none of the wizard pictures. None of the swords-and-sorcery superhero stuff that the more moody eleven and twelve-year-old Everlyn had kept on her wall. None of the toys were ones she’d indicated any attachment to.

Hollow.

Love Lost sat in the chair, limp, not twitching a finger or shifting her posture. Tears marked her cheeks, darkened with the makeup from around her eyes. Unblinking, tears flowing, she glared at Rain.

It was disconcerting to see someone cry and not blink or move.

He hated this. He hated seeing that and he couldn’t imagine what it did to Love Lost. He hated that it took something away from the sympathy, that he had to temper it with his awareness of her wanting him dead.

She had been a deeply flawed person, but that didn’t make the love, the pain, or the resulting emotion any less felt. Just the opposite, in the end.

She poured hate into her glare as if she could somehow make Rain feel the loathing and anger.

With the personality bleed, he thought, she probably could.

⊙

Rain felt his heart sink further as Victoria flew higher.

“Crazy,” Erin said.

He looked back at her. She still stood by the door of her dad’s car. She looked so weary. “Me?”

“Her. The flying, I mean. It’s crazy to go from a conversation to seeing someone take off and disappear into the sky like that.”

He’d wanted to convince Victoria more than anyone. She was the least biased in his favor because she hadn’t spent so long in group therapy, listening to his side of things, empathizing and sharing with him. A part of him had wanted to get her on his side because she wasn’t that far from all of the strangers he walked past or took the train with every day—every person who he knew would hate him if they knew his full, unfiltered story.