Somehow, at last, we reached the base of Van Alen’s great brazier. We pressed our backs against it, and for a moment we could breathe. I looked back the way we’d come, at the soldiers disappearing into the impenetrable white night, at the thousands of dead and vanished who had come to take their revenge on the fighting boys of the Westside. How many of those white-eyed people had I met, or spoken to, or even just seen? How many of my neighbors marched in that regiment of ghouls? A question that large could never be answered, but the fact that I was asking it meant that I was still alive, that even in this hellish underworld, a girl could find a few seconds to think, that she could take control.

Thorne and his men stood at the edge of the intersection in their ragged line, picking off the stragglers and the boys too frozen to run, their weapons belching white fire. I pointed that way. Cherub shook his head, that old look that said, “Gilda, this is madness, but I know we’ll be doing it anyway,” and my god—I may have smiled.

Roach bolted, and we followed, the syrupy paralysis we had felt before forgotten. There were not more than a few dozen men left standing between us and the ghouls, men who had fallen to their knees in supplication or despair, waiting to be taken and destroyed. We did not have time to wait.

Rifle fire cut down a man kneeling in front of us. He tried to stand, to run, but he was too weak to move. I leapt over his body, but the boys were as useless as ever. The dying man grabbed Roach by the ankle, and Cherub stumbled trying to get him free.

“Get up!” I screamed, but no one heard. The ghouls were nearly on us. Cherub kicked the dying man in the face and took Roach by the hand, but the smoke was on him first. Three of them—two old men and a boy no older than Roach himself—their eyes flickering, their twisted tendrils snaking up Roach’s legs, pulled hard, but Cherub would not let go. It was a desperate tug-of-war, and I ended it. I grabbed Cherub tight around the waist, and I yanked hard, and I forced him to let Roach go.

Their hands—or what should have been their hands—snaked up Roach’s body, flooding his gaping mouth and scraping out his eyes. As he died, or came as close to death as this world would let him, he looked more frightened and more sad than any boy should ever be.