Shen looked up and said, “For a little while, I thought…” He shook his head, as if thinking back over what had just happened. “But he just died, just like that, no—”

“Was there anything you could’ve done differently?”

Shen shook his head, clearly thinking through his actions and being too hard on himself. He certainly didn’t realize that the rest of them, Tom included, probably wouldn’t have even known what was wrong with Freddie, let alone how to attempt treating him.

Barney patted him on the shoulder. “You were really awesome.”

“He still died.”

Tom thought of Freddie and Jess, another couple of people who’d always been too easy to dismiss in a sort of visual shorthand—that odd-looking couple who were always joined at the hip—and it was strange to think he’d known almost nothing about them, that he’d never really heard either of them speak until Jess had called out on the slope, that he would never hear Freddie’s voice now.

Maybe it wasn’t Joel’s fault, because even without his self-declared leadership, mistakes would have been made and lives probably lost, maybe more than had been lost already. But there was something obscene about the situation in Tom’s mind, that they had been granted this amazing chance at survival and yet within one day, three people had died in such preventable ways.

He’d talked the night before about fate, and had genuinely believed that he’d seen it in Naomi’s eyes, that it was all there, pre-written. But there had been nothing about Freddie and Jess that might have predicted this, just an insane decision by one person to build a bonfire.

And as he looked at Shen, with the same air about him as a doctor who’d worked heroically to save a doomed patient and failed, he understood that it was up to all of them, that they could blame Joel, or chance or destiny, or they could take control of their own lives.

For a couple of years after the death of Tom’s parents, it had been a sort of recurring fantasy of his, thinking through ways in which he might have been there and managed to save them. Then at some point he’d come to accept that the fantasies were pointless because they were dead and he’d been a little kid, powerless to stop it even if he had been there.

Yet he was here now and he wasn’t doing anything to save the people he was with. It was easy enough to sit back and blame others for those deaths in one way or another, but Tom was just drifting about like it had nothing at all to do with him, when in fact it did.