“Pull me up!” he shouts, reaching for me. The pain’s blinding and I try to pry his fingers away but they’re too tangled. I feel the hairs start to pull from my head, searing pinpricks of bright agony.

“Let go!” I cry, but he won’t. I close my eyes and clench my jaw and fumble for the knife in my pocket, prying it open with my teeth. He’s starting to jerk against me as he tries to pull himself up. Moans fill the air around us, blood from my scalp saturating the air.

I shove the blade through my hair, sawing as hard and fast as I can. Finally, there’s so little hair left that it just pulls free, ripped from the roots with a torturous hot pain that makes me gag.

The man drops. I hear the crunch of him hitting the ground. Hot sticky blood trickles around my ear as I peer over the edge of the platform. My entire body shakes as I gulp in the frigid night air, terrified by what I’m about to see.

Chapter XXVI

There’s just enough light from the fires on the island and the stars in the sky for me to see him. He’s mewling in agony as a throng of bodies slowly descends on him. A few drops of blood drip from my fingers into the mass below and as one they raise their heads to me, mouths wet and smeared red.

They stumble to the wall and scrape their fingers against the stone, their nails cracking and skin shredding as they push against a wall that I know in my heart can’t hold them back forever.

A few more stumble from the darkness. They tumble around each other, try to crawl over one another. And all of them stare up at me with milky blue eyes. Their mouths open. Their fingers reaching for me. As if I’m the only one who can save them.

I force myself away, slap my hands over my ears and shake my head, but I can still hear them. The sound is everywhere.

Tentatively, I reach up to my head and run my fingers over the ragged edges of what’s left of my once-long hair. The cold night air feels strange against the back of my ears and neck, my face too exposed without the curtain of my bangs. I gather handfuls of snow, using it to numb the throbbing pain of my scalp, and then I pull the Recruiter’s scarf from the railing and twine it carefully around my head.

It’s all I can do, so I stand up, hunch my shoulders against the cold and start making my way down the platform. Just then I see a figure walking along the shore. In the darkness it could be an Unconsecrated, except its steps are so purposeful that it must be a living being—but someone would have to be insane to walk on the wrong side of the wall with no protection from the dead.

I pull back into the shadows, curling tightly into a ball as the figure comes closer to the platform. I realize it’s more than one person—it’s a small group—and all of them wear dingy gray tunics underneath their coats. Soulers, their faces haggard and drawn.

It doesn’t make sense for them to be out here—for them to be on the island at all, much less on the wrong side of the wall. They each carry what looks like a shovel with a sharpened head and focus intently on the group of dead under the platform. As they approach the Unconsecrated they attack, lashing out to force them to the ground and then severing their heads from their bodies.

Their movements are brutally efficient as one by one they silence the moaning. When they get to the Recruiter he struggles a bit more, trying to call out, but he’s lost so much blood that he’s too weak to protest much.

He’s not dead yet. He hasn’t turned. Two of the Soulers shrug and move down the beach, nudging the Recruiter toward the river as if the frozen water could hasten his death. The third Souler crouches and watches the Recruiter flounder and choke, blood oozing from his mouth.

I watch him too. He was cruel to me. He’d have dragged me down with him or worse, and yet seeing him like this is almost too much. It’s almost too merciless.

As if it makes me as bad as they are.

“Stop it,” I call out.

The Souler stands, turning to look up at me. My heart stutters as my mind cycles to place the familiar face. And then I remember him: He was the boy with Amalia. He was the one who tried to protect her from the Recruiters.

“What are you doing? What’s going on?” I ask, crawling to the edge of the platform so that none of the other Recruiters hears us.

His eyes are dead, his shoulders slumped. He looks back at the Recruiter floundering in the frigid water, his skin turning blue. “Waiting for him to die and Return so I can kill him,” he says flatly.

I want to ask him why he doesn’t just do it now—why he’s waiting—but there’s still a line between the living and the dead, between mercy killing and murder, and I can understand someone not wanting to cross it.

“How long have you been out here?” I wonder how I could have missed this small group combing the shore, how I could have been so wrapped up in my own world.

He glances up at the stars, the weak light from the fires down the wall making his cheeks recede in the darkness. “Since this morning?” He says it as a question. “Recruiters kept us inside most of the day—said they’d only send us out at night so other people from the City don’t get ideas of coming over and swarming them.”

“But how did you even get here? Where did you come from?”

“We were in the Neverlands—stranded on a roof—and some guy told us we’d be safe if we came with him. He’s the one who brought us to a boat and got us across.”

A sick dread creeps into my stomach. “What was his name?”

He frowns, thinking. “Trapper? Caesar … It was something like that.”

“Catcher.”

He smiles, just barely. “Yeah, that’s it.”

I dig my nails into my palms, thinking about Catcher bringing these people across the river. Giving them false hope to lead them here and then abandoning them just outside the walls. Using them to keep the shores swept clean of Unconsecrated—letting them take the risk so that the Recruiters wouldn’t have to.

“You need to come inside,” I tell the boy. I move around to the ladder, reaching my hand toward him. “It’s freezing out here. You need food and sleep.”

He stares at my outstretched fingers and I see something flicker in his eyes. There’s a spark of hope and life. But then he shakes his head. “They’ll find me and throw me back over the wall,” he says. “The only way for us to earn a permanent spot on the Sanctuary is to serve our time. Keep the shore swept clear so the dead don’t pile up.”

“That’s absurd,” I tell him. “They can’t do that to you. Come on, I’ll take you home with me.” I curl my hand, beckoning him.

I know he wants nothing more than for me to pull him up and take him away. To tuck him into a bed piled with blankets and fill his stomach with warm food and hot tea. And so I know how amazingly difficult it is for him to turn me down. “I can’t,” he whispers. “I can’t leave the others. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“You can’t trust the Recruiters,” I implore, but he stands firm, refusing my offer.

I’m afraid to know the answer but I have to ask: “Is Amalia with you?”

A brief movement of pain flashes across his face. “She’s already gone,” he says. Before I can ask more he walks out into the shallow water where the Recruiter lies still, floating among the shards of ice. I hadn’t even noticed him die. He’d been utterly alone in the last moments, not that he deserved anything better.

The dead sometimes scream when they Return, a horrid eerie cry. That’s what happens now, a plaintive wail that’s cut short as the boy’s blade slices through the Recruiter’s neck and severs his spinal cord. His head tumbles into the shallows while his body bobs in the gentle waves.

In the distance someone shouts, the sound of the Recruiter’s cry still echoing. One last time I try to convince the boy to come with me, but he just turns back along the shore after the others, and I push myself away down the platform and run for home.

Once I’m there the events of the night hit me. There’s no way I can sleep, and the air inside feels stale, like a cell. Leaving the scarf wrapped around my head, I retreat to the roof.

The storm from earlier’s blown past, wisps of clouds still stuck to the stars. The rising moon’s almost full and its glow sets everything around me into an eerie bright stillness.

The muscles along my jaw feel tight, as if I’ve been trying to hold back a scream, and I remember the infected woman on the roof that night that seems like several lifetimes ago. I think of what it felt like to dip my fingers in the colored stains she’d left behind—the feel of release without words, screaming in images.

I grab a few chunks of wood from a long-ago fire and use them for charcoal, long black streaks crumbling under my touch. I shut everything else off but the feel of my body moving, the joy and need of it. Leaving the smallest part of me to listen for anyone approaching, the rest of me indulging in the release of creating.

I draw out lines, shade in contours. Sore muscles along my arms and shoulders protest and I push them harder. Underneath my fingers shapes begin to form, faces and bodies straining against the wall. Sweat breaks out on my neck and down my back and I lose all track of time and place. I forget the pain along my scalp, the way the cold air seeps against the back of my ears.

It’s just me and the wood and the wall. Images that flash in my mind and are translated by my fingers before I can see them and piece them together. It’s like I’m not even involved, just a conversation between hand and subconscious. I sweep lines out and then smudge them with my wrist: a woman’s hair tangling in the breeze. I sketch a child’s lips around a crack: a perpetual scream.

As I step back, I realize what I’ve been drawing. Etched along the length of the wall is an army of people, stretching from side to side and deep into the distance. They shuffle toward me, fingers outstretched and pleading.

The moonlight makes them look almost real. Spirits of people from long ago breaking through the crumbling bricks, needing what’s left of our world.

I’ve drawn myself in there, the shadow of scars along my left side, my hair in angry spikes. My sister next to me, perfect and free, her fingers entwined with Elias’s. Recruiters tangled with the Soulers in their tunics. Everyone I’ve ever known—all of us gone.

All of us shells.

Except for one. Standing in the middle of the crowd is Catcher. The only one with his arms loose by his sides. The only one with his mouth closed, just standing in the midst of it all.

I stare at my drawing of him. I’ve captured the way his eyebrows curve, the slight slant to his eyes.

The loneliness and despair inside him.

Slowly I walk back to the wall. I pull out a thin strip of wood with a sharp black point. Painstakingly, I begin to scratch the bars of a fence over the mass of Unconsecrated. Needing something to hold them back.

Their fingers curl around the links, their faces against the fence. But when I get to Catcher I can’t stand to draw over him. I place the tip of the wood on my lip, thinking.

Using my fingertips I begin to add new details to the drawing, the chalkiness of the black dust gritty under my touch. To the left of Catcher runs the fence, but to the right I add other details. Rather than clutching the links, the Unconsecrated hold flowers, and balloons tug them to the sky. They wear bright hats and absurd makeup. I make them smile, as if they’re laughing rather than moaning.

I stand back from the mural, my breath still coming fast from the explosion of effort. Steam rises in wispy clouds from my cheeks and I’m panting for breath. I stare at the plague rats writhing against the fence, at the ferocious need of them. A complete contrast to the people on the other side, ridiculously happy. And in between is Catcher, as if he belongs with both and neither.

I cross my arms over my chest and stare at the image of him, feeling myself falling for him even more with every heartbeat. It’s stupid and I know it. I even hate myself for it, trying to find any reason to explain away the blaze of desire in my chest.

He’s gone.

I pushed him away.

And I pushed hard enough that he left.

My mind conjures images of my legs wrapped around him in the tunnels, of how he held me as we escaped from the City and how he swept me into his arms in the snow as if I were beautiful.

Every memory stings, reminds me of what I gave up. My mind screams for me to stop remembering, to just be done with the pain of it, but my body still warms, wanting Catcher.

They bang on the door at dawn the next morning, not even caring if someone answers before breaking it down.

“What’s going on?” Elias bellows.

I hear him trying to stop them but he can’t. They go from room to room until they shove open my door and I’m standing there dressed, already pulling on my coat.

My sister pushes past them and as soon as she sees me she gasps and screams, “Annah! What happened? What’s going on?”

I’d already seen my reflection in the window: a thin line of scabs arching behind my ear, a bald spot where the hair ripped free. I’d gone ahead and cut the rest of it before going to bed, preferring not to feel the remnants of my hair against my cheeks knowing it’s no longer enough to cover my scars.

Conall stands at the head of the crowd of Recruiters. I glare at him and he grins, coldly. “You’re gonna pay.” He raises his hand as if to hit me and Elias jumps forward, grabbing his arm.

“What’s going on?” Elias shouts, trying to regain order, but other Recruiters have pushed into the room and are clutching me, pulling me into the hallway. “What is this?”

I don’t fight them but they drag me anyway, grinning at my grunts of pain. I hear Conall explaining to Elias and my sister about the man I killed last night and Elias bellows that he’ll talk to Ox and get everything straightened out.