“I’ll have you know that my mother and my older sister are both doctors. I have seen a splinted bone or two in my time. Now, do you want help or not?”

I sat up and begrudgingly lifted my shirt from my chest. I felt like a fragile thing, a baby bird. I wanted to go home to my mother. I wanted to take a shower and gorge myself on hot food and let Cate braid my hair as I fell asleep.

Tyler took off his mud-spattered floral shirt and began tearing it into strips. Beneath his shirt, his arms and chest were covered in tattoos, delicate imagery of angels and flowers and a woman’s face: Grey’s.

“Doctor mother, hey?” I said as he worked, drinking in the way his skin stretched tight across his abs, the way his collarbones pushed through his skin in a way that made me want to press my lips to the space where they met at his throat. “She must have been really excited about your modeling career.”

“She was predictably and boringly disapproving. Such a cliché. She’s made her peace with it now that I’m wildly successful, but I left home when I was sixteen. Also a cliché. Part of the reason your sister and I got on so well, I think.”

“It’s not easy to leave everything you know and strike out on your own. You must have some guts.”

“Yes, well.” He began wrapping the makeshift bandages around my chest. “More than I generally get credit for. It’s hard being ridiculously good-looking. No one takes you seriously.” He tucked in the end of the bandage and put his palm against my side. “There. All better. Actually, a bandage on broken ribs does precisely nothing, but at least it made me feel useful.”

“And you got to take your top off,” I added. “Win-win.”

Tyler laughed. We were sitting very close now. Closer than I dared to get to anyone, lest they go rabid at the scent of me. Tyler took my hand in his and studied the lines of my palm. “Strange,” he said as he trailed a finger over my life line.

“What?”

“Grey taught me how to read palms. You have the exact same kind of life line as hers. Look here, where it’s snapped in two, with a gap in between.”

“What does that mean?”

“If you believe Grey Hollow’s Guide to Palmistry, it means something changed. There was a before and an after. A rebirth, perhaps.” His eyes flicked up from my palm to my face, then back down again. A shudder ran through me. I thought of the graves, of the three little bodies buried together.

“I’m glad you’re here with me, Tyler,” I said. I closed my hand around his and ran my thumb in slow circles over his knuckles.

“Well, I can’t say I’m thrilled to be here myself, but as far as company goes, you’re not horrible, I suppose.”

“A rousing compliment, coming from you.”

“It is, actually.”

There was a moment of silence and stillness between us, and then I leaned in, slowly, to kiss him. I gave him time to pull back, to stop me if he didn’t want it, but Tyler did not pull back, did not stop me. I put my lips against his, hovering there to see if he would go wild, but he didn’t, so I kissed him harder, faster, brought my hand up to hold his jaw as my body came to life at the closeness. I savored, for a handful of seconds, the heat and softness of a kiss that was not filled with teeth and blood and hunger. Then I felt Tyler’s palm pressed gently against my sternum. Pushing me away. I pulled back from him, but only a little.

“I love your sister, Iris,” he said against my lips.

“I know.” I pressed my forehead against his. “So do I.”

I took a deep breath, inhaling the smell of him, and then I lay back in the roots of the tree and fell swiftly to sleep.

* * *

When I woke, Tyler was still sleeping—and I had to pee. I wandered away from the tree where we rested, careful to remember my path back. The sound of running water came from nearby. I followed it and came across a brook babbling with movement, but the water was dark and smelled stagnant. I picked up a moldy stone and plopped it into the stream. It disappeared with a puff of white spores, swallowed by the water.

I squatted and peed in the undergrowth, watchful of the forest. It watched me back.

On my way back, my heart jumped at the sight of splashes of red nestled among the leaves. At first, I thought they were drops of blood, but no: They were strawberries. I knelt to pluck one from its stem, but I found it mushy to the touch, its insides putrid. I pressed it with my fingers. Worms and mold squelched out. I threw it to the ground and wiped my hand on my jeans.

There was nothing good here, in this place. Nothing untainted by decay. Agnes had been trapped here for who knows how long, with nothing to eat but rancid food and nowhere to sleep but the desolate remains of knockdown houses. No shelter. No comfort. No clean water or unspoiled food to fill her aching belly.

Why were we different? The Halfway had gotten inside of us, changed us—but not as catastrophically as it had changed others. We were not rotting. We had been allowed to leave.

When I came back to our camp, it was empty.

Tyler was gone.

“Tyler?” I called, but the wood was silent. Nobody answered me. I walked through the surrounding trees looking for some sign of him. Maybe he’d also gone to pee? “Tyler!” I shouted again, but again there was nothing. No birds fluttered. The trees were still.

Something felt wrong.

I ran back to the tree where we’d slept and yanked Vivi’s backpack out from where I’d hidden it in the tree roots—this was definitely our camp, definitely where I had left him sleeping no more than fifteen minutes earlier. I riffled through the bag and found the knife, then worked my way through the woods around the camp again, shouting his name, my whole body shaking. Wherever Tyler was, he had the shotgun with him. I called and called and called his name but he didn’t answer. Like Grey and Vivi, he was suddenly gone.