My little brother, Ben, is sprawled inside by the fan, drawing monsters in blue pencil, and I am on the back porch looking up at the stars, all of them haloed by the humid night. You’re standing beside me with a cigarette and an accent full of smoke, twirling your battered ring and telling stories about the Archive and the Narrows and the Outer in calm words, with your Louisiana lilt, like we’re talking weather, breakfast, nothing.

And she was happy. The kind of happy that smoothed time into still frames.

Maybe, maybe, maybe – and if there were a hundred lives, a hundred Kates, then she was only one of them, and that one was exactly who she was supposed to be. And in the end, it was easier to do what she had to if she could believe that somewhere else, another version of her got to make another choice. Got to live a better – or at least simpler – life. Maybe she was even sparing them.

Kell used to feel like a possession. Now he felt like a prisoner.

She’d only been with Victor and Mitch a few days, but it had been long enough to grow familiar with the sounds they both made. Not just their voices, but the way they sounded when they weren’t speaking, the way they breathed and laughed and moved, the way they filled a space, and traveled through it.

And then her mouth was on his again, and the version of himself, the one he tried so hard to drown, came gasping up for air.

Katherine was sitting alone at a table, but she didn’t look lonely. In fact, there was a small, defiant smile on her lips. As if she wanted to be alone. As if the fact people avoided her was a badge.

In an auditorium full of stares, his was the gaze she felt. in a classroom full of students learning lies, he scribbled the truth in the margins. In a school that clung to the illusion of safety, he didn’t shy from talk of violence. He didn’t belong there, the way she didn’t belong there, and that shared strangeness made her feel like she knew him.

Do you want to hear a story?” she says, her voice soft and sweet and creepy. And just like that, we all shuffle closer. Mom has always had that power over people, always been the kind of storyteller who makes her listeners lean in.

And Alice drove her hand into Kate’s chest.