Miles’s mouth opens, then closes. His good eye fills instantly.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
For a second, neither of us speak.
Pipes creak overhead. Someone coughs from the far corner.
“I don’t feel anything,” I admit quietly. “Not the way I should.”
Miles looks at me.
“I feel like something got ripped out of me and now there is just space where it used to be.”
He swallows.
“You’re allowed to feel that.”
“I don’t have time to.”
Tears spill down my face before I can stop them. I wipe them away hard with the back of my hand, irritated with myself for letting them exist at all.
“There is no point in crying now,” I sigh, my voice tight. “It's better this way. Better now than whatever way they plan to kill me tomorrow.”
Miles shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “We are going to survive.”
I almost laugh at that.
I look at him properly then.
The patch strapped too tight around his skull. The faint tremor in his hands that he keeps tucking under his thighs so I won’t see it. The way his spine stays straight anyway, like dignity is the last thing he has and he refuses to give it up.
“On the hunt, we can grab branches, rocks, anything. We aren't going to let them just kill us out there.”
“They will kill us,” I say.
“They are going to try.”
Then he shifts forward and lowers his voice.
“If they move us,” he says, “you stay near me. If you see an opening, you take it. You don't wait for anyone’s permission. You don't wait for me.”
My chest tightens at that.
“You do not get to martyr yourself.”
He gives a faint, crooked half smile.
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
The next night, before the hunt begins, they call my name.
The physician’s office smells the same, bleach, metal, blood, and antiseptic. He unwraps my arm carefully, examining the swelling, the bruising, the ugly angles of my wrist.
It still hurts. The constant dull pulse is a reminder.
Sophie appears in the doorway, arms crossed.
