I was standing over a body.
Rue's body.
Or maybe not Rue's. The face was wrong. Too pale. Too still. The eyes were open, but they weren't looking at anything.
Was she dead?
Yes.
I knew she was dead.
I didn't know how I knew.
My hands were around her throat.
Or maybe the knife was in my hand.
Or maybe both.
The weapon kept changing. Kept shifting. Every time I looked down, it was something different. A knife. A rope. My bare hands, fingers pressed into the soft hollow of her throat.
"Rue?"
No answer.
"Rue, can you hear me?"
No answer.
There would never be an answer.
She was dead.
And I had killed her.
I don't remember deciding.
I don't remember my hands finding her throat. I don't remember the knife sliding between her ribs. I don't rememberthe moment when she stopped being alive and started being a body.
The last thing I remembered was Rue leading me through the hallway. Her voice, soft and sure. Her hand, reaching for mine.
"Come with me. Let me take you somewhere safe."
And then—
Nothing.
A gap.
A wound in the fabric of my memory.
And now she was dead, and I was standing over her, and my hands were covered in blood, and I didn't know how any of it had happened.
The face kept shifting.
One moment, it was Rue—blonde, hollow-eyed, the woman who'd said she knew Gabriel.
The next, it was someone else. The blonde from my dreams. Batch 39. The girl who wasn't there.
