Page 89 of Ghosts of the Dead

“There isn’t. Trust me, there isn’t,” Jace says in defeat.

They follow anyway. Of course they do. They’ve been following me all over this damn place since we first met. I feel them even from a distance, far enough to give me this terrible privacy. Luna pads silently beside them, with her usual energy dampened.

I don’t care. I keep walking.

Through the ruins. Stumbling over debris and upraised roots. My vision blurs with tears, and I trip twice. Mars catches me the first time, but when I scream at him to go, they hang back and watch me scrape my palms on cracked asphalt the second time.

Each step feels like moving through quicksand, but I don’t stop.

The place Jace described isn’t far, but it might as well be on another planet for how long the stumbling walk feels. When I round the corner of a broken down school bus, my knees almost give out again.

She’s pinned against a wall with a long rod through her chest. Her arms twitch and she keeps reaching for nothing.Her head lolls to one side, then the other, in that mindless way rotters do, because that’s what she is now. A rotter. She’s trapped and rotting, but still moving. Still suffering.

Her hair is still streaked with purple, though I can see some of the red still poking through from the color she had died it before.

The purple hair was her idea. I thought it was crazy. Why would anyone take the time to make themselves stand out more in such a dangerous world? But she chose to have fun, to thrive rather than merely survive.

The tattoo on her wrist catches the light. Gemini. Same as mine. The one we got together on our eighteenth birthday, giggling in that sketchy tattoo parlor and promising we’d always be connected no matter what. We came into this world together, and now I have to walk it alone.

My legs give out. I crawl the last few feet on my hands and knees, ignoring the sharp debris cutting into my skin. I reach out with shaking fingers and push the matted hair from her face. Even decomposed, it’s like looking into a broken mirror. One cracked so badly it barely affects anything at all.

“Summer,” I whisper. Her name tastes like ash in my mouth.

I pull out her small music box and open it. The tune starts playing, but she doesn’t react. She’s nothing but a shell. She’s gone.

It’s her. My sister. My twin. My other half. The reason I’ve survived this long, because I always had hope. She was my North Star in this nightmare world, and now she’s…this. This thing wearing her face.

The music box falls to the ground, still playing the tune we’ve sung together for many years. Now it’s a macabre lullaby.

My breath shudders out of me and the tears come harder, blurring everything into a wash of watercolor grief. “I’m sosorry. I’m so, so sorry, Summer. I tried. I tried so hard to find you.” The words struggle to make it past the sob in my throat.

I reach for her hand. It’s cold and stiff. The flesh is peeling away, but it’s still hers. Still the same hand that held mine through every nightmare of our childhood. The same hand I gripped when we met each new foster family. The hand that squeezed mine when the first emergency broadcasts came through about the virus that was straight out of a horror movie. The hand that held mine back when we saw our first rotter stumble into the grocery store when the world was ending.

“Summer, I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, that I let them take you. I’m sorry for everything.”

The rotter that used to be Summer snarls and her jaw snaps at me. Those hazel eyes are clouded and empty. There’s no recognition, no spark of the girl who used to braid my hair and share her last piece of chocolate. They’ve become milky eyes filled with hunger and decay.

I squeeze her hand tighter, and only loosen my grip when I hear the bones shift and crack under my grip. Behind me, someone makes a soft, pained sound. They want to help. I can feel their need to fix this radiating across the space between us, but they can’t. No one can bring her back. No one can ever undo this.

“You deserved so much better than this,” I tell her. My free hand reaches for Caspian’s knife still hooked on my belt. The metal is cold against my palm. “You deserved to see the ocean like we planned. To fall in love. To laugh until your stomach hurt. To grow old and gray; not this.”

My legs shake when I raise the knife. My hand trembles so much, I almost drop it.

“I love you,” I whisper. “I’ll always love you. You’ll always be my Summer, no matter what.”

Tears stream down my face when I position the blade.

My whole body shakes. The knife feels ten times heavier than it should, my grip barely strong enough to hold it steady. My breath comes out in short, panicked bursts. But I owe her this. I have to do this. We promised each other.

“And I’ll always keep my promise. I’ll keep living, for the both of us,” I vow right before driving the blade through her eye socket.

The wet sound it makes will haunt me forever. Her body stills in an instant. She’s finally at peace.

I pull the knife free and lean forward to press a kiss to her forehead. She’s cold. She’s been cold for so long. My lips move against her skin when I speak. “Sleep now. No more pain, no more hunger.”

My legs give out and I collapse beside her body with my hand still holding hers. The darkness rushing up to meet me is almost a mercy. I welcome it. Because in the dark, I don’t have to see her face.

There’s a stampede of footsteps running toward me and voices calling my name, but none of them are hers. They’ll never be hers again.

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