58.

IT TAKES A long time for Sonya to explain everything to me. She tells me about Colonel Higgins, a person I never met and hope to never have to meet. She tells me about the twin anomalies, predator and prey, one of which tormented Windale for centuries. It was that thing that plagued my head before the crash. That thing that drove terrible, violent thoughts into my mind when I wasn’t paying attention. It had gotten to all four of us, lured us up to the Hill day after day, year after year. But as it amped up to finish us off for good, I felt it the most, could see what it meant to do. I just couldn’t make sense of it.

Mostly, I just tell Sonya about how gross the motel room was.

“The whole time I was there,” I tell her, “it was like being underwater. I could only come up for air every now and then. And even when I did, I still didn’t feel like I was really there. I was only ever awake through the … the Bug Man?”

By now, I can sit up in bed. The gunshot wound in my shoulder is healing. It was a straight in-and-out shot, but it made a mess on the way through. After a couple of minor surgeries and some hospital food that makes Fancy Feast Friday sound like a five-course meal, I’ve been mostly feeling like myself again.

Mostly.

It helps to have Sonya here. It’s a kind of therapy, I guess, talking to her. She’s curled up in the bed beside me. We’ve got some terrible daytime TV on, and we’re sharing a bag of Munchos. It would feel like any other summer day except for the way she’s looking at me. There’s a darkness in her eyes that wasn’t there before, a flicker of something that either got left behind by what happened … or something that got ripped out of her. Maybe it’s both.

“That’s what we called it, yeah,” she says, staring at me gravely. “Stupid name for something that saved our lives.”