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into the woods. I needed a moment.
    “Tess, wait up. Please. Slow down,” Robert called from behind me.
    “Not now. I just need to walk. I need a moment to myself,” I snapped without hesitating. I sped up my movements, hoping to disappear in the sunset, melting into the crimson red.
    “Come on, slow down,” he begged, jogging to catch up with me. I knew he was doing so out of courtesy only; it would take nothing for him to stop me. He was a chosen one.
    “Why is he acting like this?” I asked, my voice hitching. “He hasn’t even attempted to explain where he’s been all these years. He hasn’t once asked Louisa if she was all right. How can he look at her and not care?”
    “After your father rescued me from the center, I spent some time with a resistance sect much like the one that follows him now. These people, they become obsessed with their mission. It’s their life. It’s not born out of selfishness—or at least they don’t see it that way. It comes from a place that longs to make the world better. They’re desperate to fix it.”
    “Better? At what cost?” I asked. “Leaving your family? Abandoning them to make it through this messed-up world on their own?” I fought back the tears that threatened to spill from my eyes.
    “But you left, too, remember?”
    I gulped. “I had to. They were going to kill me. I planned to go back for Louisa.”
    “Maybe he had to make the same choice? And it’s not the reunion you imagined, but he did come back for you.”
    I shook my head, crossing my arms against my chest. “The way he talks to them, worries about them…”
    “Of course. He’s their leader. They’re his family.”
    “But…he already had a family,” I said.

Chapter 4
    I never could tell if the screams were real. In the seconds after my eyes popped open, my mind struggled to answer the question: nightmare or real life? It was getting harder and harder to distinguish between the two. But then one scream followed after another. And another. They got louder, more frantic. Shrill cries into the night sky that seemed to stretch before us like some black ocean with no end. And as my sister scrambled to her knees from where she slept beside me, I knew with dread coursing through my veins: this was real life.
    “Robert!” I yelled with all of my might, pulling myself up onto my feet, blindly reaching into the darkness for my sister’s hand. There was no point keeping quiet. The cries for help echoed throughout the woods that surrounded us, trapping our group with whatever was hunting us down. A cage of desperation and horror. A hand clamped down on my shoulder and I yelped.
    “It’s me,” Robert said from my left, reaching across and helping my sister to her feet. I couldn’t see him through the pitch black of the night. My eyes hadn’t adjusted to being yanked from sleep. Besides, my reflexes weren’t nearly as good as his.
    Before I could open my mouth, a voice cut through the night. “Tess! Are you hurt?” Henry bellowed in my direction from the darkness of the abyss. I tried to answer back, but the yells and groans of the men and women who scrambled around us filled my brain, making it difficult to form a coherent thought, let alone words.
    “What’s going on? Can you see anything, Robert?” Lockwood called out from behind us. I hadn’t realized he’d been resting so close to where my sister and I had slept, but I wasn’t entirely surprised, either.
    Robert and Lockwood continued to exchange words, but I couldn’t make sense of them. All I could hear were the screams. The wound in my side stung, a sharp pain radiating down my spine. It was a painful reminder that this wasn’t the first time I’d met danger in these woods. My heart pounded against my chest, and I found it difficult to breathe.
    What now?
    What dark thing would happen next?
    The heavy beat of feet against the ground fell in sync with the rapid beating of my heart, and I thought I’d go crazy from it. Every