The first time I saw you, at the Governor, I handn't been to watch the birds at the border in years. But that's what you reminded me of. You were jumping up, and you were yelling something, and your hair was coming loose from your ponytail, and you were so fast..." He shakes his head. "Just a flash, and then you were gone, Exactly like a bird.

I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.

I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.

That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.

"And I love you too." His fingers skate the edge of my jaw, dance briefly over my lips. "You should know that. You have to know that."

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.

There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.