Welcome to the free world. We give people the power to choose. They can even choose the wrong thing. Beautiful, isn't it?

I'd rather die my way than live yours.

I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand. "I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again." I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand. "Go," he says.

"Everyone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed... awake." Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. "I'm tired of sleeping."

Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.

it occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him--his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.