Page 105 of The Narrow

“Sit down,” Dylan says.

Water drips from my fingertips.

Maeve.

“There’s no one here but us,” Dylan says, and he’s right. Even Luke is gone. So are the walls. There’s just Dylan and the couch and a tiny wedge of light. I step leadenly toward the couch. The carpet is soaked, squishing beneath my feet. “Come on, Princess,” he says, except it’s Maeve who speaks. Maeve sitting on the couch, blood billowing lazily in the air around her from the wound on the back of her head.

“What is this?” I ask.

“The last frantic synapses firing in your brain,” Maeve suggests, one shoulder shrugging. “Or the hell you’ll get to live in when you’re dead. The Narrow keeps most of the drowned, but some have prior claims.”

“I’m dying.”

“You jumped in the Narrow, Princess. Of course you’re dying,” Maeve says. “Idiot.”

“I had to stop you. I couldn’t just sit by and do nothing. Not like with Dylan. Not again.”

“Idiot,” Maeve says again. “You didn’t donothing. You did the only thing that mattered. You survived. Whatever it took. It’s everything you didafterthat was surrender. You kept quiet. You played nice. You destroyed yourself for everyone else’s comfort, and you’ve done it again.”

“That’s not what I did,” I say angrily. I pace in front of her. Water oozes from the carpet with every step.

“Martyring yourself is a hell of a lot easier than standing up for yourself,” Maeve says. “You killed yourself to save a girl who was already dead. How does that make sense?”

“Del isn’t dead.”

“Del isn’t Del. She’s three people, and two of them are going to die tonight, whatever happens. You chose to let Del live, which means Grace and Delphine don’t exist anymore, not really. At least if you’d let me take Grace, everyone would be back to where they were supposed to be. The living and the dead.”

The circle of light is getting smaller. The water is rising at our feet. Lapping against my ankles now.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Maeve says, leaning back with one arm flung casually over the back of the couch. “You did it. Surrendered to your suffering.”

“Sacrifice isn’t the same as surrender,” I tell her, a scrape behind the words. I stand in front of her, my hands fists at my sides.

“A real sacrifice has to be something of value. You don’t think you have any,” Maeve says with a vicious twist of her lips.

“That isn’t true.” Is it?

“You didn’t even try to fight the current,” Maeve says, eyes locked with mine. “You let it take you under without a fuss. Just like you always turn back to this place. Because you think this is what you deserve. And maybe you do.”

“No. I don’t,” I say fiercely. “I don’t deserve any of this.”

“Then why are you still here?” Maeve asks.

I wave a hand at the darkness around us. “There’s nowhere else to go. Every time I leave, there’s nothing but the dark, and this place is right behind me,” I tell her. She should know that. She was in my head long enough to remember my nightmares.

“Oh. I guess you should just give up and die, then,” she says.

I glare at her. There’s water dripping from the ceiling now, coldrivulets streaming down my back. Maeve’s face is sunken, her skull gleaming beneath her skin.

She’s wrong. I don’t think I deserve to die.

But maybe that’s not the same thing as thinking I’m worth fighting for.

I did what Dylan told me to. Survival, not surrender. But then I’m sitting safely at the kitchen table, my mother’s appalled face across from me.You aren’t going to tell anyone, are you?

Moving my flight to give my bruises time to heal.

Hiding my arm from my friends.

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