Nobody says it, but it takes longer to build a fire without Piper. Delilah strikes the flint at least a dozen times before a weak spark catches on the kindling. Even then, the fire is little more than smoke and a thin orange outline spreading towards the edges of the pile. The fog pressing in doesn't lend itself to a healthy fire. Delilah puffs on the smoking bundle while Skyelar and I try to skin a squirrel he caught. Delilah is the first to voice the concern we all have.

"What do we do now?"

The question lingers in the air above our heads. Yesterday morning, the answer would have been simpler. Yesterday morning we had seven fighters, we had a plan, sort of, and we had a leader. Today, everything is different.

Nobody answers. I stare at Elle. She's lost in the folds of the sweater. She's managed to tuck her knees up inside the billowy fabric, and she sits with the hood up and her hair falling like a curtain over her face. She keeps her gaze leveled at the fire, but I know she's eavesdropping. Her fingers ripple with the colors of the flames, laced with shades of skin that aren't hers. Delilah's and Sky's in places, but most often Maverick's.

I push my glasses up and run my fingers through my hair. My hand comes away greasy and my hair stays standing up on its own. Turning back to the squirrel in Sky's hands. He holds it up by its tail and pulls a face. We haven't been very successful with skinning it. A jagged river rock isn't exactly a perfect tool.

"We can't beat them, we barely escaped last night when there were... more of us," I say. Elle finally looks up from the fire. Her skin has settled down. A red flush paints her cheeks but that's from her fever, and her gaze looks unsteady. A trickle of sweat runs down the side of her face.

"The buggers will probably have search parties out," Sky adds, tugging on the maimed squirrel tail.

"Delilah?"

She looks uneasy.

"I don't know." She lifts a shoulder and drops it in resignation.

Sky jumps to his feet.

"More squirrels," he says before darting off.

I get up as well, and kick around the edge of the clearing. Somewhere along here are the remnants of Anushka's supplies. We should have dug them up last night, but we were all too dazed and exhausted to remember. I've gathered most of it by the time Sky returns.

There's a knife, a firestarter kit, and a canteen with a tiny bottle of iodine clattering inside of it. There's also a miniature first aid kit, which Delilah promptly puts to use.

Through much trepidation and determination, she tweezes every last splinter out of Sky's palms and, not without protest on his part, soaks all of the teensy entry punctures with disinfectant. She raises an eyebrow when she sees the state of my hands, but she doesn't comment when she picks shards of rock as well as wood splinters out of my split knuckles. In return, I make her let me clean and bandage the cut on her crown. I also check her for a concussion, though she insists that she's fine.

Included in the first aid kit is the best thing of the entire load; a nearly full bottle of Tylenol. I take it and skim the label. I'm pleasantly surprised to find that there is an English translation on one side. It states that the medicine can be used for fever. Perfect, I'll give a pill to Elle when she wakes up. I check the label again. It's adult, extra strength. Okay, so maybe I'll only let her have half a pill.

I unscrew the cap and shake four of the red oblong pills into my waiting palm.

"Bit much, don't you think?" Sky comments from his place by the fire, he has a couple of dead squirrels and a questionable rodent-like creature by his side.

"Not nearly," I reply, and down all four Tylenol dry. He's probably right, in terms of taking them right now. Four pills on an empty stomach is practically begging for ulcers.

"Thought you said you weren't hurt." He wrestles with the squirrel's skin. I shrug, screw the cap back on the pill bottle, then toss him the knife. I'm not hurt. Not any more than the rest of them. It's not injury that's making my spine feel like it's forcing its way up out the top of my head. Not a new injury, anyway.

"I can't carry you if you keel over again." He jabs the knife at me before slashing a squirrel open. The sloppy contents plop onto the fire. Blood splatters against the charred bark.

I sigh, "I won't."

He peels the skin off, shakes it a bit, then places it on the glowing coals of what is left of the fire. Now that the sun is higher in the sky, the fog is clearing out, and we can't risk the smoke from building up the fire again. "Then what's with all that?"

Delilah returns from the creek then with the bottle swinging at her hip. "All what?" she joins in, dropping the bottle at Sky's feet.

"Four Tylenol!" Sky flips his wrist at me.

Reading the look on her face, I hold my hands up in surrender and try to wave off her question before it comes.

"Four?" she asks.

"Yes, four. I'm not gonna die. I'm not hurt." I aim that last part at Sky. He crosses his arms and worries his lip. "I have fibromyalgia, that's all."

"Fibro-what-ia?" His expression turns puzzled.

"It's chronic widespread pain, the Whitecoats gave it to me." I get up and bounce on the balls of my feet, testing the extent of the Tylenol, the pain is lessened. Free to move, I bring Delilah iodine for the water.

"On purpose?" Sky inquires.

"No, they used to mess up Experiments all the time. Kinetics got killed the most because they were the most difficult to change. Elle and I were both pretty lucky, they decided to turn us into Enhanceds," I explain. Sky gives a low whistle. Lucky is a stretch.

"And here I was thinking they had this whatever-percent success rate," he muses.

"Ninety point five, this year," Delilah intones. "Increased from eighty-seven last year, and seventy percent three years ago. The Whitecoats talked about it all the time. I think they forgot some of us could understand them."

"Wow, three years ago. So I would've been sixteen..." he trails off. He has to think back, recount when the cross from normal to experiment happened. "That would have been about the right time," he concludes.

"Four years ago they took me, and Chastin was there a year before that," The attention turns to Delilah, she's preoccupied rescuing the smoking squirrel from the coals, holding the squirrel in one hand and the water bottle in the other. Funny how I never met Chastin or Delilah before. Sky's absence makes sense, but five years ago? I wasn't that much of a hermit yet.

Delilah sharpens a stick with the knife and splashes a bit of water over the skinned squirrels to rinse the blood off. While she's doing that, I scrounge for utensils. The firestarter kit has a hard, plastic spork that is completely useless against the tough squirrel meat. We resort to passing the cooked rodents on their skewers, taking bites of them like they're shish kabobs.

"Why do you think they did it?" Sky asks around a shin bone toothpick.

Delilah looks up from the pine needle tea she's trying to make with the iodinated water, "What's that?"

"Why would the Whitecoats go through all that trouble? What were they planning to do with us, I mean, all we ever did was run test after test, you would think they wanted something more, eventually." He spins the spork between his fingers for a moment before jabbing it into the dirt.

"Dueling was an awful lot like culling, if you think about it," Delilah muses.

Sky begins to snap, fingers jittering. "Not much more of us to cull, hey?" he says it like a joke, lighthearted, until Delilah shoots him a cold glare.

"Why would you say that?" she demands. Sky ducks, hair falling to hide his expression.

"I didn't mean it like—" the snapping gets faster. He stands abruptly, startling everyone except Elle.

"Where are you going?" Delilah asks.

"Nowhere. Away. Um, headstones," he stammers out. The next instant he's gone, a rustle in the bushes the only indication he was ever here. Five seconds tick by, and Delilah sighs.

"Oops."

"Oops," I agree. "He'll come back."

She turns her head to skim the forest in the direction of the rustled bushes. "I'm never quite sure he will," she says.

I guess I'm not either. If I could run like that, I wouldn't come back.

When Elle wakes, she forces down a rodent drumstick and a half a pill from the Tylenol bottle. When I ask how she's feeling, she smiles at me.

Skyelar doe return, and he shows us the headstones he found. They are large, smooth rocks, five in total, each a different color. Black, blue, red, green, and white.

We clear the campsite, hiding evidence of our brief stay as well as we can. The pine boughs are tossed far into the bush, the coals are doused and scattered, Delilah sends a mini tornado across the site to bury our disturbances under debris. I catch Elle clinging to a tree at the edge of the clearing while she pukes. Blood speckles the ground under her.

"I'll be alright," she insists, pinching her bloody nose. I wish she were telling the truth. She needs her treatments. Delilah comes up behind us, wielding a travel cup of pine tea, and the other half-pill of Tylenol. She coaxes both of those into Elle, and this time they stay down.

Sky gathers the rocks, I carry a backpack in my arms, and Delilah shoulders the last pack, then we're on our way. It's mid-morning, and all the fog is burned away. I lead the way down the animal path and show the others to the cove. When we get there, the three of us each take a rock or two and stack them in the dent I made earlier. Elle watches us work for a moment, then wanders a little ways away. She's careful to remain in sight.

Sky packs clay from the stream into the cracks, sealing the stones together. He touches each one delicately, with the very tips of his fingers.

"I tried to pick their favorite colors." He trembles.

Maverick's I recognize, he always liked the color red. Pointed it out when birds with red bellies landed in the pine by the basketball court, or when he spotted a flower out in the wild grass between the fence and the woods to the west of the Compound.

The others don't come so easily. I didn't know them the way Sky did. I kneel beside him, hovering my fingers over the blue stone, I turn to him in question. He places his hand over mine, I can feel the vibration from his trembling.

"Bakari," he says, and guides my hand to the green stone, "Piper, Maverick."

He hesitates over the white stone. "I didn't know Dieter's or Anushka's."

I turn my hand over to lace my fingers through his. Elle returns then, cupping wildflowers. She sets a blossom in the cracks by each stone, lingering at Maverick's. She knew him, he was her friend. He came with me to visit her in the infirmary and kept an eye on her when I couldn't. She places the last flower with care.

She traces the edge of the headstone, adopting the same red shade onto her own skin. There are tears streaming down her face when she spins around and slams into me, burying her face in my chest. A sob shakes her entire body. I wrap my arms around her, kneeling on my good knee to hug her closer. She cries.

"You didn't tell me, you didn't—" She sniffles and breaks into another sob. "They're all dead."

"I know, I'm sorry, I know," I murmur.

Elle shakes, her tears soak through my sweater. She's a kid. She's not supposed to cry like this. She's not supposed to know what having dead friends feels like. I press my face into the side of her head, her hair covers my eyes, her sobs echo in my ears. She's just a kid.