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“Where are your parents?”

I looked back at the house. My father was inside. My mother was inside. Milo was inside too. All three of them burning together.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The officer crouched in front of me. His face was blurry around the edges. “You don’t know what happened?”

I looked at my hands. Soot. Blood. Burnt skin. Trembling fingers. They didn’t feel like mine. I could still hear my father pounding on the door. Or maybe it was my heart.

“I don’t know,” I said again. And I meant it. That was the worst part.

I didn’t know where I went when the fire started. I didn’t know what my hands had done while I was gone. I didn’t know if I had tried to save them. I didn’t know if I had wanted them dead.

The officer’s face changed.

Pity. Suspicion. Something between. I hated him for it. I hated everyone who looked at me and saw a boy. There was no boy left. The fire took him. The dark ate him.

By morning, the house was ribs and smoke. Black beams reaching up from the ground like burnt fingers. Men walked through the ruin with masks on, carrying pieces of my life in bags.

They found my mother first. Then my father.

A woman from social services came with a soft voice and tired eyes. She told me I was going somewhere safe for a while.

Safe.

I almost laughed in her face. There was no safe. There were only different rooms. Different locks. Different hands pretending they were not built to hurt.

She asked if I had any other family. I said no. She asked if I remembered anything else. I said no. She asked my name. I opened my mouth.

Milo sat on my tongue like a dead thing. I swallowed him down.

“My name is Malakar,” I said.

She frowned. “That’s not what’s on your paperwork.” Her face softened, like she thought grief made children strange. Maybe it did. Maybe grief was just another name for the place monsters crawled out of.

They put me in the back of a car. I watched the burnt house disappear through the window. The woman said the group home wasn’t far. She told me there would be other kids there. She kept talking like any of that mattered.

I pressed my burned hand against my thigh. I tried to remember the fire. I tried to remember the door. I tried to remember my mother’s voice before the smoke swallowed it. Nothing came. Only one thing stayed.

A sound. A song. Soft and broken, somewhere beneath the ash.

Fly away, fly away, sweet Milo.

You’re not here.

Nobody’s here.

Chapter 19

Good Girls Don’t Run

Starla

I was dreaming of Malakar’s hands. They were holding me down, choking me, caressing me. I dreamt of his lips devouring me. Eye sockets of all those dead girls watched us, their mouths opened in a silent scream.

He told me not to pay attention to them. He said to keep my eyes on him. So, I did. I stared into those cold, dead eyes and let him swallow me whole.

The dream began to bleed into reality. I felt ragged breaths on my skin. The sheets were cold against my skin. When I opened my eyes, the cold got worse.