Oh I'm scared of the middle place

Between light and nowhere

I don't want to be the one

Left in there, left in there

-       Avicii, "Hope There's Someone"

Chapter I

[Sunnydale, 2003]

It had been easier than I thought it would be; easier than it should have been, to make off with a wanted felon in a coma. Though I guess 'wanted' is a relative term, considering.

The knife concealed at my waist pressed into my skin with each step, and the icy steel against my hip felt reassuring. I walked slowly at the front and Kennedy brought up the rear. In between, Amanda, Vi, Shannon, Chloe, Molly, and Rona walked three on either side of the hospital bed that rolled between them. A funeral procession, I thought as I felt a weight in the pit of my stomach.

The frail girl on the bed looked nothing like the untamed wild-child that still haunted my dreams every night. Her translucent skin stretched over sharp-edged bones, and her face had a jaundiced pallor. Her hair was thick with mats and tangles; her lips so cracked and dry that I couldn't help but keep wetting my own sympathetically.

The last of the staff and patients of the hospital had evacuated days ago; there was no one left breathing in the building besides her. My stomach clenched as the voice in my head—hers, it was always hers—took on that syrupy sweet and simultaneously nasty tone that I knew all too well.

Look what you did.

I tried to push the mental images away. I was about to go to war, and being haunted by images of the numerous wires and tubes coming out of her wasn't going to help anything. But, as usual, I didn't know how to stop thinking about her.

"Oh, fuck!"

I spun around at Kennedy's voice and the foot of the bed rolled into my thighs hard enough to bruise, but I barely flinched. Kennedy was standing a few inches away from the bed on one side, and my eyes darted from the large wet spot across her shirt to the puddle on the floor to the burst catheter bag and the rapidly-spreading pool across the blanket that covered Faith's legs.

I felt my face pale as the smell of urine hit my nose, and as I looked at the bag that hadn't been emptied in days and had chosen this particular moment to give out around the seams, and I felt bile rising in my throat and guilt crushing me.

Kennedy didn't say anything else and when I finally glanced at her face I expected to see disgust, but her face was twisted in a combination of fear, anger, and sadness. I didn't understand until later, when it hit me how much of a body blow this experience was for them. If this could be the fate of a 'real' Slayer, how good could their own future possibly look?

I froze up and the others looked around helplessly, not knowing what to do. And then Chloe—sweet, innocent Chloe in her Tigger shirt with a ribbon tied in her hair—quietly left our cadre and headed into one of the abandoned hospital rooms. Amanda silently followed her and while I stood rooted to the ground, the girls got to work, with Chloe supervising.

I managed to pull myself together in time to help lift Faith's listless body, cradling her head carefully as Kennedy pulled the soiled sheets out from under her. A fresh sheet, a waterproof pad under her hips. The girls averted their eyes respectfully as I took the wipes and gently cleaned her, biting the inside of my lip to keep my feelings from escaping.

Chloe donned a pair of gloves and, bewildered, we watched as she hooked and unhooked various things, pointing Amanda and Shannon into the cabinets and drawers in search of various supplies. It was a whirlwind for a few minutes, and finally Faith was clean and dry, all her cyborg bits cleaned and hooked up or closed off for the moment, and a large box at the foot of the bed, stuffed full of supplies for her and for the ever-growing population of seriously injured girls back at the house.

After we had loaded her into the car, the girls dispersed and Chloe, who had been stuck riding on the floor of my mother's minivan on the way there, wedging herself between the bucket seats in the second row while the other girls argued over seating arrangements, climbed so serenely into the passenger seat beside me that none of the other girls even commented. Faith lay carefully buckled into the last row, with Kennedy and Amanda sitting guard on the floor in front of her and the other girls wedged in wherever they could find space.

I didn't have to ask. At the first red light, Chloe stared out the window and quietly told me about her sister at home, fighting off leukemia and cheerily placing Lisa Frank band aids and Pooh stickers on her own cyborg parts. She told me how she'd left the home and family and life that she loved, and her bedroom full of Winnie the Pooh posters and stuffed animals, because she had become a target for the Bringers. She didn't know how else to save her sister, she'd said. Her sister would leave anyway, probably soon, but not, she said firmly, because of her. And, she added, twisting a plastic ring on her finger, she had to go where she would be protected; she couldn't let her loving, devoted parents lose both of their daughters.

Weeks later, when I stood at the rim of the crater that had been my home, mourning the lives and the life that I had lost, I thought of Chloe. Laying broken and bleeding and undeniably gone somewhere deep inside the Earth, her parents left to mourn not one, but two children. My hands were still calloused from digging her grave. Another failure. I climbed back onto the bus, numb, and silently sat beside Faith's makeshift "bed" that had replaced the last two rows of seats, and after everyone else had gone to sleep, I finally let myself hold her clammy hand and cry for what my new life had cost.