The strain left her gasping, trembling again, the bite of iron on her tongue and in her nose and on her hands. They came in flashes, names, faces, slipping through her fingers like water the harder she tried to reach out and grasp them. I don’t belong here, she slurred again, wild-eyed and glassy, staring without seeing at the splatter of crimson against white, seemingly unaware of the presence of another.

The pain, though, she beheld in stark clarity. In her stomach, the crush of pavement against her back, the pressure of hands against her abdomen, trying to stop the blood that bubbled between her fingers. She couldn’t.

She remembered those hands. She used to kiss their knuckles and clutch them in her own only when no one was looking. They cradled her face, thumbs tracing softly over her cheek, ever graceful in their movements, the first time they’d said “I love you.”

I don’t belong here. This isn’t my home. Her eyes bulged, as if she could discern the face of whoever she’d left behind if only she looked hard enough. As if there were a veil covering everything that had been taken from her and she need only rip it away to know. To reminisce. To mourn.

The ground pitched dizzyingly beneath her. The sky was moving too fast around the earth. This isn’t my home, and this time it was a sob, a painful, keening sound as she turned her wavering, teary-eyed gaze to the wolf. He bumped her shoulder, disrupting the tenuous agreement she had with her legs. Her stomach lurched, she swayed. She managed one last, I miss— before her eyes rolled back into her head and she slumped gracelessly to the floor, out like a light.