as she came back to pull Kat to her feet, and when they set off running she laughed until she ran out of breath.
*
Before they made it through the cemetery, Robbie shoved away from them to move between the headstones. The others called after him and then followed to find him standing in front of a mossy cross-shaped monument.
Robbie kept his eyes on the grave. ‘Did you hear what he said?’ His voice wobbled on the edge of tears. ‘Aaron came looking for help.’
Wesley looked to the others, and found them both stony-faced. ‘Of course he did.’
‘Of course?’ Robbie whirled around, jaw jutting out hard. ‘If he wanted help, it means he achieved the fade – got exactly what he wanted – and regretted it.’
A hitch in his voice was the sound of faith being shaken. They had all convinced themselves that this was what they wanted, what they needed to make their lives right, and here was evidence that even this wouldn’t work.
‘Isn’t it better to know?’ said Wesley.
Robbie pushed past him, and when Wesley called after him Aoife shook her head.
‘Let him go.’
‘I didn’t mean to upset him.’
‘It’s difficult, seeing the reality,’ said Jae. ‘This morning before I met you guys, I realised I couldn’t remember Safa’s name. It took me ages to think of it.’
‘We knew so little about her. About Aaron,’ said Aoife. ‘Staying distant made sense at the time, but now I don’t know why.’ She met Wesley’s eye. ‘I’m glad we’re doing this.’
‘Me too,’ said Jae.
It was enough to make Wesley sure, for the first time in a long while, that he was doing the right thing.
They were almost back at the square, and leaned against traffic bollards to rest. People who had fled were everywhere, some bleeding from cuts hidden in their hair.
‘What the fuck just happened?’ said Kat.
Safa planted her hands on her hips and sucked in a deep breath. ‘That was nuts.’
‘I mean you.’ Kat shoved her, hard enough to make her stagger.
‘What did I do?’
‘You think it’s all a big joke, but it’s not! This hatred has been allowed to grow and grow, but because it was online everybody could ignore it, pretend it wasn’t serious. Now it’s legitimised. It’s here. It could have killed us. It wants to kill people like us.’
An ambulance pulled up to the square, injured people crossing to it as paramedics in high-vis jackets came out to meet them. More police were arriving too, cars edging through the throngs of people.
Safa raised her arms out in a martyr’s shrug. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t care. None of this is my problem any more.’
‘It’s everybody’s problem. They just don’t realise until it’s too late.’
‘I don’t need this,’ said Safa, oddly calm, as if she got caught in a street brawl every other weekend. ‘I’m just . . . killing time before I say goodbye to myself for ever.’
Kat stepped away as if she had been hit, feeling winded as a hole opened up inside her. Is that all she was to her? A pastime?
‘It looks to me like you’re having the time of your life,’ she said, fighting the wobble in her voice. ‘Why do you still want to go so much?’
When Safa stepped closer it felt aggressive, and Kat stepped away again.
‘I can only be like this because of the fade. Because nothing matters,’ said Safa. ‘This isn’t the real me.’
Kat wiped at her eyes. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’
‘You remember “The Girl Cut Out of the World”?’
Kat nodded. It was the last episode of Doctor Backwash season two, where Zenon decides to punish Esme for rejecting him. He manages to rewrite reality so that she never existed, the entire world reshaping itself to gloss over her absence. Nobody else remembers Esme was ever there, not even her boyfriend Roland. The show went on hiatus after that, and two years had passed with no sign of season three. That meant Esme was lost – nobody ever remembered, or discovered what Zenon had done.
‘Don’t you feel like something is missing?’ quoted Kat, a line from the final scene of the episode. When she saw it for the first time she’d sat on the edge of her bed, tears streaming down her face, begging them to remember.
‘Yeah,’ said Safa, quoting Roland’s response. ‘There’s an emptiness inside, but who doesn’t have that?’
Quoting lines together – even the saddest in the show – reminded Kat just how good it felt to be with Safa.
‘Esme is just gone. And nobody