They don't talk about their losses, maybe because they still don't understand and maybe because if they confide everything, all of these barriers, these fears created to replace the truth, all of those will come down in a ripping, roaring, burning second and consume them alive. Maybe it would help them—maybe it would have created something between them even stronger than is already there, but maybe it would have torn them apart because these things leave deep, dark voids through the soul that nothing can heal, only disguise, so that falling in is so much easier.
Briar doesn't remember his mother, except for sometimes when he is out in the gardens and there is a touch of warmth on his hair so that, for a second, she is there, her fingertips resting lightly on his head. He has no idea what she looked like, how she spoke, what she was at all—to him she is a ghost that vanished when the darkness came and left him all alone. But that has hardened over, an unpicked scab that waits for the itch, the scratch that pulls it away.
(Sometimes Tris feels pathetic, because she has seen Daja's altar and Sandry's tears and Briar's eyes and knows that she has not lost in the way that they have, but different, and yet Daja has lost in that way too and knows how much it hurts, so that sometimes, when it gets very bad, Tris can go and sit with her and not say anything and know that something has be understood between them.)
Sandry can't sleep without a light somewhere and sometimes she can't sleep even with that. On those nights she lies awake, watching the shadows play out their dramas on the walls and sometimes she can see their faces and sometimes she can't, because the dead can't come back and the door won't unlock and she is trapped, trapped, trapped until the dawn comes and she can fling open the window and breathe in that lightlightlight which makes the terror fade and her heart beat once more. She has come close, so close, to telling Lark about these times, but each moment before she opens her mouth she changes her mind, because these are secrets and secrets aren't meant to be told.
(It hurts, not to fit, not to be one of them, even if you don't want to and she secretly wants to, sometimes, when she sees how beautiful some of them are and how easy it would be, so much easier than this and on those days Tris pinches herself and remembers that they left her and that she was never, ever going back. Not even if they begged her. And in her dreams, they begged.)
Daja prays, every day, without fail, even if she is lost, tired, hungry, hurt, bleeding, dying, burning, anything, because now she is all they have left and if she doesn't pray they will lose her like she lost them all of them and then what would she do? Some days she still feels trangshi but she is used to it now, even if she is that no longer. (Do they know pain? Did they know the pain of a sea-crusted girl, so close to insanity, to close to nothing, a nothing that they confirmed with a few harsh words and a single staff? Do they?) Without prayer, she would have nothing left because, maybe, just maybe, she lives for those moments when she can kneel in front of the altar and hope that they have not forgotten her like a used, tired memory, a little girl, only a girl and that everything is alright. And it will be, she knows, just as long as she can whisper to those who can't hear her.
(And in the end, Tris decides, maybe she lost the least, because, after all, it's still there, but she's damned if she's going to let anyone say it hurts any less.)