When Dad and I rejoin the group, they greet us by letting us get good looks down the barrels of their guns. Exactly what I would expect. Still kind of unnerving.

Dad holds up his arms, the string of squirrels gently thwapping against his side. "We surrender."

Everyone relaxes, the guns go down, we're welcomed back. Dad goes straight to Rick, at the front of the group, and I hear them whispering, but I don't catch what they say. I can imagine. No tracks. But still . . .

I go to Carl, a few paces behind his Dad. He gives me his smile, so rare once and now not so rare but still precious, but I wipe it off his face, have to. Well, I actually don't think about it. "I need to talk to you."

His brow furrows. His hand falls to his holster, subconsciously, I think. His voice goes a little deeper, too. "About what? Is something wrong?"

"I'll tell you later." We're in a group, and things get overheard in groups. If Dad didn't want me to know, chances are he doesn't want the others to know. I have to tell Carl, of course, but I won't tell the others. That would be going too far.

Carl stares at me, eyebrows still close together, and I can see all of the awful things I could potentially tell him circling through his mind, pushing him closer and closer to the cliff you fall off when you get really scared. So I grab his hand mid-step and squeeze. "It's nothing to worry too much about," I say. Sort-of lie. "Just something. Worth knowing."

He squeezes back, but I have made him worry. Damn . . . I should have waited to talk to him later. Change the subject, Sydney. "Got lots of squirrels. Shot one more than my dad, even. So we get to eat more than crackers tonight."

He absentmindedly digs into his pocket. "And pecans. Here." He offers me a handful, and I take a couple and pop them into my mouth. I've never been crazy about pecans, but you take what you can get.

There's a quiet whistle ahead of us, from Rick. He gestures at us, me and Carl and the whole group. "Keep close."

So Carl and I pick up the pace, tighten up to Dad and Rick, but no, just Dad. Rick, he goes back into the group. My eyes follow him to Abraham, who I hear say, "Ready to get some concrete under your feet?"

After a moment, Rick answers with, "I think it's time."

My head flies forward again. My pulse gets stronger and faster, I feel it in my throat. So Rick's in? He's up for DC?

Abraham says that's music to his ears and then something about the first road we come to, going north on it, finding a vehicle. He asks Rick if it sounds good. Rick says it sounds good.

Do I think it sounds good?

Leaving Georgia. The idea is hard to get my head around, because when I think dead people walking, I think Georgia. Just Georgia, this little slice of the world, maybe all the world that's left, hell, how would I know different? And God, after all this time, two straight years surviving just here, here in this state that we've been all around and through and that we know . . . the prison is here, and Hershel's farm. Both of my houses. My grandparents' house. And I know if we do leave, take that long road, we might never come back.

But then again, everything I'm thinking about leaving behind is already, for all intents and purposes, gone. Except from inside of me. And I can take anything anywhere, if that's what we're talking about. The stuff inside.

DC.

I side-look at Carl to find him side-looking at me. He heard.

Oh, yes, we'll have a lot to talk about tonight.

But not now. No, he agrees with me on the not-talking-in-groups thing. He just clears his throat and switches the bag he's carrying from one arm to the other. It looks kind of heavy.

I step over a log. "Want me to take it?"

"No, I'm good."

I bite my cheek, move my lips around, play with the zipper on this coat I'm wearing, and ask, "Want your jacket back?" even though I can predict his answer.

"No."

Something about this, how he's acting, it pulls a smile out of me. But I yank it back in, lift my chin, toss the end of my ponytail over my shoulder. "You don't have to be like that, you know."

"Be like what?"

"All . . ." I know there's a word for it. Owen would know, reader that he is. "Chivalrous. You can be a good boyfriend without . . . you know, giving me your jacket, and . . . like, opening doors for me, and pulling out my chair . . . all that stuff. You don't need to do it."

"Syd, that's what I'm supposed to do."

"Well, maybe I don't want you to do what you're supposed to do. Maybe I want you to do what you want to do."

"Fine. I want to give you my jacket. And do all that other stuff."

"Why?"

After a couple of seconds, he says, "Because you deserve it."

And out comes my smile again. I duck my head, but I can't help it, it's there to stay. I have a floating feeling in my chest that only Carl, at his sweetest, can put there. I can't not feel good when that's there, that floating. "You've changed since I've been gone," I say, because he has. I wasn't planning on mentioning it, at least not until I got a sense of just how much change had taken place. But it's just so true. Nothing major, he's still my Carl. But something's shifted. For the better, I think.

But when he says, "Yeah. I have," it's a shade too dark for the conversation I thought we were having, and whatever was floating in me sinks some. I'm looking at Carl full-on, trying to decide whether or not to push for more, when we hear the screaming.

"Help! Help, anybody –"

The source of those screams is close, but out of sight.Dad pulls to a stop, so do Carl and I, Carl twists back to find his dad while I look from mine to the patch of woods where I think the cries come from. They're not far off, like I said, and we could there fast. But . . .

But it could be a trap. But it could be a herd too big for us to fight. But it could be a bad person who we might save now and get killed by later.

Rick's here, hand up, telling everyone behind him to wait, but my boyfriend, in all of his nobility, whisper-yells, "Dad, c'mon!"

Rick stares down at him and I see the options clash inside his head. But he knows the risks. He knows the risks, and here's Carl, and there's Judith –

"Come on." Carl's teeth are gritted, his gun and muscles ready.

The screams keep coming, and they eat at me, they do, but I just – I don't –

Rick, we can't, can we?

Rick glances at Dad, but Carl says one final Come on! and that seems to decide it. Rick takes the first step and then we're all running, me next to Carl, half of me wanting to hit him and half of me wanting to brush back his hair and press my face into his neck.

He has changed. But he's still too damn good.

Our whole group, we race through the woods like a herd of deer, leaping over logs and ducking under branches, staying close, tight-knit, like always, and we get closer and closer to the screaming, and I can tell that it's a man's.

"Help! Help!"

And oh, he's desperate.

The shrieking pleads lead us to a giant rock, a boulder. Walkers dance around it, their arms stretched up towards the kicking feet of a black man in a black suit, who's on his back and trying to keep his grip on top of the rock, but I guess it's harder than it looks.

"Help! Oh, please, help me!"

Carl's the first one to shoot a walker. We don't have any silencers – thanks, Joe, Terminus – so with the yells and the gunshots combined, we'll have to get out of this place fast after all of this is cleaned up. There are only five or six walkers here now. We spread out without discussion, my group. I raise my bow and shoot one, the first walker I've shot since before Terminus, and it crashes back against the rock and slumps and falls, smearing blood on the stone. Rick and Michonne come straight up to their walkers, on either side of me, and bash their heads against the boulder, Michonne with the butt of a rifle and Rick, I think, with just his hands. Carol stabs one, and here Dad comes, stepping around a tree and putting an arrow – a bolt, they're actually called bolts, Joe told me that – through the last walker's head. Then there's the after-fight quiet.

Except for deep breathing, most of it coming from the man up on the rock.

I step on the skull of the walker I put down and yank out my arrow, like King Arthur and the sword and the stone. I wipe the gore on the walker's torn shirt. The used-to-be-man is rotted pretty badly, but he still has a gold band around his finger. I wonder if it still counts. Till death do you part, and all that.

I step back.

Rick shouts for Glenn, hanging back with Maggie and Sasha and Bob, to keep watch, and then he peers up at the man on the rock. I do the same, having to move back a little farther to get much of a look. The man stretches out his neck, looks down at what we've done, wonders if it's safe, seems to be leaning towards staying on top of the rock for forever.

But Rick says, "Come on down."

The stranger's face is dripping sweat, caught in a struggle between expressions of relief and terror. But he inches towards the edge of the rock. That's when I notice the little rectangle of white underneath his chin.

I'll be damned. He's a priest.

Kind of clumsily, the priest jumps down from the blood-drenched rock, stumbles, and then just gazes dumbly around at the bodies and at the rest of us. He might be drunk. Can priests get drunk?

"You okay?" Rick asks after a beat of silence.

The priest holds up a finger and then whirls and pukes.

Rick looks up, Carl turns away, but I just drop my eyes to the ground and wait for the man to finish. I'm not too bothered by vomit anymore.

After the priest has wiped his mouth, he looks up at us, watery-eyed. "Sorry," he mutters before pushing himself upright. He takes a big sniff and does a double-take of his surroundings. Of us. His eyes get a little more alert, and they go back to Rick. "Yes," he answers, late. "Thank you." His breathing is still all shaky, but he straightens out his jacket. I've never had much to do with priests – my mother and her parents were Baptists – but as far as I can tell, he has the whole – uniform? – on. In the middle of the end of the world. That's weird. Maybe wrong.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

"I'm Gabriel," the priest says. Gabriel. He was the angel who came to tell Mary she was pregnant, I think. All the paintings and Christmas decorations of angels show them as pretty people, usually women, with wings and smiles, but my mother told me once that the Bible actually says angels are fierce warrior types, who can be pretty vicious.

Rick skips the pleasantries. No introductions, not yet. "Do you have any weapons on you?"

Gabriel gives a nervous little laugh and looks over to Michonne, leaning on the boulder to his right. She lifts her eyebrows and waits for him to answer. He shudders some – adrenaline is not kind to this man – and says, "Do I look like I would have any weapons?"

From behind us, Abraham's stone-hard drawl. "We don't give two short-and-curlies what it looks like."

I really wish people who remind me of Merle would stop coming into my life.

Gabriel swallows again, gives a breath that's kind of a gasp, and says – to the whole group, I guess, because he's speaking louder – "I have no weapons of any kind. The word of God is the only protection I need."

I sigh.

"Sure didn't look like it," Dad says.

Gabriel grins at him in a way I don't like. He's jumpy as hell, this priest in the woods. Yeah, he just nearly got ripped apart by walkers, but who hasn't been there? And these days, who doesn't carry weapons around – real weapons, not some words from an ancient book? "I called for help," he informs Dad, still wearing that grin. "Help came."

Hm. Too bad it didn't come for Hershel, or Beth, or Andrea, or – Merle. I remember that tiny red copy of the New Testament I found in his bedside table at Woodbury. Wonder if he called for help. Probably not. Planning to die and all . . .

"Do you, uh . . ." Gabriel shifts, talks straight to Rick, ". . . have any food?" Nervous smile. He really needs to lose that, it's spreading his anxiety to me. I nock an arrow as Gabriel gestures to his mess of vomit and says, "Whatever I had left it's – it's just hit the ground . . ."

And out comes Carl's hand. "We've got some pecans."

I stare at him as the Father takes the offering. "Thank you," he says graciously, and Carl nods just as graciously. Manners all around.

I check my dad's face. It is not a trusting face. Good. Our instincts line up. That means something.

There's a gurgling sound from behind me that makes my hair stand on end. Judith, in Tyreese's arms, her pale baby face a sharp contrast against his dark skin. Judith. Judy. Sweet, innocent, and completely vulnerable to the world – and the people, the strangers – around her.

"That's a beautiful child," Gabriel says, and I hear every body behind me and next to me shift, yes, leaves crackle, air is sucked into lungs, weapons are readjusted. In my case, I go just a little back and just a little to my left, to be that much closer to Judith. I've latched my trigger onto my bowstring at this point.

Paranoid. Yes, that's me, Miss Paranoid. But I'm still alive.

No one replies to Gabriel's compliment to Judith, not Rick, not Carl – no one. I can't say exactly why. I only know that I don't like a man I don't know, a shifty man, so much as looking at her. I guess none of us do.

I think Gabriel gets that, at least. He bows his head, wipes his brow, lifts his eyes to Rick. Gentle. No threat here, don't be silly. "Do you have a camp?"

"No." Not so gentle. "Do you?"

"I have a church."

"Hold your hands above your head."

Gabriel's eyes go wide, but he does as Rick ordered, hands trembling all the way up. Rick goes through the usual police pat-down thing. And he asks the usual questions. The ones I used to hear in my sleep. Hearing them now is like when Dad hums his special tune to me late at night, because there's always a long time in between those special nights he does that, and I know it's familiar but it's also strange, and a part of me has to relearn it again.

"How many walkers have you killed?"

Nervous chuckle. "Ah-ha . . . Not any, actually . . ."

"Turn around." Rick helps him here, half-pushing him. No, Rick's not crazy about this guy, either. And if Dad, Rick, and me all feel like something's not square, we're probably right. We're good about stuff like that.

A few crunch crunch sounds next to me, and then a shadow across my boots. Owen. I check him out, as subtly as I can. He watches the scene between Rick and Gabriel with eyes that are either half-shut or narrowed. There's a difference, but with him, right now, I can't tell which one it is.

"How many people have you killed?"

"N – None." Gabriel seems shocked we would even ask.

I've never heard someone answer None before.

Rick finishes the pat-down and steps back, the priest turns, and I don't have to see Rick's face to know it's not a nice face. His voice makes that plenty clear when he asks the final question, the most important one. "Why?"

The priest gives a hundred little shakes of his head, and answers like it's the most obvious thing in the world, eyebrows pulled together and everything. "Because the Lord abhors violence."

And no. No way. It's too much. No weapons? Never killed a walker, never killed a person? Oh, right, because God is enough. Because God said don't kill thy neighbor, or whatever the hell they taught me in Sunday school –

Sorry, Nana.

That voice is tiny and young and I push it down from my heart to my stomach and gulp hard so it stays there, buried. That voice does not belong here. Maybe it doesn't belong anywhere anymore.

And Rick, Rick moves closer to the priest. He was already pretty close to begin with, so the priest leans back some, and I see that fear, the fear any sane person feels when Rick Grimes appears less than happy with them.

"What have you done?" Rick asks in his lowest, raspiest voice.

The priest just stares. Confused. Or pretending to be.

"We've all done something," Rick says, still so quiet, and I look down at my hands and the bow they hold. Carl's shoulder grazes against mine. On my other side, Owen gives a single, low chuckle.

Finally, Gabriel replies, "I'm a sinner. I sin almost every day."

Almost.

"But those sins, I confess them to God . . . not strangers." Cue a tight, apologetic smile.

I don't like him.

My money's on Rick grilling him further, but before he can, a new voice joins the conversation. LC's. Her words, blended with all this talk of church and God and What have you done? makes me flinch. "You said you had a church?"

Gabriel looks over Rick's shoulder, I guess at her, and nods. And I know we're going to that church. It's shelter. And I know I should be grateful. Because, again – shelter. Assuming the priest is telling the truth. And even if he is . . . I still don't like him. And I hate churches.

. . . . .

On the way there, Gabriel explains that he mostly keeps to himself. He says people are as dangerous as the dead, don't we agree? My dad says no, they're worse, and that might have scared me once, but now it's so true that I barely even notice that it's kind of sad.

Gabriel says he hasn't been past the stream near his church more than a few times since the turn and that today he went farther than he ever had before.

Then he gets stupid.

He says, casual as you like, "Or maybe I'm lying . . . Maybe I'm lying about everything and there's no church ahead at all. Maybe I'm leading you into a trap so I can steal all your squirrels . . ." Then he laughs in a dry way, but when none of us respond, no laughs or comments or anything, he turns and sees our blank – in some cases, worse than blank – faces. My dad circles around to one side of him while Rick presses in on him from the front. Stares from all around. Glares. Gabriel looks from Rick to Dad and then at some of the rest of us, at me, and finally he says, backing down the trail he has us on, "Members of my flock often told me that my sense of humor leaves much to be desired."

"Yeah, it does," Dad assures him, close to growling.

Gabriel backs away some more, runs into a tree branch, and then leads on.

On and on. Carl carries Judith, I walk a little ahead, in between them and the priest. On and on a little more, until we break into a clearing with a little white building at its center. Weeds grow around it, though why I notice that, I don't know, since weeds grow around pretty much everything. A steeple rises up into the sky . . . into the heavens. As steeples do.

We head for the church, passing some lingering, scattered trees. A wooden fence stretches in front of the building – can't tell, from here, where it ends. A sign hangs from a tree above the fence but it's facing away from us, so I can't read it.

The front steps, painted white but worn and chipped, lead up to a pair of heavy wooden doors. As Gabriel reaches those doors and pulls a key from his jacket, Rick says, "Hold up." He jogs up the few steps and holds out his palm, staring the Father down. "We'll take a look around first." I see his eyes squint a little, his head cocks a bit. You understand, right? "We just wanna hold onto our squirrels."

It's a half-joke, half-threat.

No. It's a threat very, very thinly disguised as a joke.

Gabriel gives him the keys.

Rick kicks one of the doors open and heads in, rifle up and ready. Michonne, Dad, Carol, LC, and Glenn all file in after him. They all know what to do. Every one of us is an expert at sweeps now. I watch them disappear into the shadows from my place at the bottom step and think about how strange it is to see Michonne without her sword.

I also think about how I hate them being out of my sight, even for just a couple of minutes. If there's one thing I've learned this year, it's that being temporarily separated can turn into I'll-never-see-you-again.

Or, there's a lesson that might be embedded even deeper now: Death doesn't always take. I don't mean in the walker way. I mean how when people you've written off, who you never saw the body of but who you know – think you know – aren't coming back, come back. That can be wonderful. It can also be, well, horrifying.

"Rosita, Eugene, Tara, Bob. Let's check around back." Abraham looks at Gabriel. "If that's good with you, Father."

I get the sense Abraham doesn't give two shits whether or not it's good with the Father.

"Of course," says Gabriel, still so kind, so welcoming.

Maybe he really has never killed a walker, or a person. Maybe he's as clean as he claims, and that's why he's acting so naïve, so weak. Because he truly is.

Or maybe he's lying. He said that himself, after all. Or maybe I'm lying . . . Maybe I'm lying about everything . . .

So, the Father, Carl and Judith, Maggie, Sasha, Tyreese, Owen, and me are all left out here, standing before the church doors like we're waiting for Sunday service to start. Carl's now lugging around both the baby and the bag, so I shoulder my bow – I can put down Judith and get it back in my hands in two seconds, if I need to, I know I can – and take her from him. He doesn't resist. "Hey, pretty girl," I murmur as she comes into my arms. She gets a grip on some wayward strands of my hair and tugs. I let her, gazing up at the church, so different from the one my mother used to take me to – that was a huge brick building with an asphalt parking lot and a sanctuary so big the preacher had to speak into a microphone – but not so different at all from another church. The last church I was in.

"You're thinking about her, aren't you?" Carl asks, quietly. Just a him-and-me talk. My favorite.

The bell that rang on a timer. The cross front and center of the chapel, with a carving of Jesus nailed there, suffering for our sins. I wonder how the pain of dying from crucifixion for a few hours compares to the pain of spending two years in a world where the dead walk around eating people.

I look at Carl, meet his eyes, that's all the answer he needs. Then I rest my cheek on Judith's head, and I say, "She's gotten so big."

"I know." He takes her hand, bounces it up and down, smiles at her the way a good big brother smiles at his little sister. It's the same way Tyreese smiles at Sasha sometimes.

I sway back and forth, twisting my body, so one second I'm looking at the doors to the church and the next I'm looking at the group we're left with. Maggie, Tyreese, and Sasha are talking, standing close together, Maggie and Tyreese smiling some, her playing with her hands, while Sasha only half-smiles every now and then and keeps two ready hands on her rifle, eyes travelling between the doors and the Father.

And then there's Owen, leaning against the fence, alone. He's looking up at the steeple and rolling something between his fingers. His lighter.

Carl and me, we're far enough away from them all for a quick, private conversation. But what I wanted to tell Carl about the Terminus people can wait now, has to. Priorities can change pretty fast.

"Hey," I say softly, "What you did back in the woods, when we heard Gabriel screaming?" I shake my head, bouncing Judith. "I – I wish you wouldn't do stuff like that."

He doesn't understand right away. When he does, it makes him frown, puts creases in his forehead. "You mean help people?"

"No, not – not necessarily. Helping people is good. I'm all about it. But we didn't know what we were getting into. What we were up against."

He grunt-sighs, looks away to think for just a few seconds, and then his eyes come back to me, plunge in. He shakes his head a little. "Would you rather have ignored him?"

"No. I don't –" Now I sigh, and it's a quick sigh, the kind that seems desperate to get away so it doesn't go down with you. "I just think . . . we have to take care of our group before anything and anyone else. That's what we've always done."

"No, Sydney," he says, "that's what we always did before Woodbury. Before my dad let all the people from there in. Do you remember how things were before that?"

I look into my favorite blue eyes and wonder what he's asking me to remember. How Rick killed two prisoners we found at the prison and then exiled two more, Oscar and Axel – both now dead – letting them in our group only after they helped us, saved our lives? How Rick wanted to turn away Michonne? Merle? How Rick nearly gave Michonne up to the Governor?

Or how Carl shot down that boy in the woods who was giving up his weapon?

That's not something I want to remember. That's a Carl so, so different from who my Carl is now. But maybe that's my Carl's, this Carl's point. Maybe he wants me to think about how he's changed and how he's better for it, how we're all better for it, and how helping people is part of keeping this changed version of him alive and strong. The changed version of all of us. We are all changed, right? From who we were back then?

Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

"I remember," I murmur. "And I liked it better the way it got after Woodbury. You know that." Before the sickness and the attack by the Governor, and ignoring the presence of LC and my self-loathing and depression and the cutting and burning. But he knows what I mean. "But there have to be limits, Carl."

As I say this, Abraham and his three recruits come back around the church, from the side opposite the one they disappeared behind. I watch them head for Gabriel, hear Abraham say something I can't make out, but then I return my eyes to Carl, because he hasn't replied, and I need to make sure he understands me completely here. He's looked away, so I move closer to him and wait until he'll look at me. When he does, I know he's not angry. He's just . . . God, I don't even know, and I hate that. Maybe he's frustrated. I'll go with that. I tell him, softly, "You have to put you first. And us."

When I say us, I mean the whole group, but as it leaves my lips I realize that it could just as easily be interpreted as the Carl-and-me us, and I don't know which one he's talking about when he answers, "I still do put us first. Always. But –"

I don't get to hear what he was going to say or what us he thought I meant, because a whistle comes from inside the church. Another one of Rick's, signaling that the sweep's over, everybody return to base. Soon after, he emerges, and Father Gabriel steps up to take back his keys. "I spent a month here without stepping out the front door," he says as Ricks drops the flash of silver into his palm. "If you found someone inside . . . well, it would have been surprising."

Stop smiling like that, Father. I'm serious.

Michonne and Glenn and Carol and LC spill back out, all safe and sound, like I guess the church must be, and as they come down the steps, Carl says, "Thanks for this." He's talking, of course, to Father Gabriel. Who nods. And smiles.

"I found a short bus out back," Abraham tells Rick as the priest from the woods with the smile retreats into his church. "It don't run, but I bet we could fix that in less than a day or two. The Father here says he doesn't want it."

Rick reaches out and strokes Judith's head and just listens.

"Looks like we've found ourselves some transport," Abraham continues, prodding Rick for an answer, I think.

But Rick doesn't answer, just keeps petting Judith's head. She releases my hair to reach for his hand.

Abraham stares at Rick. "You understand what's at stake here, right?"

"Yes, I do." The father's taken hold of his daughter's hand and is shaking it a little, exactly like Carl did two minutes ago. Judith babbles. I think, even after all the time she spent away from them, she still knows the people who love her most.

Michonne breaks into the conversation, speaking to Abraham, pointedly. "Now that we can take a breath –"

"We take a breath, we slow down," he interrupts, which you should never do with Michonne. "Shit inevitably goes down."

"We need supplies." She stretches out the word, showing all of her teeth in the process. "No matter what we do next."

"That's right." Rick guides Judith's hand to mine and then takes the steps up to the church doors. "Water, food, ammunition . . ." Into the church he goes, planning.

My dad, meanwhile, has been standing on the top step all this time. He watches Rick go in and then looks at Abraham coolly. "Short bus ain't goin' nowhere." He walks through the doorway. "We'll bring ya back some baked beans."

I climb to the top step of the church with Carl by my side and Judith in my arms. It's a nice arrangement. Except for the church part. And the priest part. And the Carl running off to help strangers part.

Thing is, I love that last part, when it comes down to it. It just also scares the hell out me.