I miss a lot of things about the prison. One of those things is the mornings. My hay bale with the spray-painted target. My radio, my AC/DC CDs. The privacy I had, the focus I could achieve, in that first hour before most people were even up.

Having all ten fingers.

This evening, I slip off from camp, as I am apt to do. I tell Carl I'm going to use the bathroom. He buys it. The fact that I take my bow and arrows doesn't make him suspicious. I've been carrying them almost everywhere, because – old habits.

I walk through the woods until I'm just, just out of earshot. Not so far that if I scream, or if one of my people screams, the sound will get lost. But far enough that I can't hear them talk and they won't be able to hear an arrow hit its target.

I take the last gulp from a bottle of water. It's warm, but delicious and welcome nonetheless. I haven't had enough today, and I didn't have enough yesterday, or the day before . . . It's been a few days since any of us have had enough water. We're getting to the dangerous point.

We're also almost out of vodka. Which makes what I'm about to do even more stupid than it would have been a week ago. But I can't go on like this. Can't keep carrying my bow and quiver like I'm a snake with skin it won't shed. I have to have a reason. Have to give myself a reason.

Have to give everyone else a reason.

I walk a bit, keeping myself in that sweet spot just far enough from camp, until I find a fallen tree with some moss grown over it. The moss makes a spot flat enough for me to balance the plastic bottle on it. I walk ten paces away, pulling my bow from my shoulder with my bad hand – the hand that has to hold the bow. The sensation is disturbing. I can still feel my missing fingers, but they aren't here to do any feeling of their own. I feel them trying to wrap around the bow, but – but they aren't. And the two fingers and the thumb that remain on my left hand don't understand why the other two fingers aren't doing their job. Why they don't pitch in the way they're supposed to. The funny thing is, the way my dad taught me to shoot, I always kept those two fingers really loose on the bow, at least when I would aim. My little finger and my ring finger really held on, and the two that are gone now, they looped around the grip and made sure the bow stayed balanced. But that's important. Balance is everything. The bow slips a quarter of an inch, and your arrow flies past a head, and then you have a walker falling on you. Just like that walker fell on me back in Atlanta.

It didn't fall on you. It was pushed.

I pull an arrow from my quiver – at least doing that feels the same. I notch it and turn to face the bottle on the log. I snap my trigger-release onto the bow. For a second, I'm calm. Everything's calm. The sweet familiarity of this stance is a godsend.

But then I raise the bow and pull back the string and feel something stretch and rip in my hand just as SNAP!, I let the arrow go. The bow vibrates way too hard – I've missed.

The arrow flies past the plastic bottle. Too high. Too far right . . . by at least four feet.

"Are you kidding me?" I look at my hand. It just goes on holding the bow, all innocent. It should be pouring blood or exploding or something, for all the good it just did me. "Are you kidding me?" I repeat, whispering this time.

I try again. And again. I have five arrows, and I use them all up. The closest I get to the bottle is maybe two feet. Maybe. And I can't even begin to say how much it pisses me off.

Two more rounds. Two more rounds, then back to camp, and not a word about this to anybody.

It takes ten minutes just to find all of my arrows, because two embedded themselves in beds of leaves, and I'm so furious by then that I'm not thinking straight. I let myself shoot some more. And some more. It doesn't take me that long to find the arrows again, because I make myself watch exactly where each one of them goes now, but I can't hit the bottle. I change my deal with myself from two more rounds of shots to three, and then four, and then there's not a deal anymore – I just want to hit the damn bottle. I have to hit the damn bottle. But I don't even come close. The arrows whiz by it without any pattern at all, without any hint that the shooter might have the slightest skill as an archer.

I'm horrible. Utterly godawful. Worse than I was the very first time I ever pulled back this bowstring.

I'm finally bleeding out of my fingers, though. And I should stop.

But I can't, because I have to hit the damn bottle. Because I have to have a reason. I am not a snake with skin it won't shed.

I am a girl with a temper, though, and my thirty-seventh attempt at a shot sends the arrow so pathetically high above the bottle that I slam my bow down like a kid throwing a fit. "Son of a bitch!"

"What the hell are you doin'?"

Shit.

Dad's shown up behind me. Staring at me like I'm . . . doing something very dumb. And dangerous.

"Um . . ." I bend to get my bow. By the time I stand up with it, Dad's close enough to yank it out of my hand and toss it back on the ground.

"You outta your mind?" He tears at the fabric wrapped around my hand. It's a dark fabric, but it's clearly stained – and wet.

"I had to – I have to practice with my bow, Dad, I – I suck, I can't afford to –" I fall silent as he gets all the bandage away and the damage is revealed. Blood's dripping generously from the wounds, the holes. Blood's smudged all over the top and bottom of my hand. And, as suddenly as a summer heat storm, there's pain. Without the humiliation of not being able to shoot worth a damn . . . my body has remembered that it's capable of feeling very intense pain.

Dad's fingers squeeze my wrist way too tight. He shoves my hand under my nose. "You see this?" he snarls. "See what you done? Did you not hear me say this mornin' that we're almost outta vodka? That we ain't gonna be able to do anything for this here on out?"

I turn my head. "I'm sorry –"

"You just undid three weeks' worth of healin'! Hey, don't look away, you look at this!" He shakes my arm, and I look. This looks like a deformed, gory hand. Nothing new, except that it's attached to me. "Do you not realize what a big deal this is? You think havin' two fingers chopped off is somethin' you can just walk away from?"

"Of course not!" I snap. "I know that better than you!" I try to yank my arm away, but Dad only pulls me closer. It's the closest we've come to hugging in days.

"Yeah, then why ain't you actin' like it? Why you sneakin' off and tryin' to ruin your hand permanently?"

"My hand is ruined permanently! And I have to learn to live with that! I have to learn how to shoot my bow again –"

"You ain't gonna shoot your bow again!"

I stop trying to get my arm back. Oddly, that's when Dad lets go. His eyes fall. All the air goes out of him. He regrets what he just said, that's as clear as if he would admit it out loud, but he can't take it back. I can't unhear it. And all the air has gone out of me, too.

Dad holds out the bandage he just peeled from my skin. Slowly I take it. I press it against my fingers. I can feel my pulse. Hell, maybe I can hear it.

"You gotta heal up," Dad says to the ground. "That's all I meant." He steps over to where he discarded my bow. Scoops it up. "Let's get back to camp."

I still have three arrows out in the forest. But I don't tell him that. Mostly because he knows, he can see the lonely two left in my quiver. But I also don't trust myself to speak. And I don't want to speak. Not to him. Not to anyone, but especially not to him.

We go back to camp. There's a fuss when we show up. Half of our people are with Dad and me within seconds. Carol takes one look at my hand and then leads the way to the van so we can use up that last bit of vodka. Rick asks Dad what happened, Dad grunts an answer. Leah covers her mouth with her arm and her eyes start to shine . . . Carl, he closes his eyes and says, "God, Sydney, no," and looks at me like he should look at me, meaning in a bad way, because I lied to him. I had no choice, he would have stopped me. But he would say that I did have a choice – I could have chosen to not do the stupid thing.

I don't have to ask for understanding because I already know, just with a glance around, that no one here is going to get why I had to go out there. No one. Not even Owen. When my eyes find him, they only find his back. His back and his fists, clenched tight. He's heading off now. I'm a bad influence. And a tattletale.

"Glenn," I say, because he's close, and I trust him with this, "Glenn, get Owen." I nod that way as Dad pushes me to the van and Glenn's head turns. "Don't let him go off alone."

"Aren't you just the little hypocrite?"

I twist my head to see Abraham leaning on a tree we're passing. He shakes his head once.

"Back off!" my dad snaps, and Abraham lifts a hand and turns away.

I sit on the van's edge. Carol has the bottle of vodka and a bottle of water.

"No, we can't – don't waste the water."

"You should have thought of that before," she says, and pours out a third of the bottle over my fingers. It stings, but I welcome that. I welcome the burn from the last bit of vodka, too.

Carol works on me, but Dad and Leah stand over us. They stare at my hand with expressions that aren't the same but that scare me. Both of them, they can be hard to read. And in a way, they are now, because she's not crying any more but I preferred that to this, this wide-eyed look she has, and he's not yelling but the way he's clenching his jaw is worse. My hand looks like I lost the fingers yesterday. Maybe that's an exaggeration. But not by a lot.

"I knew it."

I jump and find the source of the voice –

– not the source, not the real source, not the source –

– right behind Carol. She's standing there with half her face gone and her police uniform covered in guts.

Dawn.

"I knew you were a waste of resources," she says, blood dribbling from her mouth. "We should have let your hand rot off."

I turn my head away, use my good hand to cover my eyes, and accidentally moan . . . no. Whine.

"Sydney?" whispers Leah, and I know it's her touch I feel on my knee, gentle and firm, motherly to the letter.

"It's your own fault," growls Dad, and I press my hand harder against my face and edge myself away from Leah. "Of course it's gonna hurt! You expect anything different when you traipsed off out there?"

"Daryl," Leah says, in a tone I haven't heard her use with my father in a long time. "Something's wrong. Something else." Now she holds my shoulder, at first I think she shakes me, but then I realize that's me shivering. "Sydney," she says. "Sydney, baby, look at me."

"Could just burn the skin."

Oh, I won't look up this time, because that voice is my uncle's, and I can't bear to see him right now.

"Hell, I did it myself . . . Took care of the bleedin' once 'n for all. I don't know, Little Bit, you tough enough?"

"Go away," I whisper. "Not you, please, go away . . ."

Leah's fingers grasp harder for a split second before she's not holding me anymore. Not by her own choice. "Get back," I hear Dad say. But fear's gotten to him. Fear gets to us all, sooner or later, wiggles in like a worm, attaches to our muscles and bones, and overtakes us so fast we can't remember a time it wasn't there . . .

"She's not talking to me!" Leah hisses, and Carol asks who I'm talking to.

Fear hasn't just gotten to Dad. That's silly. Fear's always there, just waiting for a good time to remind Dad he's sick with it, just like the rest of us, as sick with fear as we are with the infection that's eventually going to turn every one of us into decaying bodies stumbling around ripping up living, moving flesh and shoving it down our rotting throats so hungrily, so desperately, like doing all that stumbling around is something worth fighting for . . .

"She's talking to dead people," says – Tyreese.

I have to drop my hand, because I haven't seen him yet. Like this. I have to see him.

There he is, but he's all the way on the other side of camp. He's missing an arm from the elbow down and blood's gushing wildly. I shake my head, go away, but he just stares at me sadly, so sadly, while the blood gushes and gushes and gushes –

"Sydney!"

I'm jolted, literally, I mean – I'm shaken. My head is captured between two hands and Leah is right in front of me. "Look at me," she says. "Look at me. It's not real. It's not real, honey."

"Then again, baby girl," Merle's voice drawls, making me try and curl up from it, "Maybe she ain't real . . ."

"Go away . . ."

Leah won't let me lie down. "Sydney –"

I lash out at her, thrash my arms. "Let me go!" And she does, but then Dad grabs onto me. "No!" I yell at him. "No, not you! How could you say that to me? How could you? I know, okay, but I don't need to hear it from you! I don't need to hear it –"

New hands take my arms and keep me upright. "Syd!" shouts Carl, and I close my mouth and my eyes. Dad's grip lets loose, then slips away. Carl's hands on my wrists turn to arms wrapped around me. "Syd, it's okay. It's okay."

I nuzzle him. I push my forehead into his neck and hold him to me with all the strength I have.

"No one's going to hurt you . . . No one but yourself."

"I had to go out there," I whisper. "I had to try . . . I didn't know . . . I didn't know . . ."

I didn't know it would make Them come.

"I can't shoot, Carl. I can't shoot my bow."

"You didn't even have your bow when we met. You didn't have it when we were at the farm. You didn't even shoot your first walker, Sydney. You shoved it off of Dale and stabbed it with a knife."

I didn't think I could squeeze him tighter, but I do. I want to get closer. I want to – there's a phrase . . . fix the gap between us. No – bridge the gap. I want to bridge the gap and make us like we used to be. I thought we were getting there, and maybe we are, but – then I wouldn't still feel the gap. And his words would mean more.

"You're still you," Carl says. "You're still you."

I press my lips against his shoulder. Dig my fingers into his hair. I have to bridge the gap. Once I bridge the gap with him – that's when I'll be me again. That's when all of this will be okay.

Yeah. Make things right with him, and you'll shoot your bow better than ever. You'll regain your sanity. Your dad will love you again . . . Don't be stupid, Sydney.

That sounds like something my uncle would say, or maybe Dawn, but they aren't here anymore. The only voice in my head is mine.