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She found the blood first.
A dark smear along the bark of a pine, chest-high, the kind of stain that didn't come from bark or sap or anything that belonged to the forest. Emily Dixon crouched low and pressed two fingers to it. Still tacky. Recent. Her stomach turned over once, hard, like an engine catching on a cold morning.
"Daryl."
She said his name quietly, the way you say a prayer when you're not sure anyone's listening. The woods around the Hilltop's eastern perimeter were quiet in that wrong way — birds gone, wind dead, everything holding its breath. She'd been sent to find him an hour ago when he hadn't come back from a solo sweep. Carol had asked her with a look that tried too hard to be casual, and that look alone had made Emily's chest go tight.
She followed the blood.
He was sitting with his back against a fallen oak, crossbow across his knees, head tipped back against the rotting wood like he'd chosen that spot to rest and not because his legs had given out. For one terrible half-second she thought he was dead and the whole world went white at the edges.
Then he opened his eyes.
"Em."
His voice was rough, scraped out of him. He looked at her the way he always looked at her — like she was something that surprised him, even now, even after twenty-some years of her being alive in his orbit. He'd been nineteen when she was born. She had exactly one memory from before the world ended that felt real: his hands, calloused and too large, lifting her onto a chain-link fence so she could see over it. She didn't remember what she'd been trying to see. She just remembered the hands.
"Hey," she managed. "Hey, you're — you're okay, you're—"
"Em."
The way he said it stopped her. One syllable, flat and deliberate, a door closing.
Her eyes dropped to his arm.
He'd wrapped it himself, torn fabric from his flannel, wound it tight just below the elbow. But the cloth was soaked through and the edges of the wound — she could see the edges where the wrapping had shifted — were ragged in a way that wasn't from a blade. Wasn't from wire or glass or any of the hundred sharp things the world was made of now.
Her brain said *no* before any other part of her could process it.
"When," she said. Her voice didn't sound like hers.
"'Bout forty minutes ago. Maybe more." He watched her with those grey-blue eyes, steady as stone. "Came outta nowhere. Whole cluster of 'em in that ravine past the creek. Got clear, but—" He tilted his head toward his arm.
Emily's legs crossed the distance between them without her deciding to move. She was kneeling in the dead leaves in front of him, her hands hovering over the wrapped arm, not touching it, because touching it would make it real and she needed another few seconds in a world where it wasn't.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. We have to get you back. Siddiq — or Dante, or — there's got to be something, there's got to be a way to—"
"Emily."
"Stop saying my name like that."
"You know there ain't."
She did know. Of course she knew. She had watched enough people turn, had held enough hands while the light went out of enough eyes, to know there was no surgery for a walker bite, no herb, no prayer. She'd known since the very first week of this world, when she was four years old and too young to understand anything except that the people around her kept getting fewer.
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. Hard. Hard enough to see static.
"How long," she said.
"Few hours, probably. Maybe less. I can already—" He paused. "I can feel it movin'."
She dropped her hands and looked at him. He was sweating despite the cold, a faint grey undertone starting beneath his tan. His jaw was set in that ironclad way of his, the way he looked when he was carrying something too heavy and refusing to put it down.
"I need you to do somethin' for me," he said.
"Don't."
"Em—"
"Don't ask me that."
"Ain't nobody else." He said it simply. Not cruelly, not even sadly — just as a fact the way the earth was a fact, the way the cold was a fact. "I don't want Carol doin' it. I don't want any of the others. They got enough on 'em." He held her gaze. "You're my sister."
"That's exactly why I can't."
"That's exactly why it's gotta be you."
She stood up. She didn't know she was going to until she was already on her feet, already two steps back, her arms wrapped around herself like she could hold her own ribcage together by force.
"There are other options," she said. The words tasted like cardboard. She didn't believe them.
"Name one."
She couldn't.
The woods were still doing that wrong-quiet thing. Somewhere far off, a branch cracked, and Emily's hand went reflexively to the knife at her hip. Old instinct. Older than thought.
Daryl pushed himself slowly to his feet. He moved carefully, the way he always moved when he was hurt and trying not to show it, that particular brand of Dixon stubbornness that she recognized because she'd inherited a watered-down version of it herself. He crossed to her.
He was still so much bigger than her, even now. She was twenty-three years old and had survived the apocalypse and she still fit under his chin the same way she had when she was small. He put his good arm around her, drew her in, and she let him, pressing her forehead to his chest and listening to his heart — still beating, still steady, *for now* — and hating every second that she loved.
Daryl holds Emily in his arms and looks at her with his big, grey-blue eyes.
"No." Emily says firmly.
"Em.." Daryl starts.
"No!" Emily exclaims a little louder, fighting his grip before she drops to the ground, sobbing.
The sound that came out of her didn't feel like something her body was capable of making. It came from somewhere below language, below dignity, some chamber of grief she hadn't known she had. Her knees hit the earth and she pressed both fists against her mouth and cried the way she hadn't cried since she was small — ugly and total and without any armor left.
Daryl didn't try to pick her up. He sank down beside her. His good hand found her back.
"I know," he said. "I know."
"You can't ask me to do this." Her voice was wrecked, barely there. "You can't — Daryl, you're all I *have*. You're the only—" She couldn't finish it.
"I know." His thumb moved in slow circles between her shoulder blades, the same motion she remembered from nightmares and fevers and every bad thing that had ever found her. "I know, Em."
They stayed like that for a while. Long enough for the light to shift, for the shadows to stretch longer across the dead leaves. She cried until there was nothing left in her and then she sat in the emptiness that replaced it, leaning against him, listening to the sound of his breathing change by degrees — slower, heavier, that faint wrongness creeping into the rhythm.
"Tell me somethin'," he said eventually. His voice was thicker now. She could hear it.
"What."
"Somethin' good. From before." A pause. "Somethin' you remember."
She thought. It wasn't easy. Before was mostly fog and fragments, colored by things she'd understood only in retrospect.
"You put me on a fence," she said. "I was little. Like, really little. I don't even know where we were. But you lifted me up so I could see over it." She swallowed. "I don't remember what I was trying to see. But I remember—" She stopped.
"What."
"I remember feeling like nothing bad could happen. Because you were holding on."
Silence. Long enough that she was afraid.
"Daryl."
"Still here."
She pulled back and looked at him. The grey in his face had spread. His eyes were glassy at the edges, but they were still *his* — still that particular color that had no good name, blue or green or grey depending on the light and the season and his mood. Right now they were the color of winter sky.
"I'm scared," she told him. She'd never said it so plainly to him before. That was maybe the most honest thing she'd ever given him.
"Me too," he said. Which was more than she'd expected. More than he'd given most people in his entire life, she thought.
She unsheathed the knife.
Her hand wasn't steady. She didn't pretend it was. The blade caught the pale afternoon light and she stared at it and thought about everything it meant to hold it and everything it would mean to use it and how those two things were the exact same weight pressing down on exactly the same place in her chest.
"Hey." His voice was gentler now. Going soft at the edges the way it only ever did with her. "Look at me."
She looked.
"You're the best thing that ever happened to me," he said. "You know that?"
"Daryl—"
"I mean it. You were this little—" He stopped, swallowed hard. "Little screaming thing. And I didn't know what to do with you. But I figured it out." The ghost of something crossed his face. "Figured it out together."
Emily pressed her lips together so hard she tasted copper.
"You got people here," he continued. "Carol. Connie. Judith loves you. You got—" He had to stop again. His breathing was labored now, each inhale a little more work than the last. "You got a whole life. You hear me? You got a whole life left."
"It doesn't feel like it right now."
"I know." His eyes held hers. "But it is. And you're gonna live it." He said it the way he said all the important things — not as comfort, not as consolation, but as instruction. *Do this. This is what we do.* "You're gonna live it and it's gonna be hard and someday it's gonna be good again too."
She was crying again. She hadn't known she had anything left.
"Close your eyes," she whispered.
He did. Without argument, without hesitation — the most trust she had ever been given and the worst moment she had ever lived, compressed into a single unbearable instant.
"Daryl." She needed him to hear her. "I love you."
"Love you too, kid."
She did it the way he would have wanted. Quick. Certain. No hesitation once she'd decided, because hesitation was cruelty and she loved him too much for that.
She held his hand until it went cold.
Carol found her an hour later, still sitting in the leaves, the knife cleaned and sheathed and her arms wrapped around her knees. She didn't ask questions. She sat down beside Emily in the dirt and put an arm around her and stayed, the way people who have survived too much learn to do for each other — in silence, in presence, in the simple stubborn fact of not leaving.
"He told me I had a whole life left," Emily said finally.
Carol was quiet for a moment. "He wasn't wrong."
Emily looked at the place where they had been, where the leaves were disturbed and the earth told its quiet story, and she thought about chain-link fences and hands that were too large and the particular color of grey-blue sky in winter.
"I know," she said.
She didn't mean it yet.
But she thought, maybe, in time — she would.