“You were right this morning, George,” Julie said. “They shouldn’t be sending us out like this, not any of us. We’re not ready.”

Jon snorted. “Speak for yourself.”

As they bickered among themselves about exactly how hard it would be to kill one vampire, Simon stood up. Bad enough that they all thought he was a liar—even worse that, in a way, he sort of was. He couldn’t remember anything about being a vampire—nothing useful, at least—but he remembered enough to be extremely uncomfortable with the idea of killing one.

Or maybe it was just the idea of killing anything. Simon was a vegetarian, and the only violence he’d ever committed was on-screen, blowing up pixelated dragons and sea slugs.

That’s not true, a voice in his head reminded him. There’s plenty of blood on your hands. Simon shrugged it off. Not remembering something might not mean it never happened, but sometimes pretending that made things easier.

George grabbed his arm before he could leave. “I’m sorry about—you know,” he told Simon. “I should have believed you.”

“Yeah. You should have.” Simon sighed, then assured his roommate there were no hard feelings, which was mostly true. He was halfway down the shadowed corridor when he heard footsteps chasing after him.

“Simon!” Julie cried. “Wait a second.”

In the last few months, Simon had discovered the existence of magic and demons, he’d learned that his memories of the past were as flimsy and fake as his sister’s old paper dolls, and he’d given up everything he’d ever known to move to a magically invisible country and study demon-hunting. And still, nothing surprised him quite as much as the ever-increasing list of hot girls who urgently wanted something from him. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as it should have been.

Simon stopped to let Julie catch up. She was a few inches taller and had the kind of gold-flecked hazel eyes that changed in every light. Here in the dim corridor, they flashed amber in the candelabra’s glow. She moved with an easy grace, like a ballet dancer, if ballet dancers habitually sliced people to ribbons with a silver runed dagger. In other words, she moved like a Shadowhunter, and from what Simon had seen of her on the training field, she was going to be a very good one.

And like any good Shadowhunter, she had no inclination to bond with mundanes, much less mundanes who used to be Downworlders—even mundanes who, in a life they could no longer remember, had saved the world. But ever since Isabelle Lightwood had descended on the Academy to stake her claim on Simon, Julie had looked at him with special fascination. Less like someone she wanted to throw into bed and more like someone she wanted to examine under a microscope as she plucked off his limbs, excavated his interior, and sought some glimmer of what might possibly attract a girl like Isabelle Lightwood.

Simon didn’t mind letting her look. He liked the sharp curiosity in her gaze, the lack of expectation. Isabelle, Clary, Maia, all those girls back in New York, they claimed to know and love him, and he believed them—but he also knew they didn’t love him, they loved some bizarro-world version of him, some Simon-shaped doppelgänger, and when they looked at Simon, all they saw, all they wanted to see, was that other guy. Julie may have hated him—okay, clearly hated him—but she also saw him.

“It’s really true?” she asked him now. “You don’t remember any of it? Being a vampire? The demon dimension? The Dark War? None of it?”

Simon sighed. “I’m tired, Julie. Can we just pretend that you asked me that a million more times and I gave you the same answer, and call it a day?”

She brushed at her eye, and Simon wondered again whether it was possible that Julie Beauvale had actual human feelings and, for whatever reason, was blinking back actual human tears. It was too dark in the corridor to see anything but the smooth lines of her face, the glint of gold where her necklace disappeared into her cleavage.

Simon pressed a hand to his collarbone, suddenly remembering the weight of a stone, the flash of a ruby, the steady pulse so like a heartbeat, the look on her face when she’d given it to him for safekeeping, said good-bye, shards of confused memory impossible to piece together, but even as he asked himself whose face, whose frightened farewell, his mind offered up the answer.

Isabelle.

It was always Isabelle.

“I believe you,” Julie said. “I don’t get it, but I believe you. I guess I was just hoping . . .”

“What?” There was an unfamiliar note in her voice, something gentle and uncertain, and she looked almost as surprised as he did to hear it.

“I thought you, of all people, might understand,” Julie said. “What it’s like, to fight for your life. To fight Downworlders. To think you’re going to die. To”—her voice didn’t waver and her expression didn’t change, but Simon could almost feel her blood turn to ice as she forced the words out—“see other people fall.”

“I’m sorry,” Simon said. “I mean, I know about what happened, but . . .”

“But it’s not the same as being there,” Julie said.

Simon nodded, thinking about the hours he’d spent sitting beside his father’s bed, holding his hand, watching him waste away. When his parents had sat him and Rebecca down, forced out all those unthinkable words, “metastasized” and “palliative” and “terminal,” he’d thought: Okay, I know how this goes. He’d seen plenty of movies where the hero’s father dies; he’d pictured the look on Luke Skywalker’s face, returning to find his aunt’s and uncle’s bodies smoldering in the Tatooine ruins, and thought he understood grief. “There are some things you can’t understand unless you’ve been through them yourself.”

“Did you ever wonder why I was here?” Julie asked him. “Training at the Academy, rather than in Alicante or some Institute somewhere?”

“Actually . . . no,” Simon admitted, but maybe he should have. The Academy had been shut down for decades, and he knew in that time, Shadowhunter families had gotten used to training their children themselves. He also knew that most of them, in the wake of the Dark War, were still doing so, not wanting to let their loved ones too far out of their sight.

She looked away from him then, and her fingers knit together, needing something to hold on to. “I’m going to tell you something now, Simon, and you won’t repeat it.”

It wasn’t a question.

“My mother was one of the first Shadowhunters to be Turned,” she said, her voice deadened. “So she’s gone now. After, we evacuated to Alicante, just like everyone else. And when they attacked Alicante . . . they locked all the children up in the Accords Hall. They thought we’d be safe there. But there wasn’t anywhere safe that day. The faeries got in, and the Endarkened—they would have killed us all, Simon, if it weren’t for you and your friends. My sister, Elizabeth. She was one of the last to die. I saw him, this faerie with silver hair, and he was so beautiful, Simon, like liquid mercury, that’s what I was thinking when he brought down his sword. That he was beautiful.” She shook herself all over. “Anyway. My father’s useless now. So that’s why I’m here. To learn to fight. So next time . . .”

Simon didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry felt so inadequate. But Julie seemed to have run out of words.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked gently.

“Because I want someone to understand that it is a big deal, what they’re sending us out to do. Even if it’s just one vampire against all of us. I don’t care what Jon says. Things happen. People—” She nodded sharply, like she was dismissing not just him but everything that had passed between them. “Also, I wanted to thank you for what you did, Simon Lewis. And for your sacrifice.”

“I really don’t remember doing anything,” Simon said. “You shouldn’t thank me. I know what happened that day, but it’s like it all happened to someone else.”