It’s the weirdest room I’ve ever been in.

“What you know about us, or rather what you think you know about us,” Elijah says patiently, standing at the head of the classroom, “is a lie.”

Andy stands next to him, his body tense, his eyes hard on mine. I keep my face carefully blank as I stare back.

“Do you or do you not eat human flesh?” I demand coldly.

Elijah pauses. Andy’s jaw clenches tightly.

“Yes,” Elijah admits.

“Then you’re animals and there’s nothing else I need to know.”

“There’s more to it than you realize.”

I break my stare with Andy to shoot Elijah a bitter look. “I don’t care what else there is to it. You’re no better than the zombies outside. You’re insane. You’re inhuman.” I take a breath, knowing I shouldn’t say what I want to say, but self-control is not my thing lately. I’ve been through too much, I’m flying wild and loose with all this change, and I feel my heart in my throat as I spit out my next words. “You’re disgusting.”

I feel Ryan tense next to me. He knows a fight is coming. I know it too. I’m insulting monsters inside their home and it’s a great way to get yourself killed; but we’re probably going to die anyway, so at least I’ll die honest.

“Shut up, Joss.”

My head swings to Trent. “What did y—”

“I said shut up,” he repeats. He looks at me with complete calm. Complete irritating as hell calm. “I want to hear what they have to say.”

“Why?”

“Because I like to understand things.”

“What’s to understand? They eat people.”

“But why do they eat people?”

“I don’t care why!”

“I do, so shut up.”

“Quit telling me to shut up,” I growl.

“I will when you quit talking.”

I sit back in my chair hard, staring straight ahead and shaking my head angrily.

“What about you do we misunderstand?” Trent asks Elijah.

Elijah nods to Andy, his entire demeanor changing as he looks at Trent. He’s much more relaxed. He almost looks pleased.

Personally, I’m pissed.

“We do ingest human flesh,” Andy begins, his angry eyes still locked on mine, “but not for the reasons you think. We do it out of respect, and most importantly, we do it out of love.”

I fight to stifle a snort of disbelief.

“When the disease first took hold, the world was chaos. People were killing each other to stay alive. They abandoned each other, they turned deaf ears to pleas for help. It was humanity at its worst, but eventually things calmed down. People started to realize they needed each other to survive. Some realized they needed to work together, some realized they could enslave others.”

“The Colonies and The Hive,” Ryan says grimly.

“Yes. We realized the same thing the Vashons did: people like us—people willing to live together and help each other—needed to hide to stay free. But we didn’t have the numbers the Vashons did. They were better fighters. They had better resources.”

“Why didn’t you join with them?” Trent asks.

Andy’s mouth pinches tightly. “We weren’t invited.”

“Can’t imagine why not,” I mutter.

He ignores me entirely. “We were everyday people then, just looking to survive. But that was the problem. We were too average. We had nothing to contribute to their island, so they didn’t want us. They slammed the door in our faces.”

Andy’s voice has grown more and more bitter until he’s spitting the words out like venom. Any anger he has toward me doesn’t hold a candle to the hostility he feels toward the Vashons.

“We were locked out,” Elijah agrees calmly. “Forced to live here on the outside in the wild with the growing gangs and the Colonies running out of control.”

“Why didn’t you join with the Colonies?” I ask. “If you were scared of everything else around you, why not willingly be locked inside their gates? At least you’d be safe.”

“Why don’t you join with them?” he counters. “Why did you escape?”

“Because I refuse to live as a prisoner.”

“You were a slave. They all are. And we’re exactly like you—we refuse to live that way.”

“When and why did you begin to eat people?” Trent asks.

His tone amazes me. There’s no judgment. None at all. From the sound of it, he could be asking them when they first learned how to ride a bike instead of when they decided to go full Hannibal on their family and friends.

“A couple of years after we were locked out of the Vashons’ palace,” Andy tells him. “We were threatened by other gangs and the Colonies with their roundups. We were made up of mostly families. We weren’t great fighters. We were parents—parents who would do anything it took to save their children. That’s why we moved underground. We hid from the Risen and the gangs, but they found us. We knew we had to do something to keep them away. We tried laying traps but they never worked. We were hiding in the sewers like rats and they still attacked us, still stole from us and killed our people. We were dwindling and dying out and all we could think was who would take care of the kids if we were gone? They’d be next to die. They’d starve or they’d be taken in by the Colonies and raised as slaves. Or worse—they’d be taken in by The Hive and the girls would…” He takes a deep breath, his eyes fixed far off on the empty wall behind us. When he speaks next his voice is soft. “We couldn’t stand it. We definitely couldn’t let it happen. That’s when we came up with a plan. We tapped into a defense we hadn’t considered before.”

“Fear,” Ryan says quietly.

Andy nods. “And what is everyone afraid of?”

“The zombies.”

“The Risen are monumentally stupid, something that makes it relatively easy to escape them if you know what you’re doing. They can’t strategize, they don’t have any thought—not beyond eating human flesh. But what if they did? What if they worked together? What if they could plan and plot? What if they were organized killers?”

“They’d be horrifying. No one would be safe from them ever.”

“So that’s what we became. It didn’t take much. We were seen killing an intruder via ingestion one time and the rumors flew. The warnings went out and the attacks slowed. A few more times to drive the point home and the attacks all but stopped. We were monsters but we were safe.”

Via ingestion. What a lovely, clinical way to say they gnawed on a person’s living, kicking, screaming body until they died one of the most horrible deaths the world has ever known.

I feel bile burning the back of my throat.

“I understand how it’s an act of love,” Ryan says, “because you did it for your children, but how is it respect?”

Elijah sighs. Whatever he’s going to say, he knows we aren’t going to like it. “We eat our dead,” he tells us gently.

I sit forward and put my face in my hands, breathing deeply. I can’t. I can’t deal with this place and these people. They are so far beyond insane that they can’t even see crazy anymore. It’s a pale light beyond the horizon. A star still burning in the sky eons after its last ember has died out.

“Why?” Ryan asks, his voice tight.

“To ingest them is to take them with us. To carry them on in our lives as part of us. They maintain us. They keep us alive and we keep them close to us forever. It’s done very ceremoniously. It’s not much different than taking communion. Jesus himself said that his body was the bread and his blood the wine. He encouraged people to ingest him into their bodies as a religious rite.”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” I say, my face still in my hands, my voice muffled against my palms.

“It’s exactly the same.”

“I see Joss’ point,” Ryan agrees, carefully remaining neutral. “With communion a person ate a Ritz cracker and drank some grape juice. It was symbolic. What you’re talking about is… it’s pretty different.”

“It’s sick,” I groan. I lift my face, dragging my hands down it roughly. “You’re telling me that if a kid’s parent dies, you make them eat them?”