Chapter 12 The Choice

• Sujin doesn't sleep that night, and neither do I.
• We sit in her apartment with the lights off, like darkness might make us harder to find, and she tells me things she's clearly never said out loud to anyone. About the order Han belongs to, hunters and scholars who've spent centuries cataloguing things like her, not always to kill, but always to control. About the ones before me, the students, the strangers, the rare handful over a thousand years she let herself get close to before instinct or fear or someone like Han forced her to leave.
• "They don't survive it," she says quietly, at some point past midnight. "Not always because I hurt them. Because staying near me eventually gets them hurt by someone else."