Chapter 10

Book’s confession leaves them all unable to sleep, but none were quite as restless as the Shepherd himself. Near a year he’d been on the ship and had kept everything he was secret all that time. But that evening, he’d been scared. Scared into spilling everything out, everything he never wanted them to know. By a seventeen year old girl. Tell them, she’d said, voice sounding in his mind as though she were speaking in his ear. Tell them everything. Tell them about the hands. The hands of blue. Juliet had picked up on it then, seemingly channelling River’s thoughts, memories. He could hear them too. There was screaming. A lot of screaming. But nothing he recognised, nothing he’d done. He couldn’t make her understand, and she was far more than unnerving him, piling the suffering into him, showing him. Understand, she said. Comprehend. No one could tell, he didn’t show it on the surface, didn’t let them see. Couldn’t let them see. Couldn’t break. But he did. Broke and told them. And it took only the space of a breath. He’d let it all out, let it flow. Tried to tell her. It wasn’t him. But it had been. She’d shown them that. Shown them all. And now they avoided his gaze more than they avoided hers. Because he was as broken as her. More so. She’d fought the emptiness, but he’d let it in. And they all knew.