Beneath the sterile white lights I could see every mutation.

We stood by the convenience store's register desk, and while Bones and my greasy stoner cousin made smalltalk with her, I could do nothing but gape. It had been three years since I'd seen her. She'd been one of my muses once, although I would never have been able to tell her that then. Smart and bold and crazy. A stalwart individualist, and maybe better read than I. She was going to be someone. Hell, she was already someone. She was going to become someone more. Growing up in this shithole, I'd met too many walking corpses; living breathing human fertilizer just waiting for the right combination of circumstance to end their fruitless lives and shuffle them the fuck off this mortal coil. Almost everyone I've ever met, in fact. She was one of the exceptions. She was going to make it out here one day, I knew it. I could feel it.

Cocaine had carved out deep lines next to her mouth and her eyes, the gouges wrinkling into crow's feet when she forces a smile. That had changed, too; that goofy, childish naivety was gone, the free-flowing bell's tinkle of laughter replaced by harsh,c racking coughs. I couldn't draw my eyes away from her teeth. They had been perfectly straight and white, eye-catching and immaculate... now yellow, now spaced and pushed too far forward, changing her speech patterns, changing her body language... she had noticed, too. She'd become insecure about it. I could see it in the way she tried to force her lips over them. Good God, I thought, trying not to stare and making it that much worse, what the fuck happened to her?

"We have to go back to the junkyard and wreck some more cars someday soon, Niky," she said, recalling an occasion four years past, maybe more.

"... Yeah," I managed, staring into Rosalyn Fallow's broken eyes. "Yeah, definitely."

I felt like I was going to cry. She said goodbye and wandered out into the cold, clutching her cigarettes to her bony chest. It was like seeing a ghost.

You can't save them all, Nikolayevich.
I know that, but Jesus Christ, can't I save any?
Three years is a lifetime.