"Hey." Her voice breaks on the word and a few more tears well up hotly, skipping down her cheeks when she blinks. "Don't do that."

Yeah she's saying it for Clarisse — it's heart-wrenching, that she would assume this is somehow her fault — but she's saying it for herself too, because she doesn't know how to begin talking Clarisse down from the ledge of this idea. It's not like Abby can offer hard proof or reassurance of any kind, not when nobody even knows why rifters disappear when they do or like they do, with no warning, like they'd never been there in the first place.

She takes Clarisse's shoulders, smoothing her thumbs up and down her arms. Is reassurance even going to work when she's got tears in her eyes? Her throat hurts so bad, there's a spike in it. "It's not you. Okay? It would never be you."

Clarisse has her hands over her mouth. Her breath comes through her fingers in quick, ragged gasps. Abby changes track: she takes her wrists, eases her hands from her mouth and holds them tight. They're clammy from Clarisse's rough, wet breathing, filmy with tears, but she links their fingers together, she squeezes her hard. She raises her voice. "Clarisse, listen to me. If there was a way to keep people here for good, we would have figured it out by now. This isn't on you — or her."

But she gets why it hurts, why it feels like somebody should take the blame. The only thing they can point fingers at is a fucking rip in the sky.