More Than This by Patrick Ness

Each room is the same. The kitchen looks like something from a hundred years ago, and even the staircase has things piled on each step.
    But the rooms upstairs, including the attic, only have mess in them. No coffins.
    The house next door to that one was clearly owned by an Indian family, with brightly colored cloths draped over the furniture and photographs of a bride and groom wearing traditional Hindu outfits.
    But nothing else, no matter how many rooms he checks.
    He begins to feel a harsh desperation as he heaves the same gnome through the house next door to that one. And the house next door to
that.
    Each one dusty. Each one empty.
    He is growing more and more tired now, the exhaustion getting harder to fight. In what could be the tenth or twelfth house – he’s lost count – he can’t even throw the gnome hard enough to break the window anymore. It bounces to the ground, its eyes leering up at him.
    Seth leans heavily against a white wooden fence. He is filthy again, covered in the dust of a dozen houses. A dozen
empty
houses. Not a single one even making space for a bafflingly shiny coffin in any of their rooms.
    He wants to cry, mostly out of frustration, but he checks himself.
    What has he found out, after all? What new thing has he learned?
    Nothing that he didn’t think before.
    He’s alone.
    However he ended up here, wherever that coffin came from and however he ended up inside it, there aren’t any for his father or his mother or his brother. There aren’t any in the houses up and down the street. There are no signs of anyone in the sky or on the train tracks or on any of the roads.
    He really is alone in whatever hell this is.
    Completely and utterly alone.
    It isn’t,
he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house,
the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.

“Shit, Sethy,” Gudmund said, his voice as serious as Seth had ever heard it. “And they blame you?”
    “They say they don’t.”
    Gudmund rolled up on one elbow in the bed. “But that’s not what they think.”
    Seth shrugged in an offhand way that more or less answered the question.
    Gudmund lightly placed the palm of his hand on Seth’s bare stomach. “That blows,” he said. He ran his hand up Seth’s chest, then back again to his stomach and carrying on farther down, but gently, tenderly, not asking for anything more again just yet, merely letting Seth know how sorry he was through the touch of his hand.
    “Seriously, though,” Gudmund said, “what kind of country builds a prison next to people’s houses?”
    “It wasn’t really next to our house,” Seth said. “There was like a mile of fencing and guards before you got to the actual prison.” He shrugged again. “It’s gotta go somewhere.”
    “Yeah, like an island or the middle of a rock quarry. Not where people live.”
    “England’s a crowded place. They have to have prisons.”
    “Still,” Gudmund said, his hand back up to Seth’s stomach, his index finger making a slow ring on the skin there. “It’s pretty crazy.”
    Seth slapped the hand away. “That tickles.”
    Gudmund smiled and put his hand back in exactly the same spot. Seth let it stay there. Gudmund’s parents had gone away again for the weekend, and a stinging October rain swarmed outside, spattering the windows and raking the roof. It was late, two or three in the morning. They’d been in bed for hours, talking, then very much not talking, then talking some more.
    People knew that Seth was staying over at Gudmund’s –Seth’s parents, H and Monica – but no one knew about
this.
As far as Seth knew, no one even suspected. And that made it feel like the most private thing that could ever happen, like a whole secret universe all on its own.
    A universe that Seth, as he did every time, wished he never had to leave.
    “The question, of course,” Gudmund said, idly pulling at the hair that tracked down from Seth’s belly button, “is whether you blame you.”
    “No,” Seth said, staring up