"What?" Beverly asks, the word a small little exhale as the breath leaves her lungs. She's frozen like that for a moment, staring at Eddie in stunned confusion, almost as if waiting for some cruel punchline — for Richie to jump out and declare the whole thing a joke, some fucked up forced levity in a nightmare of a world. She knows better than that, though. The look on Eddie's face, or what she can see of it before it's covered by his hands, tells her all she needs to know. They wouldn't joke about something like this, anyway, not with all they've seen and survived. It wouldn't happen.

It just doesn't make sense. They've all been in danger since they got here, and hardly for the first time — she thinks, fleetingly, of swinging the fence post through that fucking clown's face in the dirty kitchen in the house on Neibolt, a memory that comes back to her just long enough to hold onto — but even with as loud as Richie often is, she can't imagine that he's just gone now.

She shakes her head. "No, that's not—" That's not how he dies, she thinks suddenly, but she doesn't know why, and she can't make sense of that, either. It's gone a moment later, anyway. Trying to breathe is getting more difficult, her chest constricting, and she helplessly glances from Eddie to Jamie, her eyes starting to sting with tears. "No. Not Richie." Not any of them. For either of these two, for Stan back in Darrow, the people who've become the family she never had, it would have been the same.