Unlocked. Just like he'd known it would be.
He opened it and the desert rushed in, cool air, dry and sharp with the smell of sage and dust, and above him a sky so dense with stars that it looked like someone had shattered a window and the light was pouring through the cracks. The driveway stretched ahead of him, pale dirt in the starlight, curving south toward a darkness that might have been distance or might have been nothing.
Amani stepped off the porch and onto the desert floor, and his bare feet met the ground, and he ran.
The first hundred yards were almost easy.
The driveway was hard-packed and smooth, compacted by years of vehicles and weather into a surface that was firm enough to run on without too much pain. Amani found his stride quickly, long, loping steps, the runner's gait that his body remembered from the track team he'd been on for one semester at sixteen before Lady Leo decided organized sports were incompatible with his work schedule. The night air was cool and the stars were enormous and for the first time in three days he was moving under his own power, on his own terms, and the feeling was so vast and bright that it made his eyes sting.
The driveway ended after a quarter mile.
He'd expected it to connect to a road, gravel, pavement, anything maintained. What it connected to was desert. The hard-packed dirt gave way to scrub, loose rocks, patches of sand, the tangled low bushes that dotted the Mojave like mistakes. The ground changed under his feet in an instant, from smooth to hostile, and his first step off the driveway found a rock that bit into his arch hard enough to make him gasp.
He kept running.
He ran south, or what he hoped was south, using the stars the way Grainger had taught him to identify them just hours ago. Orion was to his left, which meant south was ahead, and somewhere ahead was the road the van had come in on. It had to be there. The sharks had driven to the ranch and they hadn't driven through open desert. They'd been on pavement; Amani had felt the smoothness of it through the van's floor. There was a road. He just had to find it.
His feet found every wrong thing there was to find.
Small rocks. Sharp rocks. Rocks that rolled under his weight and twisted his ankles. Patches of dried brush that cracked like glass under his soles and left splinters behind. Something that might have been cactus, a bright stab of pain in his heel that made him stumble and almost fall. He caught himself, kept running, felt the warm wet of blood between his toes and ignored it because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant calculating how far he'd come and how far he had left and whether any of this was going to work.
He didn't want to calculate. He wanted to run.
The collar bounced against his collarbones with every stride, the silver slapping raw skin, but he barely felt it over the noise from his feet. Even if he could shift, even if the collar weren't there, he wasn't sure it would matter. A lion's paws were tougher than human feet but the desert didn't care what form you were in. It ate everything equally.
The desert at night was not the silent place he'd experienced from inside the house. It was alive. Things rustled in the brush as he passed, lizards, rodents, snakes, the small hidden creatures that came out when the sun went down. An owl called somewhere to his right, a low questioning sound that made the lion in him turn its head. A coyote, not a shifter, yipped in the distance, and then another answered, and the sound bounced off the open sky and faded into nothing.
He ran. His feet bled. The stars turned slowly overhead like the workings of a clock too large to comprehend. And for twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five, the desert was his and he was free and the only sounds were his own breathing and his own footfalls and the vast, indifferent silence of a landscape that didn't care if he lived or died.
Then the headlights appeared behind him.
He saw the light before he heard the engine. A pale wash against the scrub behind him, bouncing with the terrain, growing brighter and more defined with every second. The truck. The dusty Ford behind the adobe wall. Grainger had the keys, of course he had the keys, and Grainger was awake, and Grainger was coming.
Amani didn't stop. He ran harder. His feet were screaming, a chorus of pain that started at the soles and radiated up through his calves and his shins and into his knees, which were starting to buckle with every impact. The blood made the ground slippery. He slid on a flat rock, caught himself on his hands, tore the skin of his palms, got up, ran.
The headlights grew. The engine sound rose from a murmur to a growl. The truck was faster than him, of course it was, it was a truck and he was a barefoot man running through desert scrub in the middle of the night, and the math that Amani had been refusing to do finally did itself. He couldn't outrun it. The road, if there was a road, was too far away. He'd either been wrongabout the direction or wrong about the distance or both, and it didn't matter which because the headlights were getting closer and there was no cover and the desert floor was flat and open and offered nothing, nothing, nothing to hide behind.
He tried anyway.
A dry wash cut across the desert floor to his left, a shallow depression, maybe three feet deep, carved by water that came maybe once a year in flash floods and left dust the rest of the time. Amani threw himself into it, pressing flat against the sandy bottom, making himself as small as a six-foot lion shifter could make himself in a ditch in the desert.
The truck slowed. The headlights swept over the wash, over him, past him. For one breathless, impossible moment he thought it had worked, that Grainger had driven past, that the wash was deep enough, that the dark was enough.
The truck stopped.
The engine idled. A door opened and closed. Footsteps on the hard ground, slow and unhurried, walking with the same graceful precision that Amani had watched for three days. Not rushing. Not angry. Just walking, the way someone walks toward something they know will be there when they arrive.
The footsteps stopped at the edge of the wash.
Amani lay face down in the dust with his bleeding feet behind him and his torn hands pressed flat against the sand and he didn't look up. He couldn't. Looking up meant seeing Grainger's face, and he couldn't bear to know which version would be looking down at him, the warm one or the cold one. Either would break something.
Grainger didn't say anything for a long time. Long enough that the wind shifted and Amani felt it move across the back of his neck. Long enough that the coyotes called again, farther away. Long enough that the blood from his feet began to cool and thicken against his skin.
Then, softly: "I thought we were past this, little cub."
It was the warm voice. The gentle voice. And it was worse, immeasurably, indescribably worse, than if he had screamed.
Amani closed his eyes. The dust was in his mouth and his hands and his hair and the night pressed down on him like a hand, and he closed his eyes and felt the last of his plan crumble into the same dust he was lying in.
