Page 26 of Run Rabbit Run

And that gets in where all the fear couldn't.

My throat closes so fast it aches, and heat floods up behind my eyes before I can lock it down, and I have to look hard at the blue creek-line on the map and blink until the sting goes, because she's right.

She's completely right.

He's been gone for four years and can't help me, and everything I am that might survive what's coming was put into a scared kid on a riverbank by a dead man.

I would give anything, anything at all, to have him here for one hour to look at these maps and tell me what I'm not seeing.

"He'd hate this," I say, and my voice comes out rough. "He'd hate that I'm using it for this."

"He'd hate the man who made you." Rue reaches across the maps and grips my wrist, right over the pulse, hard. "Not you. Never you. You hear me?"

I hear her.

I don't believe her, not all the way, but I hear her, and I let her feed me on the floor of a rented cabin surrounded by a dead man's lessons and a living man's traps.

For one hour I let myself have my sister and the warm lamplight and the ordinary miracle of somebody who came just to make sure I ate.

For one hour, I don't think about the woods.

Then she goes home, and I clear the food away, and I get back down on the floor with the maps and the dark.

I trace his water toward his low ground until my eyes won't focus anymore.

Five days left.

I sleep on the floor beside the maps that night, and I dream about a man I've never spoken more than a hundred words to, standing at the edge of a treeline with pale eyes, waiting with a patience that has already outlasted everything I've ever thrown at anything.

In the dream, I run.

In the dream, he lets me.

That's how I know, even asleep, that something in me already understands what my waking mind won't say out loud yet.

He isn't afraid I'll win.

He's never once been afraid I'll win.

And a small, traitorious part of me, buried under the fear and the fury and the days I've spent building my own disappearance with my own two hands, has started to wonder what it is he saw in a year of watching that made him so certain.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ezra

Two days out, I walk the ground she'll die free on or won't.

The rain's finally quit, and the forest steams in the thin morning light, mist lifting off the moss in ropes.

I move through it the way I've moved through it my whole life, without hurry, without sound, a man on land that has never once belonged to anyone but him.

I know this forest better than I've ever known a person.

That's not a confession most men would make out loud, but I've stopped measuring myself against most men.

The Sitka spruce that were saplings when my grandfather ran his first hunt are two hundred feet now and blacking out the sky.

The creeks run where they've run since before there was a country to draw a line around them.