Page 35 of Run Rabbit Run

So I eat.

Every bite, though it's ash in my mouth, because Gramps taught me you fuel the body when the body will let you. You don't wait for hunger to make the choice for you later.

Then they take me down.

The driver walks a pace behind. The woman doesn't follow.

The halls go by cold and portrait-hung, and I keep my eyes forward and my breath even.

I count doors and turns out of habit, mapping a house I'll never walk again, and then we're at a side door, and it opens onto the blue last light of the day and the tree line standing black beyond a wide sloping lawn.

Ezra waits at the edge of the grass where the mowed ground gives way to the wild.

He's changed. Dark and close-fitted, made for moving, and there's a stillness on him now that's different from the drawing-room stillness of this morning, something switched on underneath it, and my body knows what it's looking at before my mind names it.

A predator. Dressed for work.

My bow's already in his hands.

He holds it out to me, my own bow, the one I've drawn ten thousand times, and the sight of it in his grip is its own small violation, that he's touched it, that he had it brought down and checked and handed to me like a favor.

I take it without a word. Sling the quiver he offers across my back. Do a fast count of the arrows and find them all there, broadheads and all, exactly what I'd have chosen, and that's wrong too, all of it, a man arming his own prey and enjoying it.

"The rules one last time," Ezra says. "Sundown to first light. The land is yours to use, all of it. I'll give you a head start worth having, because I'm not interested in a short night."

His eyes move over me the way you'd check a horse before you buy it. "Reach dawn uncaught and it's finished. Your brother's clean, the debt's ash, you never see me again."

"And when I do reach it," I say, because I won't give him the if, "how do I even know you'll honor it? Who's going to hold you to a deal made in the woods with no witness?"

Something almost like approval crosses his face.

"No one," he says simply. "You have only my word. But I've never once broken it, and I'm not going to start on the one night that's mattered to me in years." He tips his head toward the dark. "Though I'd point out you're worried about the terms of a victory you haven't won. Optimism. I like it on you."

The sun's a red line through the trees now, going.

"When the light's gone off that ridge," he says, nodding west, "I come. Not before. Run, rabbit, run."

And there it is again, that phrase, the one that snagged in the diner, run rabbit, like he's said it before, to others, on this same grass with the same red light dying.

I don't answer him. I don't run yet either.

I make myself take a few seconds I don't feel I have, because Gramps' voice is louder than my hammering pulse.

Don't bolt. The bolt is the panic and the panic is the drowning. Pick your line and move like you meant to.

I pick my line.

Then the last red goes off the ridge, and the world drops into blue-black, and I turn and run into his woods.

The first minutes belong to instinct, not thought.

Downslope and left, into the thickest timber, because thick is cover and cover is life, and I let the ground pour past under my feet, and my body do what six years and a dead man built it to do.

The dark isn't full yet.

My eyes are already adjusting, pupils blown wide, and the forest resolves into grays and blacks and the paler ribbons of game trail.

I read it as I run, fast, the way you read water in rapids where stopping to think is how you die.