Page 38 of Run Rabbit Run

Every one of them is a move I would make, a place my own instincts would send me, built out of years of me telling strangers how I think when I'm hunted.

I mapped my own mind onto the internet for a living, and he printed it out, and he's laid it across his mountain like a net with my name woven through every knot.

The bow feels suddenly stupid in my hand.

The quiver of perfect arrows.

The plan I built off a survey map like a fool who thought water was the only truth that mattered.

There was never a single hour of this night where my skill was going to save me.

My skill is the map he's hunting me with.

I look up the black slope ahead, the high ground my body still wants, the ridgeline my instincts have been quietly pulling me toward since the light died, the safe heights where I always go when I'm cornered because a man I loved told me height was safety and I believed him.

And for the first time all night, I don't climb.

I stand at the bottom of the slope with my pulse in my ears and I understand, finally, fully, that every good thing about me is a door he's already standing behind.

My grandfather. My gift. The woods themselves. All of it his now, turned around, aimed at me.

Somewhere up that ridge, patient in the dark, he's waiting for me to run the way I was built to run.

So I make myself a promise, standing there in the ruins of every advantage I thought I had.

I won't give it to him easily.

If he wants to catch what my grandfather made, he's going to have to earn every step of it, and I'll make tonight the longest, ugliest run this bastard has ever had to work for.

I turn away from the high ground.

And I go down, into the low dark, into wilderness that terrifies me precisely because it's the one place I'd never choose, which is the only reason left in the world it might be the place he didn't plan for.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ezra

She goes down when she should climb.

I'm sitting on a fallen cedar a quarter mile off her track, close enough to hear her when the wind's right, far enough that she'll never feel me, and when the change comes in her I feel it before I hear it, the way you feel a fish decide to run before the line moves.

She's stopped trusting the high ground.

Good. That's new.

That's her, thinking, fighting, refusing the pull her body's been leaning into since sundown, and the sight of her doing it, out there in my dark, choosing the low forest that scares her over the ridge that would kill her, pulls at something in me.

Most of them never get this far.

Most of them run straight up the first slope that offers itself and into the arms of whatever I've left waiting, sobbing, spent, done inside the first two hours.

I've stood over a dozen of them where they fell and felt nothing worth naming, a chore finished, a debt squared.

She's four hours in, and she just outthought her own grandfather.

I could love her for it, if love were something I still had the ability to do.

What I have instead is the deep unhurried pleasure of watching a worthy thing test every wall of the room I built for it, and find them all solid, and keep testing anyway.