Page 5 of Run Rabbit Run

"Maybe it's a bot."

"Bots like and comment. That's the whole point of a bot." She hitches a shoulder, trying for casual, not landing it. "This one never likes anything. Never comments. Never so much as taps the screen. It just runs you. Start to finish. On a loop."

A heron lifts off the shallows behind her.

It beats upstream low over the water, slow and enormous and prehistoric, and my eyes follow it the whole way without any say from me.

Old wiring.

Gramps trained the looking into me before I was tall enough to hold a bow at full draw. The part of a person that clocks what moves and what holds still, what belongs in a place and what's sitting in it wrong.

I wait for that wiring to trip now.

It doesn't.

Nothing in me lifts its head or bares its teeth, and I take the silence as proof there's nothing out there to find.

A watcher who never speaks is a fan.

Somebody lonely, running my old footage to fall asleep by, the blue glow of me talking about tarp shelters and water filtration lulling them under in a dark room somewhere.

I've had far stranger.

A man once carved a marriage proposal into a two-pound block of sharp cheddar and mailed it to my P.O. box, and it arrived sweating and furious and half-melted, and I framed the photo.

Compared to cheese guy, a quiet re-watcher barely rates.

"You're being a lunatic," I tell her, because she asked me to.

The breath goes out of her in a laugh. "God. Thank you. That's exactly what I needed to hear."

She hauls open the driver's door and cranks the heat before I've even got my side shut, and the first blast of it hits my frozen face like the best thing that's happened all week.

"You're still buying breakfast, though," she adds, dropping the truck into gear. "Being paranoid on your behalf is exhausting work."

We rattle down off the mountain with the sun climbing up behind us and the heater roaring and the gear shifting around in the bed every time Rue takes a turn too fast, which is every turn.

She drives this road like she's got a grudge against it.

Always has, since we were sixteen and she saved up for a truck older than both of us and learned every backroad on this whole mountain in a week of white-knuckle afternoons with me riding shotgun, screaming at her to slow down.

I answer a few emails on the bouncing road, thumbs slow with cold.

Turn down the bank-robbery contract.

Send the slow-paying brand a note polite enough to pass in court and cold enough that they'll feel it.

Rue talks the whole way down—the edit schedule, a creator she wants me to collab with, whether the diner's still doing the biscuits or whether the new owner ruined those too. I make the right noises in the right places and watch the trees go by.

Douglas firs give way to alder, alder to the first mailboxes, the wilderness loosening its grip on the land a little more with every mile until it lets go entirely and hands us back to town.

I don't think about the account again.

Why would I?

It's a number that broke a graph.

It's nothing.