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I shook my head, speechless at the two of them.

“Dusk is better for running,” Linden said. “Fewer people around.”

I blinked. “What?”

“You hold everything in your head. It has nowhere to go. Run before you try again.”

It was so unexpected, so precisely aimed at something he had no right to see, that for a second I couldn’t answer. “I used to run,” I blurted, even though I hadn’t meant to.

Kit’s face softened. Linden’s didn’t, but his attention changed, and there was no pity in it, only recognition.

“Then start again,” Linden said before he pushed off the wall and left.

There was no goodbye or explanation, and Kit watched him go with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t like wanting to.

“Do you two do that often?” I asked.

“What?”

“Have entire conversations where no one explains anything.”

“Constantly,” he said, pausing for a moment before in a quieter voice he added, “He’s right. Annoying, but right. You should run and get out of your head.”

That night, I dug my running shoes out from the bottom of my drawer. They still smelled faintly like home, asphalt and laundry soap and the cheap rubber of soles I had worn thin on Calder streets before dawn, when the whole town was quiet and nobody needed me yet. I sat on the floor with the shoes in my lap for a long time. Then I set them beside the door. Laces loose. Toes pointing out.

THIRTEEN

Billie

The first few strides were easy, my legs remembered what it was like to run before the rest of my body caught up, but when it did I realized how out of shape I’d let myself become. I wasn’t about to let that stop me though. It didn’t matter that my brain kept coming up with reasons for me to turn around and go back inside.

I was going to run, dammit.

My breath sawed in and out of my chest as I moved and finally, after a long few minutes I found a pace that worked for me. The world slowly narrowed to the impact of my shoes on the ground and the cold air sliding in and out of me.

I’d gone out at dusk, thanks to Linden’s recommendation. I also knew that if I waited until morning I’d manage to talk myself out of it. So I was out running as the grounds turned blue in the twilight.

Shadows pooled under the bushes and trees and arches, while fog steamed upward from the washhouses. The scent of soap reached me faintly and reminded me slightly of home, but also of what had happened with Kit that afternoon.

I pushed the thoughts away and focused on my steps. Now was not the time to get up in my own head. Instead I looked at what was in front of me and I found that the path I’d been following ended. For a little ways after it was mown grass, but after that it was tree roots and lifted earth that made up the edge of the wood.

With no other option I ran along the edge of the forest. I kept the trees on my left and the hill that all the buildings sat on top of on my right. For as big and impressive as Æscholt was, there really weren’t many paths for someone to run on. Everything was designed with class and practice in mind. It was like they didn’t expect anyone to have free time.

The air changed near the trees and got colder and wetter, the scent of leaf rot and moss and bark filled my nose. Then there was that particular dark pressure that I had felt ever since I looked at the woods through my bedroom window that first night. It was stronger now, but I ignored it and my head, for the first time since I’d walked through those gates, went quiet. Not empty, it never got empty, but the constant work of translating Æscholt, of tracking who I’d offended and which rule had teeth and where the exits were, fell away and all that existed was my footfalls and breaths.

While I was out here running, no one was asking what I was, nobody was writing me down in a black book, nobody cared whether my hem had insulted hundreds of years of tailoring. I was a body moving through cold air. I had almost forgotten a body could be good for anything besides carrying everyone else’s worry across a kitchen and setting it down gently so it wouldn’t wake.

Back home I’d run to get away from the house when it got too loud, or too quiet, which were the same problem wearing different clothes. I’d run past the closed laundromat and the dentist who took only cash, past the dead streetlight at the bend of Calder Street, and the only thing I worried about was counting my breaths or steps, whichever I chose to keep track of at the time. I ran the same way now, counting my breaths in fours, the numbers steady under everything like a floor I could trust when nothing else at that school would hold my weight. It was the closest thing to peace I’d found since the gate, which should have worried me.

Then the woods moved.

I almost tripped over my own feet because just ahead, where the trees thickened at a bend in the edge of the woods, a shape stood half in shadow. Wolf, my mind supplied, and then immediately, no.

It was too big.

Admittedly, I’d only ever seen wolves in zoos so maybe they were different in the wild, but somehow I knew that this wasn’t that. Its size was just…wrong.

Its coat was dark, near black in the dusk. It had long legs and held its head low. Its eyes were fixed on me with a steady, patient attention that was unlike any animal, wild or otherwise, I’d ever encountered before.