Page 47 of Iggy

Neela stopped. The sound had come through the rain almost directly in front of her. She backed away beneath the oak, but a dead limb cracked under her knee. The noise was small. In the storm it should have meant nothing. A beam snapped toward her.

Neela rolled downhill before the light reached the tree. She slid through leaves and mud, struck a root, and tumbled into a shallow basin filled with knee-deep water. The impact drove what little air remained from her lungs. She came up choking.

“Neela?” Tank called.

He was close. She splashed across the basin, leaning on the water with both hands as though it could hold her upright. At the far side she tried to climb the bank. The mud sheared away under her fingers. She dug again, gouging four furrows, and dragged herself onto the slope.

Behind her, Tank entered the water.

Neela climbed.

The ridge was not high, but it might as well have been a mountain. She hooked her fingers around roots and pulled while her feet slipped below her. Mud coated her teeth. Her breath came in tiny, useless gasps. Halfway up, her arms gave out and she slid back several feet, skinning both knees.

“Stop,” Tank said. “There’s nowhere left to run.”

She clawed higher.

“Don’t make this worse, Neela.”

Bark pressed rough against her cheek. She pushed away and continued. Lightning flickered repeatedly inside the clouds, not bolts now but a cold pulsing that made the forest seem to breathe. Neela’s shadow jumped from tree to tree. The wind carried fragments of voices from below.

“Tank!”

“Up here!” he shouted back. “She’s on the ridge!”

Neela lurched between the pines. Her sight narrowed to a trembling circle. She could hear her heartbeat but not the thunder. Her hands had curled into claws. She could not make them open.

A root caught her. She fell face-first. Mud filled her nose and mouth. She rolled onto her side, coughed, and tried to rise. One elbow straightened. The other collapsed. She crawled instead, pulling with her forearms, dragging both legs. The ground gave beneath her fingers in wet clumps.

“Just a little further. A little further and you can run,” she told herself.

Ham reached the slope first, followed by Rush and Christian. Jean and Iggy came behind them. Nutt, Plum, and Wood moved along the base of the ridge, their beams cutting across the flooded basin for another way up.

Tank was already on top.

Neela heard him moving through the trees, not rushing now. He knew she had nowhere left to go. She dug her fingers into the mud and pulled herself toward the darkest stand of timber.

The ridge narrowed ahead, pinched between a steep drop and the uprooted mass of a fallen cypress. Neela tried to pass beneath the lifted roots. They formed a wall of black earth taller than she was, threaded with pale, twisting wood. Water streamed from it. She turned toward the drop.

The bank vanished into darkness. Far below, swollen water moved through the trees with the sound of tearing cloth. No way forward.

Neela pivoted, lost her balance, and caught the trunk of a pine. Her muddy hand left a dark print on the bark. She held herself there for one breath, then another. Her lungs refused to fill. Each gasp stopped high in her chest.

Tank’s light appeared through the rain.

She shoved away from the tree and made one last attempt to run. Her injured foot folded. She dropped to both knees and pitched forward. Her palms struck the ground. Mud squeezed between her fingers.

“Neela.”

She crawled. There was no strength in it, only movement. Her nails scored the earth. She pulled a few inches, slipped back half of them, and tried again. Rain washed the grooves smooth almost as quickly as she made them.

Tank slowed when he saw her. She lay near the base of another tree, one shoulder against its roots, clothes plastered to her body, bare feet cut and dark with mud. Her breath tore in and out in shallow gasps. Both hands worked at the ground as if she could dig her way beneath it. Her fingers opened, clawed, filled with mud, and opened again.

“Stay back,” she managed. “You’re a fucking traitor. All this time it was you who made sure things went sideways. You mismanaged the drops. You made sure the vaults were empty when we arrived. You told the fucking Swamp Rats everything!”

The words were barely air. Tank kept the flashlight trained just below her face, watching her hands. Rain streamed over his jaw as he stopped several paces away, balanced and ready in case she reached for a weapon or tried one last deception.

“The hunt is over.” Tank lowered into a guarded crouch, staying beyond the reach of her mud-caked hands.