Page 23 of Run Rabbit Run

It isn't her, and the only person in this whole gray morning who knows for certain how it ends is already home on his mountain, patient as winter, watching the account where I'll go on smiling down the lens for ten more days like a woman who still believes the door behind her is open.

I get in her truck.

And under everything, cold and certain, sits the first bar of the cage, the one nobody built for me.

The one I picked up in a diner booth and set in place with my own hand, because a man watched me my whole life and learned that the surest way to trap me was to make me do it for him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wren

Day one, I run until my lungs quit lying to me.

The trailhead behind my rented cabin climbs hard for the first mile, straight up a spine of granite and root that most people turn back on inside ten minutes, and that's why I picked it.

Gramps used to say the mountain doesn't care how you feel about it.

He said it the summer I turned twelve and sat down halfway up a grade and cried and swore I couldn't go another step.

He didn't yell, and he didn't carry me.

He sat down on a rock beside me and waited, and when I finally got up, he spoke really softly and told me that the mountain would take everything I had and give nothing back, and that the trick wasn't feeling strong.

The trick was moving anyway.

I move anyway.

My breath saws raw at the top of my throat, and my quads have gone to liquid fire.

The cold morning air scrapes going down. I keep my eyes on the dirt three feet ahead and climb, because in nine days a man is going to put me in the dark and hunt me.

The only thing I've got left is what my body remembers how to do when my mind wants to fold.

At the top the whole valley opens up gray-green below me, mist sitting in the low folds of it like water that forgot to drain.

I brace my hands on my knees, breathe, and I let myself have thirty seconds of the view before I turn around and run back down.

Because down is where people get hurt, and getting hurt is a luxury I've priced out of the days I've got left.

By the third day I've built a routine that would frighten a normal person.

Up at four. Run the spine in the dark with a headlamp, then without one, forcing my feet to read the ground by feeling the way they'll have to read his.

Archery at first light, cold hands, wet string, the way it'll be.

Afternoons on the water and in the brush, moving slowly and silently, teaching my body again how to pass through wilderness the woods don't notice.

I drill what Gramps drilled into me, and I catch myself doing it the way I've always done it. Somewhere on the fourth morning, that starts to scare me worse than the hunt does.

Because I have a way of moving that's mine.

Everybody who lives in the woods long enough develops one, a signature, a set of defaults their body reaches for.

Mine is height. When I'm nervous I climb, and when I'm cornered I go higher still, get my back to stone and put a slope between me and whatever's coming, because height is sight line and sightline is safety.

Gramps taught me that before I could read.

Losing a follower is the same instinct: run backward: break uphill, cut along the ridge, let the grade do the work of shaking them, because most people can't run a slope and most people quit before the top.