Page 36 of Run Rabbit Run

Water. I need water first.

Not to drink, not yet. To move in.

A creek breaks up scent and sound and boot print all at once, and I know from the map there's one that runs off the northwest, downhill, and downhill is where I want to be anyway, low ground, out of the wind, out of the sightlines, everything Gramps ever taught me pulling me down and away from the high country.

I find it inside ten minutes, getting there sends a small hot flare up through me, dangerous and bright.

Hope.

The creek's just where the map promised, silver-black and loud over stone, and I step into it and let the cold bite up through my boots.

I move upstream against the current, because upstream is the harder read for anyone tracking.

I go quiet and cautiously, and for the first time since the gate clanged shut, I feel like myself.

Like the woman in the videos. Like someone with a chance.

I don't see him.

That's the part that should comfort me and doesn't.

An hour in, moving well, covering ground, and there's no sign of him at all, no sound that isn't the creek, the wind, or my own controlled breath.

He said he'd come when the light died. The light's long dead.

So where is he?

I stop once, dead still, pressed to the wet black trunk of a spruce with my heart working and my ears stretched wide open.

I listen the way Gramps taught me to listen, past my own noise, past the near sounds, out to the edges of what the forest is doing.

And the forest is doing nothing.

No owl.

No shift of a deer bedding down.

No small scrabble of the night things that should be everywhere in the wilderness this thick.

The animals have gone still and silent the way they do when there's a bigger predator moving, and it isn't me they've hushed for, because I've been moving through them for an hour and they didn't care.

Something else is out here. Somewhere close enough that the woods is holding its breath around it.

I hold mine too. I wait. I count my own heartbeat down from the red panic-line toward something I can work with.

I strain into the dark for the one wrong sound, the snapped stick, the drag of cloth on bark, the give of a boot in wet duff.

Nothing.

That's worse. A man makes noise. Even a good one, even a cautious one, a man his size moving fast through timber this thick makes some small sound, and there's none.

I remember the way he crossed his own stone floors this morning without a whisper, and my skin goes tight all over.

He isn't moving fast. That's why there's no sound.

He isn't chasing me at all.

My stomach bottoms out, the same lurch as a foot coming down on ground that isn't there.