Page 54 of Run Rabbit Run

The running's got to have taught somebody something.

Because a man who's run this play before has run it the same way every time.

Habits he's stopped noticing. A script he's performed so many times he can't see the edges of it anymore.

He built a trap out of my patterns.

Seven days too late, hollowed out and half-broken and leaning toward his warmth like a plant toward a window, I understand that the only way out of this house is to learn his.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Wren

Nine days in, he comes to me at night for the first time since the woods.

I've been waiting for it.

Braced for it every evening since the stairs, every time his footsteps didn't come, and the not coming was its own slow torture, exactly the way he means everything to be.

A body can't stay braced forever.

Nine nights of flinching at a door that stays shut wears the flinch down to nothing, and by tonight I've stopped listening for him, which is when he comes.

That's the first lesson I learn about how he works.

He never arrives on my fear's schedule. He waits until I've set the fear down, and then he picks it up for me.

The hours before he comes, I spend on Rue.

I do it every night now, a ritual I've built against the silence.

I lie in the dark and walk through her day the way I'd walk a trail, step by step, because imagining her is the closest I can get to her.

She'll be up early, coffee she won't admit is bad, the edit bay glowing blue.

She'll be worried, but not frantic yet, because I built her a story good enough to hold for a couple of weeks, off-grid, coasting, back before Thanksgiving.

I gave her that story with my own mouth so she wouldn't come looking, so she'd stay a hundred miles south and safe, and every night I pray it's still holding; that she's annoyed with me instead of afraid for me, because annoyed keeps her home and afraid gets her killed.

What I don't let myself think about, because it's too much on top of everything else, is the content.

The videos we shot ahead.

Rue's out there right now scheduling me, posting me, keeping a woman alive online who doesn't exist anymore, and somewhere a few hundred thousand strangers are watching me draw a bow and teach them to survive while I sit in a locked room learning I can't.

I can't hold that one.

It's too big and too strange, and it makes the walls feel closer, so I fold it away with the rest, and I go back to walking Rue's ordinary day, over and over, until the door opens without a sound.

I'm on the window seat with a book I haven't been reading, my back against the cold glass, the fire throwing its useless orange light across the rug and the dark pressing black against the panes behind me.

I know he's in the room before I turn because the air changes, goes charged and close, the way it does before the weather changes.

"You've stopped eating the evening trays," he says.

"I eat enough."

"You eat what keeps you alive and nothing past it." He crosses the room slowly and sits on the end of the window seat, near but not touching, and the nearness of him lights up every warning I've got. "You're punishing your own body to spite me. It won't work, Wren. Your body isn't on your side in this. It stopped being on your side the moment I caught you, and the sooner you understand that, the kinder this gets."