10

"They found me," I whispered.

Evie was at the window in three strides, one hand on the blind. She peered through the slats at the street below, where the man stood utterly still, his head cocked, his breath coming out in small white clouds.

"Big guy? Neck like a tree?"

"Marcus's enforcer."

"Not on my watch." She let the blind snap back into place and crossed to the supply closet, where she began yanking cardboard boxes down onto the floor with the efficiency of someone who had done this before. "There's a fire stairwell behind the laundromat. It lets out in the alley. I've been using it to dodge my landlord since I was twenty-three."

"Evie, you don't have to do this. It isn't your fight."

"You're sleeping on my couch." She turned and jabbed a finger at me. "That makes it my fight. Listen to me, because I'm only going to say this once, and I'm going to say it fast. I have a cousin in a human town three hundred miles from here. Quiet place. No wolves, no weirdos, nothing but cows and a very dull church. I'll make one call, and someone will meet you at the bus station. In the meantime you are going to change your clothes, tie up your hair, and walk out of here like you own the place."

I did as she said. I put on one of her old pairs of scrubs, a faded green set with a stain on the cuff, and tucked my hair under a baseball cap. My hands shook the whole time. When I caught sight of myself in the small mirror by the door, a stranger looked back, wide-eyed and pale, with the ghost of a girl behind her face.

"Wren," I whispered. "Are you there?"

She had been silent for hours, curled up small and heavy at the back of my chest. Now she stirred.

"I'm here." Her voice was thin, but steady. "I'm scared, Sage. But I'm here."

"We have to go."

"I know." A pause. Then, softer: "Sage... the baby. I can feel the baby's heartbeat from in here, and there's something strange about it. It sounds the way thunder sounds when it's very far away."

I pressed my hand to my stomach. There was nothing to see yet, only a faint warmth beneath my palm, like a coal hidden in ash. But for the first time since the night I had crossed the river, something inside me felt like it was growing in the right direction.

"Whatever it is," I said, "it's mine. And nobody is going to take it from me."

Evie shoved a worn backpack into my arms. It was stuffed with water, crackers and eight crumpled bills, and a very small, very ugly stuffed lion with one button eye. "For the baby," she said, when I looked at it. "I won it at a fair when I was twelve. It's the bravest thing I own."

I could not speak. I pulled her into a hug so hard it bent her glasses, and she held on, swearing softly into my shoulder, and I thought that I had never in my life been hugged by someone who smelled of coffee and antiseptic and so little fear.

"Name it after something brave," she said into my hair.

"I'll think about it."

"Call me when you get there."

"I will."

The fire stairs were steel and freezing and smelled of wet cardboard. I climbed down them in the dark with my cap pulled low and the backpack bumping against my spine, and at the bottom a rusted door opened onto an alley full of puddles and moonlight. A cat watched me from the lid of a dumpster. I did not breathe until I had walked two full blocks.

The bus station was a low concrete building with a flickering sign and a single bench. I bought a ticket with two of Evie's bills and sat in the farthest corner under a poster about the dangers of unattended luggage, watching the doors. Every pair of boots that came through made my skin crawl. Every man with a jacket and a stiff shoulder seemed to be looking at me. I held the stuffed lion in my lap and stroked its crooked mane, and I told myself that I was a rabbit, that rabbits survive by being so still that no one sees them.

The bus pulled out of the station forty minutes later with me in a window seat, my forehead pressed to the cold glass and the town sliding away behind me in a string of orange lights.

For the first hour I watched the road, expecting headlights to pull up alongside us. Then the city thinned into fields, and the fields into a long dark nothing, and I started to understand how big the world was. It had never occurred to me, in Silverwood, that a girl could simply keep going. There were no borders out here. No pack lines painted on the grass. Only a ribbon of highway, and a sleeping woman snoring two rows ahead, and the faint warmth of a stranger's heartbeat inside me.

I fell asleep with the lion in my arms, somewhere past midnight, and dreamed of absolutely nothing at all. It was the best sleep I had had in months.

I did not know that two hundred miles behind me, in a glass tower above the city, Kaelen Thorne had just shattered his office window with his bare hand.

He had spent eleven weeks tearing the city apart. He had turned over every shelter and motel and clinic in the human quarter, and he had come within a single street of finding me. He did not intend to stop.

It would take him four years to learn where I had gone.