All Chapters of My Stepfather's Son Is My Fated Enemy : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

She didn't sleep.This was not, strictly speaking, unusual. She'd had a complicated relationship with sleep for three years, not insomnia exactly, more like a persistent negotiation, her body willing and her mind declining, lying in the dark with the ceiling above her and the particular quality of nighttime quiet that had never fully stopped feeling temporary. Like she should be ready to move. Like stillness was provisional.She lay in the dark until one-fifteen by the clock on her phone, and then she stopped pretending and got up.Luna lifted her head from the foot of the bed when Lily moved, tracking her with the alert, questioning attention of an animal for whom nighttime departures had historical significance."I'm just getting water," Lily said. "Go back to sleep."Luna put her head down but kept her eyes open, the specific compromise of a dog who didn't entirely believe you but was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Lily pulled on the sweatshirt from her desk chair a

She looked at it. "How old?""This one — forty, fifty years. My grandfather's grandfather's generation made the system." He stopped walking. She stopped beside him. He was looking at the marker not the way you looked at something you needed to read but the way you looked at something you knew. "They used to walk the whole line every spring. All the adults, the full circuit. Miles.""Do they still?""Not the whole thing. Parts of it." He glanced at her. "I run it."She looked at the mark in the bark and thought about running a border in the early morning, the trees still dark, alone. She thought about the things you did when the responsibility wasn't abstract yet, when it was still something you were building toward."How long is the full circuit?""Eighteen miles.""And you run it.""Parts of it." A pause. "Most of it."She looked at him. He was looking at the marker again, and in the particular sideways quality of the forest light his face had the unguarded expression she'd been cata

She was doing homework when it happened.Ten forty-seven on a Monday night, at the desk in her room with the lamp on and the window dark and Luna a warm, solid weight against her feet under the chair. Calculus. The particular quiet of a house where everyone had wound down for the night — the small sounds of settling, of cooling, of a structure at rest. She'd been in it for an hour. She'd been, against all reasonable expectation, almost comfortable in it.Then the sound came through the floor.Not a sound, exactly. A vibration first — something at a frequency that was more felt than heard, that arrived in her sternum before it arrived in her ears, the specific register of a phone going off in a room below hers and then footsteps, immediate, the kind of footsteps that were already moving before the person had consciously decided to move.Kane's voice, low and rapid. Words she couldn't make out through the floor but a tone she could, the tone that was not alarm but the controlled thing u

She did not ask immediately. She had learned, in three years of being careful, that the way you asked a question was part of the question, that the framing, the timing, the specific words you chose were information you were giving as much as requesting, and that giving the wrong information while trying to get the right information was a particular kind of error that was difficult to recover from. So she did not ask immediately. She waited until she had decided how to ask, and then she waited a little longer, because she was not yet certain she wanted the answer. It was Wednesday before she asked. She had spent Monday in the regular architecture of school, classes, corridors, the managed performance of a person who had slept five hours and spent three of them at a kitchen table and had filed all of it neatly and was not thinking about any of it. She had spent Tuesday doing the same thing, more successfully. By Wednesday she had run out of reasons to wait and had not found any new

The truck was in for service.Derek said this at the end of the school day with the economy of someone reporting a logistical fact, no preface, no apology for the inconvenience. The truck was in for service. The forest path was twenty minutes. He said this in the way of someone who had already calculated the options and was presenting the conclusion, and she received it in the way of someone who had no particular objection to the conclusion and was not going to manufacture one.So they walked.The path entered the trees about a quarter mile from the school's east lot, a dirt track wide enough for two people, packed down by use, the kind of path that had been made by people walking it rather than by anyone deciding it should exist. She had taken it twice before, both times alone, both times in the brisk functional way she moved through things she was not yet decided about. She had noted the path the way she noted routes: width, surface, sight lines, the points where it narrowed and wh