It also puts me in the same place as people who want me dead.
My hands stop shaking. Not because I'm not scared. Because scared doesn't change the math, and I've run the math too many times now to pretend the answer changes.
I pull the strap of my bag tight and step off the front step into the ordinary street, and I start walking.
I'm walking into the place that killed my family. But I have nowhere else to go.
Chapter Two
The bus smells like diesel and old fast food. I sit with my bag on my lap, forehead against the cold glass, watching the landscape change.
It takes most of the day. Flat suburban sprawl gives way to highway, then mountains. Mountains that don't look real from a distance, too large, too sharp against the sky, the snow line creeping lower as we climb. My ears pop twice. The air through the vents shifts from stale warmth to something cooler, dryer, carrying a faint edge of pine that gets stronger with every mile. The other passengers thin out at each stop, ordinary people with ordinary destinations, until by early afternoon it's just me and an old man in a flannel shirt who fell asleep before Denver, his head tilted against the window.
I've read the letter four more times since this morning. Not because it tells me anything new. Because reading it gives my hands something to do and my mind something to grip that isn't the free-fall of everything I don't know.
The photograph is at the bottom of my bag, and every hour or so I'm aware of it, that persistent low-level consciousness of something tender. I don't take it out. I just know it's there. The woman with my cheekbones, caught alive in afternoon light, one week before everything.
The driver is a heavyset man with a gray beard, and he hasn't said a word to me since I boarded. Two hours out from the final stop he catches my eye in the rearview mirror.
"You headed to the Academy?"
I don't answer right away. The letter didn't tell me to keep it secret. It didn't tell me much of anything about how to behave, just handed me a destination and a deadline and wished me luck in the least encouraging way possible. I look at the back of the driver's head, the gray hair, his shoulders sitting slightly too high.
"Yeah," I say.
He nods, eyes back on the road. A long pause. Long enough that I think he's done, that it was idle conversation, that he's going to spend the next two hours saying nothing while the mountains grow closer through the windshield.
"Three girls went missing from that place last year."
The old man keeps sleeping. The diesel smell keeps turning.
"Bodies never found," the driver says. His voice carries no emotion, flat as stating weather. "Figured you should know."
My hands tighten on the strap of my bag. "Did they investigate?"
"Sure." The word comes flat. "Came up empty. Sheriff's a shifter. Academy's got friends."
I look at the back of his head. "You're not."
"Not what?"
"A shifter."
He's quiet for a moment. Outside the window the highway is giving way to something narrower, the trees pressing in on bothsides, the mountain climbing ahead of us. "My daughter applied to that place when she was seventeen," he says finally. "They said she wasn't the right bloodline." He pauses. "Probably lucky."
We don't talk again after that. I sit with his words and the smell of diesel and the mountains coming up through the glass, thinking about luck. What it means in a place where bodies don't get found.
The town at the base of the mountain is called Harrow's Creek, and it is the most aggressively quiet place I have ever been.
It isn't small-town quiet, the comfortable hush of a place where nothing much happens and people are easy with it. It's the quiet of a place that learned to keep its mouth shut. The main street has a diner with a flickering neon sign, a gas station, a hardware store with boards over one window, the boards weathered gray, in place long enough to have become part of the building's face. The sidewalks are clean but no one lingers on them. Three people in the half-block I can see from the depot, each one moving with purpose, eyes down, not looking at the bus, not looking at each other. Walking carefully, not drawing attention.
One woman glances up as I step off the bus. Our eyes meet for less than a second before she looks away, speeding up, turning the corner at the end of the block without breaking stride.
The bus depot is a parking lot with a covered bench and a trash can. The bus doesn't idle. The driver pulls away before I've shouldered my bag. The sound of the engine fades up the road. I am standing alone in the cold mountain air with a sign in front of me: EVERPINE ACADEMY, 4 MILES.
The air up here has a weight to it, a mineral cold that settles into my lungs with every breath, clean and sharp and threaded with pine resin. And underneath that, something warm and organic I can't place, prickling at the back of my throat, making something in my chest go quiet and watchful.
I need transportation. There is one taxi, a sedan with a cracked bumper parked in front of the hardware store. A man leans against the driver's side door, arms crossed, and when he sees me crossing the lot his eyes do a quick assessment, running from my bag to my face and back, his jaw settling into something cautious.
