Page 2 of Run Rabbit Run

But she'll come, the way weather comes, the way she taught the internet a frightened animal always breaks for the high ground.

And when she does, I'll offer her the one thing no one's ever given her.

A fair chance.

A game. A whole night. Thousands of acres and a single rule, and a door standing open at the end of it with her freedom on the other side, close enough to smell.

I'll let her run.

I'll let her believe it all the way through, believe she can win.

Hope is the cruelest gift you can hand a person, and I'm going to hand her more of it than she's ever held.

I'll let it get heavy in her arms. I'll let her start to make plans around it.

Then I'm going to take it back.

Run, rabbit, run.

I've waited a long time to watch you.

CHAPTER ONE

Wren

Cold comes up off the river before the light does.

That's the part nobody tells you about filming out here in October.

The camera doesn't care how pretty the fog looks curling over the water.

It only cares that my hands are shaking too hard to nock the arrow clean.

My breath hangs in front of my face and refuses to leave.

The mud soaked through the knees of my pants two takes ago, and the wet's working its way toward bone now, slow, patient, the way the cold always moves when it means to stay.

"You're clenching."

Rue calls it from behind the tripod, both hands wrapped around a thermos I know holds gas-station coffee, because she refused to make the good stuff at four in the morning.

I don't blame her for that.

"Your shoulder. You do that thing with your shoulder when you're freezing."

"It's thirty-eight degrees."

"And your people want to watch you nail it in thirty-eight degrees. That's your brand, babe." She lifts the thermos in a little salute. "Suffer prettily, Holloway."

There she is.

The reason I climb out of a warm truck at four a.m. and stand in a river for three hours.

Rue Bell swallowed up in a coat that used to be mine, hair shoved under a beanie stitched with a sponsor logo she keeps threatening to seam-rip off.

We learned this river together.

Learned it the summer we were nine, when Gramps pressed a peeled stick into each of our hands and told us the water would teach us more than he ever could, if we shut our mouths long enough to let it.