Page 25 of Run Rabbit Run

"I keep thinking there's gotta be another way," he says, before hello, before anything.

His voice is thin and fast, the voice of a man who hasn't slept and has been rehearsing. "I've been asking around. There's a guy in Tacoma who might—if I could get a stake together, one good night, I could⁠—"

"Luke." I pinch the bridge of my nose. "Say the next part of that sentence out loud and listen to it."

Silence on the line. He hears it. He always hears it, after, when it's too late to matter.

"You want to gamble your way out of a gambling debt," I say, gentle as I can make it, which isn't very. "That's the sickness talking. That's not a plan, that's the disease looking for a door."

"I can't just let you⁠—"

"You already did." It comes out bitchier than I mean it.

I hear him suck in a breath, and I close my eyes and make myself soften, because he's still my brother and this is still the last of my blood worth loving, and I'm still going to give myself up for him no matter how much of me wants to scream.

"Hey. Listen. I've got a plan. A real one. I'm training, I'm ready, I'm good at exactly what he's putting in front of me. You do the one job I gave you. Stay clean, stay quiet, and let me handle it. Can you do that?"

"Yeah." A wet sound, him wiping his face. "Yeah, I can do that."

He can't, and we both know he can't, and that's the entirety of my brother in four words, but I tell him I love him and I mean it.

I hang up and stand in the cold with a fistful of ruined arrows and let myself feel none of it, because feeling it won't put an arrow where I want it, and putting an arrow where I want it might keep me free.

I go back to the target.

I shoot until the light's gone and my fingers won't close, and then I shoot ten more, because Gramps used to say you don't get good at the shot you take when you're fresh, you get good at the one you take when you've got nothing left, and the woods won't hand me a fresh shot when it counts.

On the fifth night, Rue brings dinner up to the cabin.

She lets herself in the way she has since we were kids, no knock, just Rue and a paper bag that smells like the good tacos from the place two towns over.

She stops in the doorway and takes in the state of me.

I've got topo maps spread across the whole floor.

Not my maps. Not the wilderness I know.

I spent days and more money than I want to think about getting my hands on the survey maps for the land north of the Vane estate, public-record parcels that butt up against his.

Because if I can't scout his ground I can at least learn what surrounds it. The water that flows off it. The ridgelines feeding into it, the whole stubborn way the country wants to move whether a man owns it or not.

"Wren." Rue sets the bag down slowly. "What is all this?"

"Homework."

She crouches at the edge of the maps, careful not to step on them, and she reads the topline of the nearest one.

I watch her face change when she sees the name printed in the corner of the survey block.

VANE.

"You're mapping his land."

"I'm mapping around his land. He won't let me see the inside. So I learn the outside and I make the inside make sense from what I know has to be true." I crouch across from her and tap a blue thread of creek that runs off the northwest corner. "Water always tells the truth. It doesn't care who owns the deed. It runs downhill the same on a billionaire's mountain as it does on Gramps' river, and if I know where his water goes, I know where his low ground is, and low ground is where a person hides and high ground is where they die."

Rue stares at me for a long moment.

"You sound like him," she says quietly. "Your grandfather. Right now, you sound exactly like him."