Page 42 of Run Rabbit Run

Rue comes into my head first, a hundred miles south and asleep, who'll get her phone call after all.

Then Luke, walking free tomorrow, not knowing, never knowing, and for once the not-knowing doesn't feel like a wound, it feels like a gift I get to give him.

And Gramps, last of all and closest, until I swear I can feel him running the final stretch with me, his voice in my stride, his hands at my back, telling me the mountain takes everything you have and you move anyway.

Freedom, close enough that my body lunges toward it before my mind gives the order.

I run.

Not smart now, not careful, not the stranger I've been all night.

I run like the woman I really am, all-out, everything I've got left thrown into the pounding downhill sprint toward that pale gap and the open country past it, because dawn is here and the gap is right there and I am going to make it.

I’m going to walk off this mountain into the light, and Luke is going to be free, and I’m never going to see Ezra Vane again as long as I live.

My lungs are on fire.

I can't feel my legs anymore, and they carry me anyway.

The gap swells in front of me, forty feet of open ground between two shoulders of rock, gray morning pouring through it, and past it the land falls away into a valley and mist and everything that isn't his.

Fifty yards.

Thirty.

I can smell the difference in the air coming through the gap, colder, wider, the smell of country that belongs to nobody.

And some animal reflex, some last habit of a hunted thing, makes me do the one thing Gramps always warned me against.

I look back.

Only for a second. To see the dark I'm leaving, to know how close he got, to have it, the sight of the woods that couldn't hold me falling away behind my shoulders.

There's nothing there.

No pale eyes. No dark shape moving through the timber. No hunter at all, only the gray drainage climbing back up into the trees, empty, and the emptiness is the sweetest thing I've ever seen, because it means he lost me, it means going low worked, it means the woman in the videos was good enough after all, and the arrogance wasn't arrogance, it was just the truth.

I beat him.

The thought blooms hot and enormous, pride and relief and a wild rising joy all at once, and I turn back toward the gap and the open country and the rest of my free life waiting a hundred feet away⁠—

And the ground isn't there.

One stride my boot comes down on solid earth and the next it comes down on nothing, on give, on a false floor of woven branch and moss that folds under my weight like water, and the world drops out from under me and I drop with it.

I fall.

There's a half-second of pure animal terror, the oldest fear there is, the floor gone and the dark rushing up, my hands clawing at air that won't hold them and my gut lurching up into my throat. Then the net.

It takes me hard, a whole-body slam that punches the wind out of me and snaps my teeth together on my own tongue, copper flooding my mouth.

The rope bites through my clothes into my back and my thighs, and I bounce once, twice, the tangle stretching and snapping taut beneath me, cradling me in a way that's almost gentle and is the opposite of gentle, doing exactly what it was built to do.

I hang there in the dark of the hole with the gray morning a perfect square of light above me, blood in my mouth and my heart trying to climb out through my teeth, and for one second I don't understand.

Then I understand all of it at once.

The moss over the top, laid too even.