Page 6 of Run Rabbit Run

The diner sign swings into view at the edge of town, and Rue points at it without slowing down, a whole argument in one finger.

The biscuits.

I point back, which means fine, yes, biscuits, I'm buying, stop looking at me and look at the road.

This is the town that raised the three of us and then didn't quite know what to do with us when we grew up strange.

A girl who makes a living pointing arrows at things on the internet, a girl who edits the videos, and a boy who could charm the fillings out of your teeth and never once used it on anything good.

Four thousand people who all knew Gramps, who all still call me by a name from before I had a follower count.

There's a comfort in it and a weight in it, and most days I can't tell you which one's winning.

We hit the last stretch of pavement where the grade flattens out, and the tires stop grinding gravel and start to hum, and my phone goes off against my knee.

Not the work line.

My real number.

The one a small handful of people have, and most of them share my blood.

Luke.

He knows I film on Tuesday mornings.

He's known it for years, the same way he knows I don't pick up for anybody when I'm standing in a river with a bow.

He's calling anyway, at six-nineteen in the morning, and the little photo of him grinning under a ballcap sits there lighting up my screen, and it buzzes, and it buzzes again.

There's a way you learn to read weather when you've spent your life outside.

You feel it before you see it.

A drop in the air, a shift in how the birds move, the green a sky goes right before it decides to open up and ruin you.

Looking at my brother's name buzzing against my leg at six in the morning, I feel exactly that.

The pressure change before the storm.

The certainty, cold and complete, that whatever's waiting on the other end of this call is going to take something from me I don't get back.

I let it ring twice more.

Then I thumb the green circle and lift it to my ear. "Luke."

CHAPTER TWO

Wren

"Wren." My name comes out of him wrong.

Too fast, and pitched high in a way I haven't heard since we were kids and he'd broken something he couldn't put back before Gramps got home.

The truck's still rolling, Rue's still mid-sentence about the diner, and the ordinary morning keeps happening around me while my brother breathes into the phone like he's been running.

"Luke. Slow down. What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Nothing's wrong, I just—" A sound goes across the line, muffled, like he's dragged a hand down his face. "Are you with Rue? Is Rue there?"