Page 63 of Run Rabbit Run

He sits on the edge of the bed, close, and holds the phone up where I can see it.

The screen lights his face from below and turns the pale eyes to glass.

It's me.

For a second my mind won't accept it, the way you don't accept your own voice on a recording, and then it snaps into place and the floor drops out of me.

It's my channel.

My newest video, posted today, the little red counter ticking up in the corner, forty thousand views and climbing while I sit locked in a room a hundred miles from anywhere.

There I am on a ridge I filmed back in September, another life ago, hair loose, sun on my face, drawing my bow to the corner of my mouth and grinning at the lens like the whole bright world belongs to me.

"Watch," Ezra says softly.

I don't want to. I can't not watch it.

My own face fills the little screen and my voice comes out of it, easy and warm and sure, and it's the sound that undoes me first, before the image even.

My voice.

The way I used to sound.

Light. Unafraid.

A woman who's never once had to wonder whether the door locks from the outside.

Hey, wild ones, the ghost says, that dumb warm greeting I opened every video with. Today we're talking about staying found when everything wants you lost.

I watch her nock an arrow.

I watch her talk through the draw, the release, the follow-through, her hands doing the exact thing my hands did ten thousand times because a man on a riverbank taught them to.

She hits the target dead center and laughs, delighted with herself, and the sound of that laugh goes into me like a blade turned slow.

I can't remember the last time I made that sound.

I can't remember, sitting here, how it even worked, what my face did, where the laugh came from.

Nine days and it's already gone from me, the idea of my own joy, and there's a woman on a phone screen who still has it, who's grinning and free and doesn't know that in a few weeks a man will watch her videos and take her apart with them.

The video keeps playing.

She moves through it so easily, my ghost, narrating as she goes, and I know every word before she says it because I scripted them. I stood on that ridge in September and said them into a camera, thinking about lighting and sponsors and the next day's shoot, thinking about nothing, thinking I had all the time in the world to be that woman.

She tells the wild ones to trust their training, tells them the woods only feel like the enemy until you learn to read them, and then she grins into the lens and says the trick to never getting caught is to think like whatever's hunting you.

I taught four hundred thousand people how to think like a hunter.

And the only hunter who ever mattered sat in the dark and let me teach him, video by video, month by month, until he knew my mind better than the people who loved me, and then he used the free education I gave him to run me to ground on his mountain.

The woman on the screen doesn't know any of that. She grins and trusts her training and thinks the woods are hers, the way I thought it for twenty-five years, right up until the day the woods turned out to be his.

Watching her is like watching a home movie of someone who died young, that helpless ache of seeing them so alive and so certain, so utterly ignorant of the truck coming around the bend. Except the person who died is me, and the truck was a man in a good coat, and I'm not watching from safety.

I'm watching from inside the wreck.

"She's beautiful," Ezra murmurs, close to my ear, watching me watch her. "You were beautiful. You still are, but it's a different beauty now. That one didn't know anything yet." His thumb moves across the screen, almost tender, over my grinning face. "This is the last one Rue queued from the old batch. After this the feed goes quiet, and the world starts to wonder, and the story you built begins to come apart. But not tonight. Tonight there are still forty thousand people who think you're free."