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I push through the undergrowth, trying to retrace my route, but the path doesn’t appear where it should.

Stopping, I look around. Every direction gives me the same trees, the same dark ground, the same stretch of black between the trunks.

The gate should be around here, but it isn’t.

My chest tightens as I choose another direction and start moving again, faster now. I don’t get lost. Not here. Not anywhere.

Then footsteps hit the ground somewhere behind me. I turn and find a man thirty yards back, between the trees, a visor hiding his face and shoulders squared beneath a dark jacket.

For one heartbeat, neither of us moves.

“Ash?” My voice shakes despite myself. “Ash, that’s enough. Come out where I can see you.”

The man launches himself straight at me.

For one impossible heartbeat, I tell myself he’s committing to the role. Then he keeps coming, fast enough that panic slams into me.

I run up the slope with everything I have, branches whipping past my face as my shoes tear at the wet ground. His footfalls remain hard and even behind me, much too quick.

A man’s voice suddenly calls from higher up on the right.

My head snaps towards it, catching the flash of another dark visor between the trees before I throw myself off the path.

The pines crowd together here. I hit one shoulder-first, catch myself, and keep going, arms up to protect my face. My shoe slips on the wet earth, sending me to one knee, but I’m moving again before the pain registers.

Behind me, the footfalls split. Two sets now, moving in different directions. Then a third starts ahead and to my left, cutting across the slope. When I realize there are three of them, fear punches straight through me, driving me back against a tree as I clamp one hand over my mouth and fight to keep my breathing quiet. Another visor moves between the trunks below me. Someone laughs farther up the slope, followed by a voice I can’t make out.

There’s no gate in sight. No hall. No way out.

And Ash? Is he coming at all?

I push away from the tree and run downhill, my shoes slipping on loose ground as I take the first clear gap I can find. A drainage cut opens at the bottom of the slope, water threading through it, and I throw myself down, following the channel into the dark.

During the Hunt, I was good at this. I could read the ground, I had a compass, and the worst thing chasing me was the weather.

Now I have no compass, the paths are dark, and there are people out here hunting me.

One of them comes down the drainage cut behind me at an unhurried walk, taking his time.

“Ash!” I shout, scrambling up the far bank on my hands and knees. “Ash!”

Scrambling over the top, I break into open ground, lungs burning as another voice carries through the trees somewhere ahead.

I make it to the far side and dive behind the roots of a fallen pine, squeezing into the hollow where the earth has torn away beneath them. Bracken hangs over the opening, wet against my face as I curl tighter and try to quiet my breathing.

Then a blue light sweeps through the trees to my left.

It passes over the trunks, disappears, then comes back from another angle, searching.

I press myself deeper into the dirt. “Ash,” I whisper. “Please. I didn’t know there’d be more than one of you. I don’t want it anymore. I’m saying it out loud, whatever the word is. We never picked one. You never gave me one, so I’m just saying it. That’s me saying it.”

Somebody laughs nearby, boots shifting through the wet ground. “There he is. Pretty boy’s begging for his savior already.”

Another voice answers from farther up the slope. “Is that him?”

“Yeah. He’s down in the bracken. Leave him. He’ll move.”

“How long are we staying out here?”