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A strangled yell breaks the silence. She sprints into the trees. Twigs scrape her cheek and the undergrowth tangles around her legs. Alexander is on the ground, a big, broad man on top of him, strangling him. On the ground nearby is something black and L-shaped, formed just so, just for the shape of fingers. A gun.

Alexander’s arms flail. He wheezes, thrashes. The man pulls him off the ground and then slams him back into it. Alexander’s head snaps back.

Sonya kicks the gun deeper into the woods, then dives at the man’s shoulder. Startled, he topples over. She fumbles in her pocket for the knife, and then the man is on top of her. She thinks of her finger digging into her attacker’s eye socket in the dark of her old apartment. She flails, wild. Screams. And then turns her head and bites hard into his hand. She feels the yield of skin and tastes copper.

The man yells, and punches. Sonya turns her head. She reachesup, fumbling along the ground for the knife handle. He’s against her, heavy, his breath sour and hot. So heavy she can’t breathe. She digs into the dirt above her with her fingertips. The blade bites into her fingers; she grabs the handle and swings, stabbing up, in.

Into the man’s neck. He lets out a sickening gurgle. His blood is warm and it’s all over her. She’s looking into his eyes as they go glassy.

She squirms beneath him, chest heaving, desperate to get away from him. The weight lifts away and the man falls to the side; Alexander stands above her, one hand on the back of his head, his eyes wide enough that she can see the whites of them. Everything is quiet except for her breaths, shuddering in and out of her. They sound like they belong to someone else.

Alexander holds out his hand to help her up. She lifts her own, and the red streaking it startles her. Alexander takes it anyway. Her legs feel unsteady. Her body aches. Alexander tugs her toward the road, and she resists him. She wants to be away from those trees, that knife, the too-still form of the man in the dirt—but she has to see.

His throat is red gore. A Veil covers his face. She reaches behind his ear to deactivate it. His face is familiar, but so unremarkable she wonders if he looks familiar to everyone. He’s older than she is, his eyes creased at the corners, but still young. His arms are splayed in front of him, his fingers curled, relaxed now in death. There’s a bandage on one of his hands.

Frowning, Sonya crouches beside him, and peels the edge of the bandage back. On his hand is a neat cut, scabbed over now but still fresh.

“I think I did this,” she says. “I think I gave him this cut. He’s with the Army.”

“He had a gun.” Alexander scrubs at his face with his clean hand. “How did he get a gun?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t get it,” Alexander says. “I don’t understand why they wouldfollow us all the way out here like this. It can’t just be that they want revenge for what Knox did.”

“Maybe it is,” Sonya says. “Maybe it isn’t. But we can’t ask him now, can we?”

She tests herself, taking one step, and then another, toward the road. She rubs the grit out of her hair.

“Sonya...” Alexander follows her. She dropped her bag at the edge of the tree line; she goes to it, and her hands tremble as she tries to open the bottle of water. Blood streaks the plastic. She can’t get the cap to open.

“Sonya.” He covers her hand with his own, stopping her. “Hey, hey. Look at me.”

Frustrated, she throws the water bottle at the ground. He touches her shoulders, turns her toward him. Touches her face. His hands are cool on her neck, her jaw. She looks up at him, into his eyes, brown as a deep, clear lake in summer.

“You saved my life,” he says.

Her throat is tight. She nods.

“Thank you,” he says.

Her hands have come to rest against his wool coat, heedless of the stain they will leave behind. She bunches the fabric into her fists, and then pulls him against her, hard, her nose coming to rest at the base of his throat. His arms loop around her. They stand for a long time.

As she walks, she tries not to think about it—the man, the knife, the nearness of the end.

She’s felt it before. At the table with her family, four chairs, four glasses of water, a yellow pill in her hand. A tablet, not a capsule, stamped with the lettersSOL.

SOL. Short for Solace, a drug prescribed for terminal patients who sought lasting relief from pain. It induced a feeling of euphoria and connectedness, and then a heavy sleep that culminated in cardiac arrest.Go gently into that good night,the advertisements said, a nod to the old poem that revealed no one in Solace marketing had actually read it.

SOL. It was short for “shit outta luck,” too, which is how Sonya felt at the table in the cabin, her mother humming and her sister weeping and her father pouring water. Four eyes aglow, four paths converging. The end is inevitable. Inexorable.

Four heads tip back to swallow. Then she watches them all die.

Fifteen

They walk until dark. At one point they take a break so they can rinse the blood from their hands and scrape it from beneath their fingernails. Alexander is the one to suggest they stop for the night. They make camp in the trees, but still in view of the road. Sonya finds some almost-dry branches heaped in the undergrowth, and comes back to find Alexander struggling with the NeverFail log. She crouches next to him, and nudges him aside to take over.

She knows how to clear a space for it, how to unwrap the complicated packaging to expose the artificial log within without stripping it of the paper—the paper acts as kindling. She lights it with steady hands, and then kneels beside it with hands outstretched. There are cuts under her fingernails from when she dug into the earth. Her body aches from the struggle, from the walking.