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Her fingertips probe the lines. Her breathing eases.

SARA: Little tricks. They don’t change anything.

She lets her head fall back. After a few minutes, she pulls down her sleeve, hiding the writing once more. She stands and walks to the table. When Ashford enters several minutes later, she appears perfectly calm.

ASHFORD: Miss Donoghue. Can I get you anything before we get started again? Something to drink?

SARA: No, I just want to get started.

ASHFORD: All right. I believe we were just talking about your exit from the mansion.

SARA: Yes. And then—I think—I think I’d like to tell you about Miranda.

ASHFORD: Is that so?

SARA: It’s hard to... There’s a pattern to things. Like a map. You have to go in order.

ASHFORD: In order?

SARA: One and five and one. One and four and three. Two and five and two. We’re almost there.

ASHFORD: I see.

He does not sound as if he sees at all, but Sara nods.

SARA: But first we have to talk about the field.

21

THIRTEEN STEPS. WEtake them quickly, and the need to move forward, to catch up to Kyle, overwhelms the urge to let go. Trina and I come out of the dark with our hands firmly entwined and step through an open door at the back of the house.

Outside the sun slants down like a blade against our eyes. We flinch away from it. I have to shut my eyes against the onslaught. The afterimage on my eyelids supplies me with a flat expanse of scrub, and something beyond it—water? And the dark thorn of a shape on the shore, a tower. Lighthouse, maybe.

I force my eyes open again. The light hurts, but I begin to adjust. Trina is already running forward. The others emerge behind us—Jeremy and Mel, Anthony and Becca. I squint along the road. It snakes out through the grass, looping first to the left, then the right, a long switchback through the field. A dirt path has been beaten down between the ends of the switchback—a shortcut. A temptation. Another road, and one we can’t follow.

Two people move awkwardly along the road just ahead.

“There they are,” I say, and my eyes trace the length of road between us. They’re not far. A hundred feet. But the road curves and twists, and it will take us an eternity to reach them.

“Kyle!” Trina screams. Smoke still rolls and folds behind her eyes.

“Trina!” Kyle flings himself back in Grace’s grip, but she holds fast. He hits at her, flailing. Trina stutters at the edge of the road. Swears. Starts running down it, limping on her injured ankle. Anthony and Mel are quick behind, Becca flitting after.

Five crows make lazy circles in the sky above us, and I don’t move. I watch the next three seconds’ movement with a strange, analytical detachment.

First, Kyle’s awkwardly closed fist finds the side of Grace’s jaw.

Then her grip falters, and he flees. Then she lunges for him again, and they are falling, and the sun glints off something metal in her hand. A knife.

The others are hurtling down the road. A twisting mile to go. Jeremy stands at the edge of the road with me. A hundred feet to cross.

It isn’t until afterward that I realize that in those three seconds, I decide I am ready to die to save them. Any of them. It isn’t until even later that I realize that Jeremy had made that decision long before I did.

We don’t speak. The decision is made. We take the footpath, the other road. In the distance, the beast bellows, the sound of metal shearing. The beast has Jeremy’s scent once more; the hunt resumes.

Tufts of errant grass crunch under my feet, brittle and dry. Wind slices past me. Fifty feet, thirty, twenty. The knife glints. Kyle wraps his hands around Grace’s wrist, but he’s always been small, always been fragile. Mel would lift him up when he wastwelve years old, old enough to be embarrassed by it, and spin him around with a whoop. The knife dips lower, toward his torso. I imagine his skin blooming with mushrooms.

Jeremy and I are matched step for step; we reach Grace at the same moment. I dive in low, grabbing her arm and pulling it away, pulling the knife off course. Jeremy grabs her by the shoulders and yanks her back.