Page 23

CHAPTER 22

RUN .

It’s my first instinct. I leave my brother behind and race toward the two silvery shadows already fading into the woods. Try to touch the tails as they disappear into the underbrush.

I run even faster than I did on the track. They’re only fifty yards ahead of me. They flow through the trees, graceful as wind. They could let me catch up to them if they wanted to.

But they don’t want to. They speed away from me like I’m just another human. A stranger—or an enemy.

“Come back!” I cry. “It’s me! Wait!”

But wolves aren’t dogs. They don’t come when you call them.

They get smaller and smaller and soon I can’t see them at all. I stop and bend over, gasping for breath. My lungs scream. My heart aches.

They left me , I think, they left me .

When I stand upright again, the forest is quiet.

I’m utterly alone.

But I can feel how the woods welcome me. How the ground knows my footsteps. I feel a weight lift from my shoulders.

There’s no school here in the woods. No Hardys. No Chief “You Might Still Face Criminal Charges” Greene. I’m just another animal in the wilderness. A creature without paws or fangs or fur, but an animal all the same.

What if I keep on walking? What if I don’t go back? Will Holo know to come find me? Can we— should we—pretend that all this never happened?

The piercing cry of a red-tailed hawk interrupts my thoughts. Of course I have to go back. If I’m going to give up now, then we shouldn’t have come out of the woods in the first place. We should’ve stayed lost forever.

Maybe that would have been easier.

Just walk, Kai. Put one foot in front of the other. You know where you have to go.

By the time I get back to the cabin, Lacey’s making dinner. Holo, sitting at the kitchen table, looks at me accusingly. “Where’d you go?”

Lacey says, “And why’d you go there so damn fast ?”

I dump an armload of roots and leaves on the table. “I went foraging,” I tell them. “I just suddenly had a craving for wild greens.”

“Oh,” Lacey says, as if this is perfectly reasonable.

Holo can tell that I’m lying. But he doesn’t say anything. We know how to keep each other’s secrets. We always have.

“What is all this?” Lacey says, picking up a long, thin root and looking at it curiously.

“Biscuit-root,” I say. “It grows by the lodgepole pines and in the meadow. And that’s lamb’s-quarter from near the stream. And dandelions from your garden.”

“Neat,” she says brightly. “But what do you do with them?”

“You eat them, obviously,” I say. My hands are dirty. I start to rub them on my pants, but then I remember the kitchen sink. I may not love the human world, but I love its running water.

“For dinner?” Lacey asks, sounding uncertain. “I was making burgers.”

“I love burgers,” Holo says dreamily. “Especially when they have cheese on them.”

“They’ll keep,” I say. “I’ll just put them in the—the thing.”

“You mean the refrigerator?”

“I forgot what it was called,” I admit. Can you blame me? I’ve never used one before.

The chief comes into the kitchen after I’ve stashed the wild food next to the plastic packaged food.

“I think I saw your friends just now,” he says.

“We don’t have any friends,” I remind him.

“I’m talking about the wolves,” he says.

They’ve come back? Then why did they run away from me?

“They were checking me out,” the chief says.

“They don’t care about you, don’t worry,” I tell him. “They just want to make sure we’re okay.”

“Well, why don’t you tell them that you are, so they don’t keep coming around?”

The chief’s right: they shouldn’t be getting this close to houses. They ought to stay deep in the wilderness where they belong. But I can’t help bristling at his tone. “Is my family bothering you?”

“They’re dangerous animals, Kai.” The chief reaches into the thing—the refrigerator, whatever—and gets a beer. “Wouldn’t want to have to shoot one.”

Before I even realize I’m doing it, I’ve grabbed the knife that Lacey was using to chop carrots and I’m pointing it at his chest. “No offense, Chief,” I say, “but if you do that, it’s going to be the last thing that you do.”

The chief frowns, but he stands his ground. “You’re a fierce one, huh, Kai?”

The knife’s shaking in my hand. Maybe I’ve gone too far. Maybe he’s going to throw me in jail again.

Let him try.

“She’s fierce as fuck!” Holo says.

Lacey and the chief whip around and stare at him in shock. “Holo!” Lacey exclaims. “We don’t use that word in this house.”

“Why not?” Holo asks innocently. “I learned it at school.”

Then the chief bursts out laughing, and all the tension in the room suddenly breaks. “Well,” he says, “I guess that doesn’t surprise me. But it’s a bad word, Holo. A curse word, and we don’t use it around here.”

“Oh. Sorry,” Holo says.

“Did you learn any other words today?” I ask my brother.

Holo nods. “Yeah. Shitass, dickface—”

“I think that’s enough,” the chief says. “Thanks, Holo.” He’s still smiling.

And I slowly put down the knife.