Page 3 of The Lovely and the Lost

That Saskia was playing with me now—that she would do anything tokeepplaying with me—was a minor miracle, given the way we’d found her. She’d mistrusted humans, and she’d had reason to.

“That’s my girl.” I stepped back from the game, and Saskia went eerily still, waiting for instructions. Waiting for round two.

“Feel like some exercise?” I asked her.

She let out one loud, sharp bark.

The tension that had been building inside me since the night before began to dissolve. I gave Saskia a wolfish grin. “Let’s run.”

* * *

The deeper we ran into the woods, the rougher the terrain got, and the rougher the terrain, the harder we ran. My body was coated in sweat by the time we finally stopped. The burn in my muscles had gone from pleasant to verging on real pain. I bent over at the waist. My heart was racing in my chest. My skin tingled, a surefire sign that I’d come close to pushing myself too hard.

Everything in me wanted to go harder.

“Cady’s already going to tear a strip off of me for skipping breakfast,” I told Saskia, who wasn’t even winded. “If I don’t stop and rest, things could get ugly.”

My canine companion eyed me for a moment and then lowered her front half toward the ground, silent and ready.

“I see how it is,” I murmured. Saskia had an uncanny way of looking at people, her gaze almost human and borderline predatory all at once. Cady had been against my training her.

My girl didn’t play well with others.

I signaled, and Saskia pounced. After wrestling with her for a minute or two, I lowered myself to the ground. If anyone had seen us from a distance, they might have thought I was in danger—a small, fragile teenage girl with a fifty-pound animal looming over her.

Feeling more at peace than I had in weeks, I closed my eyes, and for the first time in twenty-four hours, I slept. When I opened my eyes again, Saskia was nestled beside me, and the sun was high enough in the sky that I was fairly certain the two of us weren’t the only ones out and about. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was a rag—one I’d swiped out of Cady’s room the day before.

I let Saskia get the scent, and then I climbed to my feet. “Shall we see what the boss is up to?” I asked the dog. Saskia’s whole body was taut with the effort of staying in place until I gave her the command. “Find her.”

Asingle search and rescue dog could cover as much ground as fifty or more human searchers. It didn’t take long for Saskia to find her target and come looping back to me. She gave three authoritative barks—sharp, loud, clear, just like she’d been trained to do.

Find. Recall. Re-find.

“Show me,” I said. Saskia took off, slowing her pace just enough for me to follow. She led me over rocks and a small stream, straight to Cady, who greeted Saskia with a quick tussle.

Find. Play. Find. Play.

Years of training had tied these two things together in the dog’s mind. I’d taught Saskia how to play—with me, with Jude, with Cady, with Free.

Her attitude toward the rest of the world was still a work in progress.

“You’re up early,” I greeted Cady before she could aim those same words at me. “One last training session?”

Cady had Pad on a lead, which I took to mean that my foster mother had already laid a scent path that our resident overachiever was following. Most dogs were either trained in air scenting, like Saskia, or in a method that focused more directly on retracing the target’s progression. Pad could switch back and forth between air scenting to cover a large area, and trailing, following a specific scent path across any and all terrain.

The army would have uses for both.

“You eat anything this morning?” Cady finished playing with Saskia and turned her eagle-eyed attention to me.

I shrugged.

“That would be a no, then.” Cady produced a PowerBar seemingly out of thin air and tossed it to me.

My hand whipped up to catch it. “Eat,” I ordered in unison with Cady, mimicking her no-nonsense tone almost exactly.

The edges of Cady’s lips twitched as she stifled a smile. “Is that your way of telling me I’m predictable?”

I shrugged again, but I didn’t bother biting back my own grin.