North

She got to Penn Station at noon.

The concourse was the usual midday chaos — commuters and tourists and people going somewhere and people coming back, the particular democracy of a major transit hub where everyone was equally in the way of everyone else. She moved through it with her bag on her shoulder and her ticket on her phone and the specific focused quality of someone who had somewhere to be and had decided to be there.

She bought water and a sandwich from a stand she didn't taste and sat on a bench near the departures board and watched the trains.

Hers left at one fifteen. Two hours and forty minutes to Albany and then a connecting service that would get her to the town nearest Vicrock by early evening. She'd looked it up on the bridge. She knew the route. She'd taken it in reverse five years ago in the back of an ambulance and then again three days later in her mum's car going home and she hadn't been back since and hadn't planned to be and here she was anyway because this was always where it was going to end up.

She ate the sandwich without tasting it.

She thought about what Lucas had said.

He's not the same. He can't be stopped the way normal people can be stopped.

She thought about what she knew of Jacob Cain from book one — the professional, the patient one, the man who had walked through three nights of forest killing people with the efficiency of someone completing a contract. That man had been frightening because of his control. His stillness. The complete absence of anything personal in it.

That man was gone apparently.

What had replaced him was something with the same body and the same patience but none of the detachment. Five years of a bullet that hadn't killed him and an obsession that hadn't let him rest and a son he'd raised from a distance for a purpose and lost when that son had looked at a girl across a kitchen table and chosen her instead.

What had replaced him was personal.

Personal was in some ways more frightening and in some ways less. Personal meant emotion and emotion meant mistakes. Personal meant he wasn't thinking clearly, wasn't operating at full professional capacity, was running on something rawer and less precise than contract.

Personal also meant he would not stop. Would not be bought off or negotiated with or deterred. Would follow her to the ends of whatever map she drew because this was not a job anymore and jobs could be abandoned but this wasn't a job.

She knew that. She'd known it since she saw him at the end of her street.

She finished the water.

She thought about weapons.

She had nothing. Her bag contained her wallet, her phone, her cigarettes, a lighter, a spare charger, the practical detritus of a life she'd packed in thirty seconds in a hotel room. Nothing useful. Nothing that would matter against a man who had walked out of a forest with a bullet in him and crossed a city and killed four people in a week.

She thought about the shed. The guns. The rope and the cable ties and the heavy torch in its bracket.

She thought about the bow rack at the ScreamForHell campsite.

She'd seen it in the aerial photographs on the forum. Still there, apparently, five years on — the site had been sealed after the investigation and never formally cleared. The equipment still inside the perimeter, rusting quietly, the forest growing back around it.

Still there.

She thought about that.

Her train was called.

She stood up and picked up her bag and joined the flow of people moving toward the platform and thought about what she was walking toward and whether she was ready for it and decided the question was irrelevant because she was going regardless of the answer.

The train moved north through the city and then out of it, the density of buildings giving way gradually to the particular geography of upstate New York — wider skies, longer distances, the quality of space that cities spent all their energy compressing and that came back out here like a held breath finally released.

She sat by the window and watched it go past and thought.

She thought about Jacob Cain's body. What Lucas had told her — the way it had changed, the way the wounds had healed wrong, the way damage registered differently now. She thought about what that meant practically. Not invincibility — nothing was invincible, everything had a threshold — but a higher threshold than she'd planned for the first time. She'd aimed for centre mass in that clearing five years ago and she'd hit and it hadn't been enough.

She wouldn't make the same mistake twice.

She thought about the forest. About what she knew of it and what Jacob knew of it and the difference between those two things. He'd spent three nights in there five years ago and however many times since — the site was officially sealed but sealed sites had perimeter gaps and Jacob Cain had already demonstrated a comfortable relationship with gaps in perimeters. He knew the layout. He knew the paths.

So did she.

She knew it differently — not as a hunter but as prey, which meant she knew the hiding places and the dead ends and the places where the treeline offered cover and the places where it didn't. She knew where the equipment sheds were. She knew where the hooks were on the trees and she knew where the fire pit was and she knew where Elizabeth had died and where Addison had died and where the bow rack had been and where she'd found the rope and where she'd stood in a burlap mask in the moonlight and said gotcha.

She knew this forest.

Maybe better than him.

She held onto that.

She called the detective from the train.

He answered on the first ring with the energy of someone who had been waiting for the call and was not pleased about the circumstances.

"Ms Derby," he said. "Where are you."

"I need you to listen to me," she said. "I'm going to Vicrock. I know that's not what you want to hear. I know you're going to tell me to come in and let you handle it and I understand why you're going to say that and I need you to hear me when I tell you it's not going to work."

A silence.

"Jacob Cain is not going to be stopped by a police presence," she said. "You've seen what he's done this week. You know what he is. If you put officers around me he goes quiet and waits and the moment your resources are stretched or your attention is elsewhere he moves and more people die." She paused. "The only way this ends is if I draw him somewhere contained. Somewhere away from civilians. Somewhere I know and he thinks he knows better."

"Ms Derby—"

"I'm telling you where I'm going," she said. "I'm not asking permission. I'm telling you so that when it's over someone knows where to send people." She paused. "Vicrock Forest. The ScreamForHell site. Give it twelve hours and if you haven't heard from me send everyone you have."

A long silence.

"This is not how this works," the detective said.

"I know," she said. "I'm sorry."

She hung up.

She looked out the window at the upstate sky, wide and grey and getting darker as the afternoon aged into evening. The train went north and she went with it and the city got further behind her and the forest got closer ahead and she sat with all of it — the grief and the fear and the cold focused thing underneath both of them — and breathed.

In. Out.

She thought about Anastasia.

She thought about the hand over hers. Come back.

She thought about all the people who had told her to come back in various ways across five years — her mum, her therapist, the detective with his careful voice — and she thought about the specific difficulty of coming back when the thing you were coming back from had never fully let you go.

She thought about what coming back would look like this time. After this. If there was an after this.

She didn't know.

She'd figure it out when she got there.

She got off at the connecting station at four forty and stood on the platform in the cold afternoon air and looked at the town around her.

She'd been through here five years ago without seeing it — in the ambulance on the way out, then in her mum's car on the way back, both times the town just a thing that happened outside a window she wasn't looking through. Now she looked at it properly.

Small. That was the overwhelming impression — small in the specific way of places that had a function once and had been quietly losing it for years. A main street with too many empty shop fronts. A petrol station. A diner with its lights on against the early dark. The particular stillness of a Friday evening in a place where Friday evenings didn't mean much.

She walked to the diner and sat at the counter and ordered coffee and a meal she didn't particularly want and ate it anyway because her body needed fuel regardless of whether her appetite had caught up with the programme.

The woman behind the counter was in her sixties, efficient and incurious in the way of someone who had been serving people in the same diner for a long time and had long ago run out of surprises. She refilled Indigo's coffee without being asked.

Indigo wrapped her hands around the cup.

She thought about what she needed. The site was about three miles from town — she'd looked it up on the train, cross-referencing her memory with the forum's detailed mapping of the area. Three miles on a road that would be dark by the time she got there. She needed a torch. She needed something more than a torch ideally but a torch was the minimum.

She paid for the meal and left a tip and went to the general store two doors down and bought a torch — a proper one, not a phone torch, the kind with actual weight and actual beam — and batteries and a lighter and a penknife that wouldn't be much against an axe but was something. The woman at the register didn't look at her twice.

She came out of the store into the early evening dark and stood on the pavement and looked north.

Three miles.

She started walking.

The road to the site was exactly as she remembered and nothing like she remembered simultaneously.

In daylight five years ago it had been unremarkable — a rural road, two lanes, the kind that existed to connect one place to another and was not itself a destination. In the dark on a Friday evening in late autumn it was something else. The trees pressed close on both sides, the canopy closing overhead where the branches reached across the road, the torch beam cutting a pale corridor through the dark ahead of her.

She walked steadily. Not fast, not slow. Conserving energy, watching the road, listening to the sounds of the forest on either side — the wind in the high branches, the occasional sound of something moving in the undergrowth, the general aliveness of a place that didn't stop just because the light went.

She thought about Jacob Cain.

She thought about him on a train heading north, or in a car, or already here — already in these trees, already in this forest, already moving through it with the patient certainty of something that knew it was going to win. She thought about whether he'd followed her from the hotel or whether he'd gone straight here, knowing she'd come, knowing there was only one place this could end.

She thought about the bow rack.

She thought about what she was going to do when she got there and the shape of the plan that had been assembling itself since the bridge — not complete yet, not all the pieces in place, but the outline of it. The direction of it.

She thought about Elizabeth.

The bow and the arrow and the specific small sound of the string releasing — too small for what it did.

She walked.

The road curved and the trees thinned slightly and through the gap she could see the visitor centre — dark, the car park empty, the chain link fence with its padlocked gate exactly as it had been when she'd stood on the other side of it five years ago banging on the bars while Elizabeth's name was on her tongue.

She stopped.

She stood on the road and looked at the building and breathed.

It looked smaller than she remembered. Everything about it smaller — the building, the car park, the fence, the sign above the entrance that she couldn't read from here but knew said ScreamForHell in the hand-painted lettering of something that had tried to be fun and had not been fun at all.

She stood there for a long moment.

Then she walked to the fence.

The gap was there. Not the same gap — that had been repaired at some point — but a different one, further along, where the mesh had pulled away from a post at the base. Someone had been through it recently. The edges of it freshly bent.

She crouched down and looked at it.

Then she looked at the forest beyond the fence.

Then she looked behind her at the road.

Dark and empty and quiet.

She went through the gap.

The site received her the way it always had — without acknowledgement, without ceremony, just the trees closing around her and the path underfoot and the dark on every side.

She moved carefully. Torch low, beam pointed at the ground just ahead of her feet rather than out into the dark — she didn't want to announce herself, didn't want to throw light into the treeline and have it bounce back from a pair of dark eye gaps thirty meters away. She wanted to see without being seen for as long as possible.

She found the first equipment shed after fifteen minutes.

It was the one from five years ago — the small one, the tools along the wall, the workbench. She pushed the door open and swept the torch around. The guns were gone. Of course they were — the police had been all over this site after Vicrock, had catalogued everything, had taken what needed taking. The box under the floor was still there but open and empty.

She stood in the shed for a moment.

She took the penknife out of her pocket and opened it and put it back in her jacket pocket with the blade out. Not useful. She knew it wasn't useful. But something.

She left the shed and kept moving.

The main clearing was ahead — she could feel it the way you felt open space in a dark forest, the particular change in air pressure, the sky opening up above the canopy gap. She stopped at the edge of it and looked in.

The fire pit. The logs. Five years of weather and growth and the forest slowly taking back what had been cleared, but still recognisably the shape of it. Still the place.

She stood at the edge of the clearing and looked at it and felt the weight of it — not the paralysing weight of the first time she'd approached it five years ago in the dark with Anastasia's hand in hers, but something more complicated. The weight of a place that had taken things from her and given her something in return that she hadn't asked for and hadn't wanted and had used anyway.

She thought about Elizabeth on the log.

She thought about the bow rack.

She crossed the clearing to the far side where the equipment had been — the rack, the quiver, the row of hooks along the trees — and swept the torch along the trunks.

The hooks were still there. Dark with rust, driven into the bark, the forest growing around them like it was trying to absorb them.

She looked at them for a moment.

Then she looked at the rack.

It was still there too. Weathered and leaning, the wood of it soft with years of rain and frost, but upright. And in it — she crossed to it, torch up, not quite believing until she was close enough to be certain — the bow. Still there. Still in the rack. The string long gone, rotted away or removed, but the bow itself, the limbs of it dark and weathered but intact, the shape of it unchanged.

And in the quiver beside it, still held in the bracket, two arrows. The flights weathered and bent. The points dark with rust.

But there.

She stood in front of the rack and looked at the bow and felt something move through her that she didn't have a name for — not quite recognition, not quite grief, something that encompassed both of those and had edges she couldn't find.

She reached out and took the bow from the rack.

It was lighter than she expected. The wood had dried out over five years, lost weight, become something almost fragile feeling in her hands. She turned it over. Ran her thumb along the limb. The wood was solid underneath the weathering — dense and dry, the grain tight.

She'd need a string.

She looked around the clearing. At the hooks. At the shed at the far edge of the site — the bigger one, the one with the rope and the workbench, where five years ago she'd found the guns and the plan had come together in the quiet of a night shed with Anastasia beside her.

She went to the shed.

It was as she remembered — larger than the first, the workbench along the right wall, the shelving units. The rope was still there. Some of it. The coils she hadn't used, left behind when the police had catalogued the scene and apparently decided rope was not evidence.

She looked at the rope.

She looked at the bow in her hand.

She cut a length of rope — thin, strong, the kind that would serve — and she sat on the floor of the shed and she strung the bow the way she'd seen it done enough times to have a rough idea and worked at it until the string held taut between the limbs and the bow had its shape back.

She pulled it experimentally. The draw was stiff, the wood resistant after years of no use, but it moved. It held.

She took one of the arrows from the quiver and nocked it loosely.

She stood in the shed doorway and looked out at the clearing and the dark forest around it.

She waited.

She didn't have to wait long.

She'd known she wouldn't. Jacob Cain had been following her since Tuesday — since before Tuesday, since long before Tuesday — and whatever route he'd taken north he was here, she could feel it in the specific quality of the silence, the way the forest had changed around her in the last few minutes. The particular stillness that preceded him. She'd felt it before. She knew what it meant.

She stepped back from the doorway.

She put her back against the wall inside the shed, beside the door, where the angle meant she was invisible from outside but could see the clearing through the gap.

She held the bow.

She breathed.

In. Out.

The clearing was still. The fire pit, the logs, the hooks on the trees, the moonlight coming through the canopy gap — pale and indifferent, the same moonlight it had always been, casting the same silver shadows it had cast five years ago when all of this started.

She watched the treeline.

He came out of the trees on the north side.

Slowly. The way he always came. The dark jacket, the pale trim, the hood. The burlap mask. The axe in his right hand — Ben Kowalski's axe, the camping axe from the corner store, dark with things she didn't look at too closely.

He stopped at the edge of the clearing.

He looked at the shed.

She pressed herself against the wall and didn't breathe.

He stood there for a long moment. Looking at the shed. Looking at the clearing. The patient unhurried assessment of something deciding.

Then he took a step forward.

She watched him through the gap in the door.

He crossed the clearing slowly, moving toward the shed, and she counted his steps the way she'd counted things in this forest before — one, two, three, the specific arithmetic of survival — and held the bow and kept her breathing even and waited.

He was ten meters from the shed when he stopped.

He looked at the bow rack. At the empty bracket where the bow had been.

He looked at the shed.

She saw the moment he understood.

He moved fast — faster than something that size should move, the inhuman speed that Lucas had warned her about — and he hit the shed door with his shoulder and it came in and she was already moving, already through the back wall where the collapsed section gave out onto the treeline, dropping through the gap and into the dark outside.

She heard him behind her.

She ran.

The forest at night was the forest at night — the same darkness, the same roots, the same branches reaching out from both sides. She ran and it ran with her and behind her she could hear him — not running, not even close to running, just walking, that same steady walk, because he knew as well as she did that she couldn't run forever and the forest was his as much as hers and walking was enough.

She ran until she had distance and then she slowed and moved carefully, torch off now, navigating by moonlight and memory.

She needed him in the clearing.

That was the plan. Get him into the open, under the canopy gap, in the moonlight. She needed to see him and she needed the sight line and she needed him still for long enough.

She looped wide through the trees, moving south and then east, coming around behind the fire pit. She could hear him somewhere to her north — not close, not yet — moving through the undergrowth with the unhurried certainty of something that had decided the outcome already.

She came to the edge of the clearing from the south side.

She knelt behind a fallen trunk at the treeline. She nocked the arrow. She rested the bow on the trunk and looked down the shaft at the clearing.

And waited.

She heard him before she saw him.

The footsteps in the undergrowth to the north, closer now, the sound of him approaching the clearing from the direction she'd run. She held herself still. Breathed.

He came out of the trees on the north side.

He stopped in the clearing. Looked around. The axe in his hand. The mask. The two dark eye gaps moving across the clearing — the fire pit, the logs, the shed at the far edge with its door hanging open, the treeline on every side.

He was maybe thirty meters away.

She looked down the arrow at him.

Her arm was shaking slightly — the bow was stiff and the draw was hard and she'd been holding it for too long and her arm was telling her about it. She compensated. She steadied.

He turned slowly, scanning the treeline.

He was going to see her.

She needed him still for one more second.

"Hey," she said.

He turned toward her voice.

She released.

The arrow crossed the clearing in the dark and she heard it connect — not the sound she expected, something different, the bow string having been improvised rope rather than proper sinew — and he went back a step but didn't go down and she was already moving, already out of the fallen trunk and into the clearing because she needed to see, needed to know—

He was still standing.

The arrow was in his shoulder. Not his head — she'd aimed for his head and the improvised string had given and the shot had dropped and taken him in the shoulder instead.

He looked at the arrow.

He pulled it out.

She stopped in the middle of the clearing and watched him pull the arrow out of his shoulder with the same expression he had for everything which was no expression at all and she thought about what Lucas had said and understood it now, completely, in a way she hadn't before.

He looked at her.

She looked back.

Thirty meters between them in the moonlit clearing where Elizabeth Jack had died five years ago and the fire pit cold between them and the hooks on the trees and the whole forest silent around them.

She had one arrow left.

He raised the axe.

And then the fire started.