The south treeline held.
She hit it at full speed and it received her the way it always did — branches, roots, the particular darkness of forest at night — and she went through it and kept going because the fire was behind her and behind her was not somewhere she could afford to be.
The smoke was everywhere now. Not the thin preliminary smoke of earlier but the full committed output of a forest that had decided to burn — thick and low and moving with the wind, filling the gaps between the trees, turning the torchlight she'd switched back on into something that reflected back at her more than it illuminated ahead. She ran with her jacket over her face and her eyes half closed against the sting of it and her feet finding the path by memory more than sight.
She thought about the arrow.
She'd driven it into him and he'd gone still and she'd run and she didn't know what that meant. Down wasn't dead. She knew that — she'd learned that five years ago in the most direct way possible, had pulled a trigger and walked away and spent five years paying for the assumption that down and dead were the same thing.
She didn't assume that now.
She ran and she listened for footsteps behind her and she heard the fire and the wind and her own breathing and nothing else and she kept running.
The path south curved and then straightened and she recognised where she was — the section of trail that ran parallel to the fence line, the one that would take her to the maintenance gap she'd come through. She'd walked this path in the dark five years ago with Jett's shoulder against hers and she walked it now alone and the distance between those two things was the distance of everything that had happened in between and she didn't look at it directly, just kept moving, kept her eyes on the path and her feet on the ground and her breathing as even as she could make it.
The smoke was thinning slightly as she moved south and away from the fire's main body. She could breathe better. She pulled her jacket down from her face and took a proper breath and her lungs made their feelings about the last twenty minutes known and she acknowledged them and kept moving.
Behind her the fire roared.
She didn't look back.
She heard him at the bend in the path.
Not footsteps — something else, a sound she couldn't immediately classify, a dragging quality to the movement, something wrong with the rhythm of it. She stopped and killed the torch and stood in the dark and listened.
There it was again. Behind her, north, on the path she'd just come down. Movement. Slow. Inconsistent. Not the steady patient stride she knew so well — something damaged, something that was still moving because stopping wasn't something it knew how to do but that had lost the clean efficiency of before.
He was still coming.
She closed her eyes for one second.
Then she opened them and looked at the path ahead — the fence line, the gap, the road, the town three miles south. She could run it. She had enough left to run it. Get through the gap, get to the road, get seen by someone, get to somewhere with people and light and the particular safety of the visible.
She could do that.
She stood on the dark path and listened to the damaged sound of him moving through the smoke behind her and thought about doing that.
Then she thought about five years ago. The ambulance and the hospital and New York and the office job and Lucas and Rebecca and Anastasia and Max and all the people who had been in the path of something that had started in this forest and hadn't ended when she'd walked out of it the first time.
She thought about walking out of it again with him still behind her.
She thought about who would be next.
She turned around.
She didn't go back up the path.
She went into the trees on the east side — pushing through the undergrowth, moving parallel to the path, heading north and staying in the dark. If he was on the path she wanted to come at him from the side, from the angle he wasn't watching. She moved carefully, torch off, navigating by the orange glow of the fire filtering through the canopy to the northwest.
She had nothing.
That was the clean arithmetic of it — the axe was in the burning clearing, the bow was on the path where she'd dropped it, the penknife was in the back of his hand which was attached to him which was not a retrieval scenario she was interested in. She had her torch and her lighter and the practical detritus of her bag and none of it was a weapon.
She thought about the forest.
She thought about what the forest had given her five years ago — rope in a shed, guns in a box, a bow and arrow on a rack. The forest as resource. The forest as the thing that could be used if you knew how to use it.
She thought about what was left.
The hooks.
She stopped.
She was standing in the trees east of the path and approximately thirty meters north of where she'd heard him and she was looking at the trunk of the tree directly in front of her and the hook driven into it at head height.
She looked at the hook for a long moment.
She looked at her torch.
She looked at the path.
She thought about what she was thinking about doing and she thought about whether it would work and she thought about the alternative which was nothing and she started moving.
She found three hooks in the trees between her position and the bend in the path.
The first was the one she'd already seen. The second was on the other side of the path, twenty meters north, she'd have to cross the path to get to it and crossing the path meant being visible for the second it took to cross. The third was just south of the bend, on the east side, close to the path edge.
She stood in the trees and thought about it.
She needed him to come to her rather than her going to him. She needed him in a specific place for a specific moment and she needed that moment to count because she wasn't going to get more than one.
She thought about what she'd done with the line across the path — the improvised tripwire, the disruption of the stride. It had worked once. The same trick wouldn't work twice — he'd be slower, more careful now, watching the ground.
She needed him looking up, not down.
She took the torch out of her bag.
She looked at it. Heavy, solid, the kind with actual weight — she'd bought it for a reason and the reason was standing in a burning forest with nothing else in her hands.
She put it on the path.
Pointing north. Beam on. A line of light running up the path toward the fire, visible from a distance, obvious.
She stepped back into the trees on the east side.
She found the hook closest to the path — the third one, just south of the bend — and she gripped it with both hands and pulled. It was driven deep into the bark but five years of rust and weather had worked at the seal between metal and wood and she pulled and felt it move and pulled again and it came free with the particular give of something that had been holding on too long and had finally let go.
She held it in both hands.
The iron was cold and rough with rust and it was heavy — properly heavy, the kind of heavy that had purpose behind it.
She pressed herself against the tree and looked at the torch beam on the path and waited.
He came around the bend two minutes later.
She heard him before she saw him — that damaged rhythm, the inconsistency of it, the sound of something that was operating on will rather than function. She watched through the trees as he came into the torch beam.
He looked worse than she'd expected.
The arrow had done something — she could see it in the way he was moving, the left side compromised, the head at an angle that wasn't right. The knife was still in his right hand but the grip was different, the damage to the hand from the penknife showing in the way the fingers held it. He was still upright and he was still moving and the axe was gone and the burning arrow was — she couldn't see where the burning arrow had ended up, couldn't see from here whether it was still—
It didn't matter.
He was upright and he was moving and that was the only thing that mattered.
He stopped at the torch on the path.
He looked at it.
He looked at the trees on either side of the path — east, west — the patient scanning assessment of something that had learned to be careful.
He looked east.
Directly at the tree she was pressed against.
She didn't breathe.
He looked for a long moment.
Then he looked back at the torch.
He crouched down — slowly, the left side protesting — and picked it up. He held it and swept the beam east into the trees and the light went past her and past her and settled on the trees further in and found nothing and moved on.
He stood up.
He kept moving south.
She came out of the trees.
She had maybe three seconds before he heard her — the undergrowth between the trees and the path, the particular sound of someone moving through it, unavoidable. She had three seconds and she used two of them to cover the distance between the tree and the path and she used the third one to swing the hook.
She aimed for the back of his head.
She hit his shoulder.
He went sideways — the impact knocking him off the path and into the undergrowth on the west side, the torch spinning out of his hand and lighting the trees at a crazy angle, the knife going somewhere she didn't see. She followed him into the undergrowth because stopping was the same as losing and she swung again and this time the iron connected with something that made a sound she felt in her hands and he went down.
She stood over him.
He was on the ground and not moving and the torch was somewhere in the undergrowth throwing its beam at the canopy and the fire was north and the path was east and the fence was south and she stood over Jacob Cain in the undergrowth of Vicrock Forest and breathed.
Down.
She watched him for a long time.
Down.
She thought about five years ago and the gun and the assumption she'd made and the cost of that assumption.
She thought about the hook in her hand.
She thought about Rebecca making fresh coffee. She thought about Anastasia's hand over hers on the kitchen table. She thought about Max's voice on the phone on the bridge and Lucas making pasta on a Tuesday and Ben Kowalski's sign above the door that he'd repainted twice.
She thought about Jett.
She thought about all of them.
She raised the hook.
Afterward she sat on the path for a long time.
She sat on the cold dirt of the path with her back against a tree and her knees up and the hook on the ground beside her and she looked at the fire in the north — still burning, still moving, the orange glow through the canopy enormous and relentless — and she breathed.
In. Out.
She was cold. She hadn't noticed being cold during but she noticed it now, the particular cold of someone whose body had spent everything it had and was now in the process of accounting for it. Her hands were shaking. She let them shake.
The smoke was still in the air but lighter here, the wind carrying it northeast, the fire moving with the wind, moving away from her and toward the fence line and the road and the world beyond both of those.
She needed to move.
She knew she needed to move — toward the fence, toward the road, toward the town and the detective and the twelve hours she'd told him to wait. She needed to move and she sat on the path and didn't for another minute because the minute felt important and she allowed herself the minute.
She thought about the clearing. The fire pit. The logs in their compass formation.
She thought about six people sitting there five years ago waiting to be safely scared.
She thought about what she was going to do when she walked out of this forest. Not in the immediate practical sense — the detective, the hospital probably, the long process of whatever came next. But the other sense. The larger sense. The question of what a life looked like on the other side of this, the second time, the final time, with nobody left who had been there and knew.
She didn't have an answer.
She had the question and she had the path south and she had whatever was going to come after and that was going to have to be enough.
She picked up the torch.
She stood up.
She looked north one more time — at the fire, at the orange sky, at the forest burning around the place where it had all started.
She looked south.
She started walking.
The fence gap was where she'd left it.
She crouched down and went through it and came out onto the road on the other side and straightened up and stood on the tarmac and looked at the road stretching south toward the town and the diner and the station and the train back to a city that had her name in it in various configurations none of which she'd asked for.
She stood on the road and breathed the cold air that smelled of smoke and autumn and distance and she looked at the sky above the forest — the orange glow of the fire visible from here, rising against the cloud cover, the same sky it had always been, pale and indifferent and very large.
She took her phone out.
She called the detective.
He answered immediately. "Ms Derby."
"It's over," she said. "Send everyone you have."
A pause.
"Are you hurt," he said.
She thought about that.
"Some," she said. "I'm on the road south of the site. I'll walk toward town."
"Stay on the line," he said.
"Okay," she said.
She started walking south and she kept the phone to her ear and she listened to the sounds of the detective on the other end of the line — the particular sound of things being set in motion, voices in the background, the machinery of response beginning to move — and she walked.
The fire behind her lit the sky orange.
She didn't look back.
She walked south and the road was the road and the cold was the cold and somewhere ahead of her were lights and people and the long complicated process of what came next and she walked toward all of it with the particular steadiness of someone who had been through the thing and come out the other side and was still, despite everything, despite all of it, moving forward.
One foot. Then the other.
South.