He drove the stick downward with everything he had. A hand caught his shoulder from behind.

Female. I saw the fingernails in the split second before the momentum redirected. She forced him into a turn and drove the stick through his back in the same motion, clean and deliberate, the specific targeting of someone who had done this before and knew exactly where to put it.

The wood punched through muscle, bone, and dead flesh with a thick, wet crunch, erupting from his chest in a violent spray of dark, almost black blood that splattered across the leaves.

Vince coughed hard. A wet, gurgling explosion of dark fluid burst from his mouth, spilling down his chin and dripping in heavy ropes onto the forest floor.

He didn’t fall immediately. He went to his knees, which was its own kind of statement, something that old and that strong going to its knees in a forest outside School Central.

Above him, Mary Stam stood with the composed expression of someone who had just completed a task she had been planning for a while.

Something burned at the base of my spine. The mark. The one she had put on me during the chase through the capital, the night I had gone out the hotel window and she had walked through it. She had tracked me through it. All this time, the mark had been a line between us, and tonight she had followed it here.

Vince reached back with a trembling, blood-slick hand, gripped the protruding end of the stick, and began to push. The wood slid through his body with a sickening, sucking squelch, more thick blood pouring from both the exit and entry wounds in pulsing gushes like a broken water pipe.

He ripped it free completely, dropped it, and started crawling, dragging his failing body through the dirt and leaves like a dying animal. He collapsed just a few feet away, chest still leaking dark fluid into the earth

Mary stared at him for a long moment. Then her gaze shifted to me.

She came to one knee beside me and I understood what I must have looked like because her expression said it before her mouth did.

There’s no easy way to help this.

"Abram." She said my name the way people say names when they need you to still be there. "How do I help you?"

[You need Daphne. Her ability can manage the pain.]

[Vitality restoring. Tissue regenerating. This will take two days.]

Two days. I had a mission in three.

"Teachers’ quarters," I rasped, every syllable grinding through shattered ribs and punctured lung. "Find Daphne."

"Daphne?" she repeated.

"Tell her... tell her not to pani—"

My eyes closed before I finished the word and the forest took me.

***

It was dark and there was cold on my skin and something was wrong with the sounds outside. I was ten years old.

The abandoned house had seemed safe when we found it. Two rooms, one door, a window that looked onto a narrow corridor between the outer wall and the building.

We had surveyed it before we slept. My mother had said the corridor was risky if infected found you in it. We had decided the door was solid enough. It wasn’t.

"Abram." Her voice. "We’re surrounded."

I had been asking her what to do my whole life. Every dark night, every wrong sound, every morning that arrived without guarantee. She had always had an answer or the face that looked like she did.

"Mom." I sat up on the floor where we had slept. "What do we do?"

I’m ten, I thought, somewhere beneath the dream. Old enough to stop asking and start deciding.

The door took the first impact and held. The second one split the frame. My mother crossed to me and lifted me toward the window before I had finished standing, and I sat on the ledge and looked down into the corridor and behind me the door came open and the room filled with the sound of infected entering fast.

Her hands on my back.

"Run," she said.

I saw her fingers gripping the ledge as she tried to follow. Then I was falling and the corridor caught me and I ran.

"Abram."

A different voice.

"Abram."

****

I opened my eyes. Strange ceiling. Strange room. Morning light.

Daphne was looking down at me with the expression of someone who had been watching for a while and was relieved the watching had produced a result.

"Don’t move," she said. "Your bones are broken."

I was lying naked in her bed, covered by a thin sheet, which meant Mary Stam had carried me across the campus in the dark and delivered me and disappeared again without waiting for a thank you, which was exactly the kind of person Mary Stam had turned out to be.

[Vitality: Recovering.]

I lay still for one minute. The pain was present but managed, Daphne’s ability working on it from the outside the way the system worked from the inside, two different mechanisms aimed at the same problem.

Then reality crashed back in.

Vince Vale had been on his knees in that forest, chest torn open and leaking black blood.

I didn’t know if he was dead. I didn’t know if a stake through the chest was enough for something that old. I didn’t know if Mary’s aim had been accurate enough to hit what the page said you needed to hit.

What I did know was that a member of a powerful family was missing or dead, and I was missing, and those two facts together were going to produce questions before the morning was over.

And I had a mission in three days that required a body that could move.

"Daph," I said.

She turned from the doorway where she had been heading. I needed to think fast and I needed her to help me do it without panicking.

"Sit down," I said. "We have a problem."