“But what if she comes back?” I demand. “It isn’t just about the bread. It’s about the food that got destroyed. It’s about the fact that she nearly suffocated Logan. She broke Emerson’s arm and bashed their head in.”

She took our food and the one person brave enough to care for our dead. She might as well have taken everything.

It’s about Josie attacking people I’m meant to protect.

If I think about it too hard, the fire that burns inside me is the same I felt when I pulled Ian off that girl in school. I saw her struggling. I realized he held one hand over her mouth and had the other pushed down her pants. I saw that she was hurting. And I hit him until my fists were sore. I kept punching and kept punching. I broke his nose. And his arm. My anger is a white-hot fire that will scorch everything in its wake, but I refuse to burn alone.

“So, what? We need to set an example?” Sofia very nearly hisses the words.

“Yes, is that so wrong?”

She spits on the ground. “You sound like the judge at my trial when you say stuff like that.”

The words are a blow to the stomach. I don’t have a response to it. I breathe out through my teeth. “It isn’t like that.”

“Isn’t it?” Sofia holds out her hand, and I nearly laugh and cry when I see what’s on her fingers. Bread crumbs.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say. “What a twisted fucking fairytale.”

“Well, here’s to living happily ever after, I guess,” Sofia says.

We follow the bread crumbs. Sofia leads the way. The wind buffets us and the trees. What was a sea of gold and orange and yellow around us has become a monotone landscape of barren trees and undergrowth. It’ll make our hunting and hiding all the more difficult.

We need to stock up on food—and protect it.

We turn onto the main road in the direction of the roadblock. None of us have gone here since the confrontation with the soldiers. Either Josie found a way past it, or there’s another route out of here.

The bread crumbs are few and far between, on a blanket of muddy-brown fallen leaves. Off the road and on again, and the closer we get to the roadblock, the more anxious I grow. I don’t want to be faced with the guards, with their guns or their determination.

I don’t want to be reminded of how we’re closed in and alone.

And with every step I take, that gnawing grows.

When we come up to the turn, I hold out my hand and brush Sofia’s arm. She stiffens and halts immediately. “What?”

“Maybe we should leave the road,” I suggest.

“The trail keeps going.”

“I know, but…” I wince. A strand of hair flies into my face, and I push it away. “It’s coming up to the roadblock where they killed Reid, that night when we all left the center.”