He had limped a dozen more steps without direction. He could not outrun the dog. He had stared at the cistern—cemented stones, head high and round, fed by a joined-wood gutter funneling water down the hillside—then heaved his backpack up and over the rim. He had found toeholds up its mossy stone wall. He had cleared the rim and rolled in, cold water closing over him. The barking dog had sounded squeaky, trailing away. He had held his breath, heard Faith holler past, come up for air.

The dog was heading up the bluff behind the house, gathering its deep black haunches and exploding upward like a bear through brush and tumbling rocks, reaching the height where the sun still struck with setting light. Faith had carried the rifle past the cistern and ducked underneath the dripping wooden gutter that sluiced in the water. She couldn’t climb with the dog. She had whistled at it. Behind Sammy Lamb of God, Papa bawled a jumble of words and curses as he flailed without help through the meadow.

He had ducked back underwater and held his breath until he couldn’t. When he came up, Papa leaned against the cistern, wheezing, not three feet away. The dog descended in a cascade of loose rock. Papa had gasped at Faith, “Bring him back or it’ll be you.”

“Who’ll cook me?” she had growled in response. “Who’ll cook for you?”

“I’ll tear you like a vulture.”

He had ducked under again. When he came up, Faith and the dog were gone. Papa gasped horribly beneath the eaves of the house, spitting after every breath.

Underwater, he had put his backpack on and crab-walked to the opposite side of the cistern, where the water poured in. He had risen under the spout, chinned himself, thrown a leg over, heaved out, then scrambled up the gutter like a monkey as it zigzagged up through thick forest along the steep hillside. From where the gutter ended at the spring that fed the cistern, he caught a glimpse of Faith and the dog hunting him through the gray grasses at the high end of the meadow, like he was a pheasant.

He was hidden, but he had nowhere left to go. So he had waited there for night. Chickenshit, the voice had caught up to remind him. Cassie never ran from anything Cassie ran into the fire for her horses.

But you told me to jump.

Yes.

You told me to run.

Yes. And it is also me who chases you. I am them and I am hunting you. I am inside you and outside you now. I am everyone and everywhere. You can’t escape.

He had opened his backpack and taken the shattered highway reflector, had scraped and torn the skin of his forearms like Cassie taught him until they bled into the spring and gently trickling water was the only sound he heard.