No, they all said. Couldn’t happen. She would die.

The Lost Girl. Dead according to everyone who spun a tale about her. It was impossible for a girl to survive out in the Ruin alone. Everyone knew that. There were too many dangers. Zoms and wild animals and bounty hunters. There were crazed loners and cannibals and a thousand different kinds of disease.

Stupid stories, she told herself. Except at night, when she thought about them in the private darkness of her bedroom, in the one place where she was safe enough to be weak. That was when she cried. That was when she believed that she was living on borrowed time—alive only because death had considered her too insignificant to pause long enough to collect.

Except that death collected everyone. Death is like that. Relentlessly efficient.

Borrowed time is no place to live.

Lilah had often feared that they were right.

Now she was sure they were.

That was the only thought that would fit into her head as she lay suspended in darkness.

She remembered the boar. Feral, massive. Four hundred pounds at least.

Both dead and deadly.

But animals can’t become zoms. It doesn’t work like that.

Unless, somehow, it does.

The Lost Girl should not be alive.

Unless, somehow, she was.

For now.

It felt like she was falling and yet not falling. Pinpricks of pain held her aloft, and for a long time she could not understand that.

Little points of pain all along her body. Except for her hands, which hung down into the black well of nothingness.

Above her, she heard the grunt of the boar and the scuff of its hoof on the edge of the rocky shelf. Then dirt and loose stones tumbled down, striking her face and chest and stomach and thighs. She heard a rustling sound as the debris fell past her. It sounded like foliage, like pine boughs and vine leaves being pelted by rain.

She forced one eye to open. It was smeared with blood, and what little she saw was filtered through red. She blinked and blinked until tears ran pink from the corners of her eyes. Above her—thirty feet at least—the snout of the dead boar protruded over the edge of the stone shelf. That meant that . . .

Panic flared in her heart, and it brought with it a fresh burst of adrenaline, and with adrenaline came clarity.

She knew where she was.

She was suspended in a tangle of dense trees and tall shrubs, caught in the midst of her fall. Temporarily held, as if fate was waiting for her to wake up and pay attention as death made his call to collect her.

Lilah tried to move, to lift her arms, and suddenly the whole assembly of branches shifted with her. Pinecones rained down on her. Angry birds fled the trees.