He paused for only a second before turning and sprinting toward the tents. “Let’s go, everyone! Pack up, now! No time to hide our tracks, just grab your gear and run!”

I hunched over, hands on my knees, catching my breath, while the others flew around, tearing down tents and folding up tarps. In the corner of my eye, where the dust and floaters swam, all I could see was Mitch, his shoe, the crows I knew had arrived at the scene, and I couldn’t move.

I remembered when the Recruiters took Minerva from the old barn where we were hiding. She had insisted on staying on the ground while the rest of us nestled high in a hay-strewn loft, safely out of sight. I remember us finding old tin can lids she had kept and rolled into cones for a jingle dress that one day some girl would wear, when we were allowed to make noise again, when we were allowed to heal and dance and live. And the words Chi Boy had spoken came back to me right then.

Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one who’ll be alive to live it.

I stood up and started packing so we could run. This time, together.

CHAPTER 30

THE WAY HOME

Rose

ROSE REMEMBERED HER GRANDMA’S HOUSE ON THE rez. It was small, just a kitchen that opened onto a small living room, a bedroom with a twin bed and a dresser with broken drawers, and a tiny bathroom that consistently smelled like a bleached outhouse. The front mudroom was always crammed with boots, snowsuits, toboggans, and hunting gear. On the back porch was a stack of plastic chairs that sat under snow for months at a time and a round table rusted to leaning. There was a huge backyard her grandma refused to mow until one cousin or another dragged a mower up the dirt road and did it for her while she glared at them from the sliding doors. “All those flowers chopped up so I can have a golf course,” she’d mutter. “And I don’t golf, me.”

But Rose loved that backyard. She even built a small fort back there out of old wood pallets steadied against the gnarled trunk of an apple tree. Out there, she could be alone. No smaller cousins popping at her knees like corn, no rez dogs snouting her hands for scraps, no grown-ups pestering her to get something or do something or say something. But to reach it, first she had to get down the steps from the deck. They were rickety and wide, and the railing had long since rotted off. So she’d position her bum at the top and slowly descend, stretching each little leg out to touch the next step before carefully lowering herself onto it. This approach was a double-edged sword, since underneath the deck was the most terrifying place on earth. Damp and cold even in August, it housed sharp hedge trimmers long abandoned, antlers and skulls her great-uncles never got around to mounting, the skeleton of a snowmobile from the seventies, and boxes that had melted into a kind of tan flesh sculpture near the back.