They both got down as low as they could and moved in a kind of commando glide, cutting through the thicker foliage. Crawling under a knot of old oak and maneuvering around an overgrown blueberry bush, Rose finally saw the tent. It was green, and the front flap was open and blowing in the breeze. The movement startled them, and they held their breath, but when no one emerged, they moved forward.

There was no use in avoiding a settlement. It was always better to find than to be found. If you were the finder, you set the rules of engagement. Being found meant being surprised, and all power was lost. Beside the first one was another tent, orange and crushed under the weight of a fallen branch so that it sagged and billowed like a plastic bag. Opposite the pair was a third, yellow and zipped up tight. On the ground was some debris—a cracked plastic pail with the handle pulled loose, a striped sweater sprawled out like a chalk outline, an empty juice bottle. None of it was a good sign. It had the feel of quick abandonment. Out here, you didn’t leave your trash behind, let alone your shelter. Only one thing could’ve made people leave that fast.

Rose felt a rush of excitement in her dread. If Recruiters had been through here, so deep in the bush, maybe that meant they were getting close to the school. Surely they wouldn’t have ventured too far on foot, and there was no way a van could have gotten through this tangle, not even close.

Derrick caught her eye and silently motioned for her to take cover behind a massive trunk several feet away. That way they’d have two sight lines. She lowered to her belly and made her way over. Once she was hidden, she turned back to the camp, watching, waiting. And then a feeling was released into her blood. It was cold and heavy and moved quick like a hungry snake. Panic—useful when you have to run, but deadly when you have to think. It wound its way up her spine and made her fingers numb. Something was up.

When Rose was young, she had lived with her grandmother and two great-uncles. They’d taught her everything she needed to know about what was to come by teaching her everything she needed to know about what had already come. It had been a childhood full of lessons, like Bush Life 101. Her grandmother, always the most stubborn person in any room, had sent Rose off with her uncles when she became too frail to travel, insisting she’d be fine. It was almost a year before Rose had been able to accept that the old woman wasn’t playing bingo with her friends on the rez, that she wasn’t cooking bread in her small woodstove, that she was, in fact, dead in the shed where they’d left her. She’d stayed with the old men until, one at a time, they’d gotten sick and died. She’d buried her last living relative before setting off on her own, wrapping his old bones in his favorite Pendleton before returning them to the earth. And then she was alone, out in the woods and getting by just fine. Maybe not fine, but well enough. She ate when she was hungry. She bathed when she found water. And she listened to everything—the way the wind turned around a body, the way the birds shifted their songs depending on incoming weather. The way a footstep echoed like ground thunder if you really didn’t want to hear a footstep. The one sound she had never learned in all that time alone before she found Frenchie and the others was the way your heart beat in your ears in the moment you prepared for your worst fears to come true.