“No.” My response was instantaneous. Understanding my own reasoning took longer. “If I unpack, that means we’re staying.”

Free waited.

“If we’re staying, that means that we haven’t found Bella yet.”

I caught Free up on the evidence Saskia and I had uncovered, but the entire time, I kept thinking that I hadn’t done enough. I’d let Cady send me packing. I’d let her tell me that I needed rest.

I should have fought harder.

Free didn’t let me wallow for long. “Flip you for the bed?” she said. She glanced meaningfully at the double. “Unless you’d prefer to cuddle.”

I walked over to the still-open window. The breeze was cool, the mountain temperature falling steeply. Cady was out there, searching.

Bella was out there.

And I’m not.

“Bed’s all yours,” I told Free.

On nights like these, I preferred the floor.

Chapter 14

Girl shouldn’t have eaten the berries. She lurches forward, stomach on fire. Hurts. It hurts. Everything inside her comes up.

Again. And again.

Finally, she collapses. She can smell the sick—smell it everywhere. Girl trembles, tries to push herself to all fours.

Bad things.

Bad things happen with that smell. She has to get away before—

I woke crouched in the corner, my hair stuck to my face with sweat. Moonlight kept the room from utter darkness. I could make out the outline of Free’s form on the bed. Slowly, I remembered where I was, when I was.

“Kira.” I whispered my own name under my breath. Over and over, I said it, an audible reminder of who I was—and who I wasn’t. Slowly, I came back to myself.

One to ten? I could hear Cady asking. Eight. It had been months since the last nightmare, years since I’d had one that vivid. That real. I didn’t need any of the specialists I’d seen as a child to tell me that the hunt for Bella had triggered something in me.

The last psychologist Cady had taken me to—the only one who hadn’t made me feel like an animal trapped in a hole—had told me that she could help me remember, if that was what I wanted.

She’d also told me that the brain repressed memories for a reason.

I pushed myself off the floor, digging the heels of my hands into the wood floor harder than I had to. I stalked out of the room and down the stairs. I needed space. I needed air.

I needed to breathe.

But as my hand closed around the knob on the front door, I heard the murmur of voices coming from the kitchen and turned toward them.

“You won’t sleep tonight.” Ness’s voice was matter-of-fact. Without meaning to, I crept toward it, in time to hear the reply.

“Cady knows her way around the wilderness.”