Not going to happen. There had been a time in my life when people were convinced I couldn’t talk. If Gabriel was waiting for me to break, he was going to be waiting for a very long time.

It took half an hour to reach the forest’s edge. In that time, Saskia covered more ground than a human searcher could in an entire day—and found nothing. As the tree line broke and the three of us stepped out onto a rocky ledge, I realized that Gabriel hadn’t been exaggerating when he said that the search area was bounded on one side by cliffs.

The drop-off wasn’t just steep; it was deadly. Like the gods had sawed the edge of the mountain off with a knife. Rocks jutted out from the cliff’s side, and a light fog rose up from the valley, obscuring my view of the bottom, a thousand feet below.

Without meaning to, I walked closer to the edge and looked down. My heart didn’t beat faster. It didn’t jump into my throat. I thought about Bella Anthony, about how her story could end with a drop-off like this.

Girl is running. She bolts through the forest. She’s bleeding, stumbling. The memory hit me like a wave, but it was the undertow that pulled me down, down, down—

Can’t look back. Can’t stop. Girl is supposed to stay hidden. Brush bites at her face, arms, legs, but she can’t stop. Girl can never stop.

And then she needs to, and it’s too—

A sharp pain pulled me from the flashback. I looked down to see Saskia beside me, her teeth locked around my hand. She’d nipped once, hard enough to draw blood, but her grip was softer now—solid, implacable, but not painful as she pulled me back from the cliff’s edge.

It wasn’t until an instant later that I realized just how close I’d been standing, the tips of my toes hanging over the ledge. I took a step back, and gravel and dirt skittered over the side of the mountain, dropping soundlessly into the vast nothingness below.

A masochistic part of me held tight to the snatch of memory that had taken over my mind a moment before. I remembered running. I remembered the feel of a predator bearing down on me, the feel of being prey. I remembered skidding over uneven ground.

I remembered falling—and waking up in the ravine below.

Beside me, Saskia yipped sharply—just once, not an indication of anything other than her annoyance at my distraction.

Find. Play. That was what we were here to do. That was the mission.

“Yeah,” a low voice said behind me. “What she said.”