She sighed. Deep down, she knew that reasoning would never hold up under Sage’s and Ketty’s scrutiny, and certainly not the council’s. What kind of Endlan saved an outsider?

“Not an outsider,” she said out loud, trying to drown out the voices in her head. “A human being.”

After she’d collected herself, she resumed jogging at a more maintainable pace. She couldn’t call attention to herself, and she couldn’t be in a state of panic when she made it home. She would tell her family she’d heard the wolf, that she’d gone out to investigate and hadn’t found anything. A rabbit darted across her path, making her gasp, but aside from that, she saw no living creatures in the Forest. Most of them knew to stay away from the pine grove, at least the ones that had survived long enough to learn.

A bird flapped from a tree suddenly. Leelo froze, and in the silence, she heard the faint sound of someone talking.

Two someones talking.

She dropped down behind a bramble bush, listening. She must have veered closer to the trail than she realized.

Leelo would know her cousin’s voice anywhere, but it took her a moment longer to recognize the second voice.

Hollis.

“It’s quieter without her there. I guess I should have expected that. Violet was always complaining about something. She was small for her age, you know, so she couldn’t do what the other kids could. She was always falling behind and yelling for me to wait up.”

“And did you?” Sage asked.

“Only if my parents made me...” His words faded as they disappeared farther into the woods, and Leelo realized she’d been holding her breath to hear him. She exhaled raggedly and sat down all the way. Hollis must have taken over her Watcher shift when Sage woke up and found her missing. Leelo had never lied to her cousin before, and now she could see the lies she’d have to carefully weave together multiplying.

What she really wanted to do right now was go home and climb back into her bed. Mama would come and look in on her, pressing her cool palm to Leelo’s forehead to check for fever, the way she always did when Leelo was ill. She would bring warm honey-lemon water and a hot stone wrapped in a knit cover for her feet. She would sit by Leelo’s bedside and stroke her hair and sing something soft and meaningless, not a true Endlan song, just something she’d made up to soothe Leelo as a baby.

Leelo longed for those early days, before Tate was born and her father was dead, before Aunt Ketty’s meanness crystallized into amber, when she and Sage were two girls in pigtail braids with no cares in the world.

She couldn’t do any of that, but she had nowhere else to go.