“I’m suggesting we get the hell out of here,” Warden replies. “We can hike it. I remember from the map, there’s a way out of here, around the backside of the Raven’s Claw. There’s a highway, like, twenty miles north.”

Kyla groans. “Twenty miles?”

“It’s not hard,” Warden says. “We just follow a river. We’ve got enough food to make it, and we’ll have a couple days’ head start on whoever comes looking for us.”

“And then what?” Dawn asks. “Are we supposed to just, like, hitchhike back home?”

Warden sighs, like the way your teacher sighs when you’re just not getting a concept. “You need to stop thinking about this as just a speed bump on the way back to normal,” he tells her. “If we get out of these woods, Dawn, we’re not going home.”

Dawn doesn’t say anything. Her head’s spinning.

Warden looks at Kyla.

“Kyla, when we get out of here, you never have to worry about your mom’s stupid boyfriend again, or the judge who sent you. Just go off and do something new; whatever you want.”

He turns to Lucas. “Bro, you can forget about the army, or whatever your dad wants. Make your own life. Fucking take control, right?”

Lucas nods, though it’s clear the idea of telling his dad to fuck off kind of terrifies him.

“Alex, you’re new, and, Brielle, you hardly ever speak, so I don’t really know either of you, but once we get out of here, you can do whatever it is you want to do,” Warden says. “And, Brandon and Evan? You guys can, shit, I don’t know. Give each other handjobs in a truck stop bathroom or something, whatever you’re into.”

Nearly everyone laughs. Even Brandon and Evan, though Dawn notices they refuse to look at each other.

Then Warden turns to Dawn. “Dawn,” he says, “listen. You want to see your nana, right? Wouldn’t you rather be in Chicago than here?”

Dawn doesn’t answer.

“We can go to Chicago,” he says.

Brandon and/or Evan makes an ooooh noise like Warden just told Dawn he has, like, a crush on her.

Warden shoots them the finger. “Not like that, assholes,” he says. “Just, like, we’ll hitchhike, or something. Scrounge up money for the Greyhound. We’ll go to Chicago. You can visit your nana. Isn’t that better than just going home?”

It is better.

It’s so much better.

Warden has her, and he knows it.

Dawn wants to see her nana so bad it nearly makes her cry to think about it, and now that Warden’s mentioned how the Out of the Wild people will probably get them in trouble once they figure out what happened here—

(and let’s be real, it would totally not be beyond Christian to try to rewrite history and blame the Bear Pack for what happened)