Page 15 of Run Rabbit Run

Something kindles behind his eyes, approval, and I hate that I want to earn it and hate worse that some animal part of me already does.

"Ask."

"Weapons?"

"Carry whatever you like. I'd be disappointed if you didn't." He says it like a man discussing terms he's set a hundred times before, and the ease of that answers a question I haven't worked up the nerve to ask out loud yet. "I'll carry nothing that can kill you. This was never about killing you, Wren. Quite the opposite."

"How big's the ground? Can I leave it?"

"The land is fenced and posted and wider than you could cross in a night at a dead run, so the edges are no use to you. Look for them if you want. I won't stop you reaching them. You won't reach them." He gives it without a scrap of doubt, and doubt is the one thing I keep hunting for in him. It’s the one thing he never once hands over. "Water, shelter, the high ground, the caves along the north ridge. All of it's yours to use. Use it well."

"Can anyone come for me?"

"No one sets foot on my land who I haven't invited." The warmth drains out of it, and for a breath the pleasant mask goes thin enough that I see the flat rock underneath. "You come alone. You leave alone at first light, free, or you don't leave at all. Bring your friend into it, and I'll call the game forfeit and collect you where you stand, and she'll have been the reason. Are we clear?"

Your friend.

Not your brother. Not your family.

Your friend, singular, and the precision of it stops my breath, because he already knows exactly who I love most and exactly where the thinnest skin over my heart is.

He's set his thumb on it without once raising his voice.

Rue.

"We're clear," I say, and my voice comes out of some cold flat country a long way from my body.

"Good." The mask smooths back down. "Anything else?"

There's a hundred other things. There's my whole life.

But the rain's coming harder, my brother's shaking apart beside me, and I've already asked the only questions worth asking and gotten the only answer that matters underneath all of them, which is that he's walked every angle of this ahead of me and left the exits standing open on purpose, because he knows not one of them leads anywhere but back to his hand.

My mouth has gone dry. The storm-smell is thick now, close, and the first fat drops start to tick against the gravel around us.

"Why?" I manage. "Why go to all this? You could have anyone. You could buy anyone. Why me, why this⁠—"

"That's not a parking-lot question either." Something moves under the flat blue of his eyes, there and gone, and it's the first thing all morning I can't name, and not being able to name it scares me more than everything that came before. "Ask me again on Halloween. If you make it to dawn, you'll never have to hear the answer. If you don't, you'll have the rest of your life to think about it."

The rain starts in earnest. It comes down cold and straight and turns the gravel dark, and none of us move for it.

"How long do I have?" I hear myself say, and I hate that I've asked, because asking is already a kind of yes.

For the first time, Vane smiles all the way.

It's a beautiful, terrible thing, and it puts a cold weight behind my knees, the same drop I get standing at an edge with too much air below it.

"Ten days," he says. "Halloween. I'll send a car."

He turns up his collar against the rain he waited to let fall on me and not him, and he walks back toward the long black car, unhurried, a man who has never once had to run for anything in his life.

At the car door he stops and looks back.

Not at Luke. Never once, this whole time, at Luke.

"Train hard, Wren," he says, and there's something almost gentle in it, and the gentleness frightens me worse than anything else he's done all morning. "I want you at your best. It's no fun if you don't believe you can win."

The door shuts. The car pulls out slowly, tires hissing on wet asphalt, and I stand in the rain with my ruined brother and watch it go until it's nothing, until the road's empty and it's only the two of us and the water coming down.