The Run

The slope was steeper than it looked.

He went down it half sliding, half falling, with the bag banging against his hip and branches whipping his face. The track was little more than a deer path, a pale thread between the black trunks. Roots caught at his boots. Frozen leaves slid beneath them. Twice he went down on one knee, and twice he rose without feeling the pain.

The pines closed over him. The stars went out. In the dense dark he ran with both hands in front of his face, like a blind man, and the only sound in the world was his own breath, tearing in and out of his chest.

And behind him, the hymn.

It had begun again. He could hear it quite clearly, down through the trees, a long way off but not growing fainter. It had changed. It was no longer the slow sweet lullaby of the evenings. It was swifter, higher, full of a hard bright urgency, like hounds giving tongue. He knew the tune. He had sung it for seven nights. His feet found the beat of it without his willing them to, and he had to bite the inside of his cheek, hard, to break the rhythm.

Don't. Don't sing. Don't think the words.

Venite, hospes.

He ran faster.

…

The first light came after ten minutes.

A white wavering beam, far above him on the slope, swinging through the trunks. Then another. Then a third. They crossed and parted and fell, sweeping the black like the fingers of a blind man feeling a face. He heard voices. A shout.

"The gate's open! He's gone down the east track!"

Silas Ward.

His voice was higher than Cassian had ever heard it, and rough. He was running. Behind him came the heavier thud of two other boots, and a third, lighter. Prefects. Cassian had seen them on the wall on Sundays, strolling, hands behind their backs. They had looked bored. They did not look bored now.

He dropped the flashlight that Leo had given him. He had never used it. He went off the track to the right, into the thick of the trunks, and ran bent low, with his shoulder knocking against bark, until his foot found open air.

He fell.

Cold. It went through him like a hammer. It closed over his knees, his thighs, his waist, and for a second he did not know what had happened. His lungs locked. He opened his mouth to scream and nothing came out. Black water, ice-edged, ran fast and loud over stones, and he stood in the middle of it with his arms flung out, gasping, soaked to the chest.

The stream.

Cross it, Leo had said. Don't stop.

He waded. The current dragged at him. The stones rolled under his boots. He went fifteen feet along the middle, upstream, away from where he had entered, and then thirty, until the bank rose steeply on his left, and he scrambled up through the mud and the roots, and flung himself flat in a thicket of dead bracken, and lay there, shaking, with his teeth locked together.

The lights came down the slope.

They crossed the place where he had been. They paused. Silas's voice said, "Here. He's been through here." A hand parted the undergrowth. A beam stabbed down the bank and lay on the water, and he watched it from not ten yards away through a lattice of dead fern, and held his breath, and did not move.

"He's crossed," said a Prefect. "Lost the trail."

"He'll be upstream."

"Or down."

"Spread out," Silas said.

…

They fanned along the banks. Beams swept the trees. The sound of snapping twigs went away east, and west, and came back.

And then, across the stream, from the black wood on the far side, came a voice.

"Cassian."

It was soft, warm, unhurried. It was Tessa Quill's voice, and yet it was not the voice he knew, the flat, bright clip of a girl reciting a recipe. It was lower. It was sweeter. It rolled out of the dark as slow and rich as honey from a spoon.

"Cassian, darling. Where are you?"

He pressed his face into the cold earth.

"It's all right. Nobody's angry. We only want to bring you home." A pause. Beyond the rim of his sight, a footstep crunched the frozen leaf. "It's freezing out here. You'll catch your death. I've brought you a blanket. Come out, and we'll go back, and no one will ever speak of it. I promise. I swear on my mother's grave."

Don't answer.

"You were so good, Cassian. You were so good. You did everything right." The voice was closer. It was tender now, a little hurt, a little rueful, like a woman talking to a child. "I'm so proud of you. We all are. Don't you want to come home?"

His heart was banging against the ground.

Whoever it sounds like. Don't answer.

"Cassian?"

He thought, quite clearly: It's not her.

He did not know how he knew. It was in the pauses, he thought. In the space between the words. Tessa Quill had never in her life left a pause. The pauses in this voice were long, and breathing, and wet, and there was something moving in them, slow and delighted, that was listening for him to speak.

He pressed his hand over his mouth.

Time passed.

"Ah, well," sighed the voice, after a long moment. It was a very ordinary sigh. "Never mind."

The footsteps went away.

…

He ran for an hour.

He did not know how far. He lost the stream, and found a ditch, and lost the ditch, and plunged through a stand of bare saplings that clawed at his coat. His clothes froze on him. His hands lost all feeling. His breath came in short, hard, bright jabs that stabbed him under the ribs, and he ran bent over, holding his side, one boot dragging, the hymn still ringing faintly far behind, fainter, fainter, until he was no longer sure whether he heard it or only remembered.

He came out of the trees without warning.

Gravel. Then asphalt, black and hard, with a white line down its middle. A road. A real road, gleaming faintly under the stars, running off east and west into the dark. A mile post stood at the verge. A power line hummed.

He stood in the middle of it, with his chest heaving, and for a moment he could not do anything at all.

Far off, west along the road, two small lights appeared.

They grew. A low, grinding rumble came with them, the sound of gears, of a heavy engine climbing a grade. He stepped into the road and lifted both arms over his head and waved, and the lights swelled and blazed and flooded him with white, and the air-brakes hissed, and the great bulk of a flatbed truck loaded with logs slewed to a stop ten feet away.

The window rolled down.

An old man leaned out. He had a gray beard and a quilted cap with ear flaps, and a face like a walnut, seamed and brown. He looked at the boy in the road, soaked and filthy and shaking, with leaves in his hair. He didn't say anything for a moment.

"Well," he said. "I'll be damned."

"Please," said Cassian. His teeth were clacking so hard he could hardly shape the word. "Please. I need to get to Iowa."

The old man looked at him a moment longer. His eyes traveled over the frozen coat, the empty hands, the bag with its string. Something in them softened.

"Get in, son," he said. "Heater's on."

…

He sat with a blanket over his knees and a thermos in his hands and watched the road unroll in the headlights. The old man, whose name was Walt, did not ask questions. He turned the heater to high. He turned on the radio, low, a country song, a woman singing about a train. After a time he reached across and tucked the blanket tighter.

"Somebody after you?"

"I don't know," said Cassian.

"Well." Walt nodded slowly. "If they are, they'll have to catch us first. This old girl'll do sixty downhill."

Cassian laughed, and was surprised at the sound, and found his eyes streaming. He turned his face to the window.

The road bent. The trees fell away from the verge, and the valley opened beneath them, long and white with mist. In the mirror on the door, small and bright and far away, a gray spire stood up out of the fog, with a single red light burning in its crown.

It dwindled as he watched. The mist rose around it. The turns of the road swung it left, and left again, and closed it off behind the shoulder of a hill.

And then there was only the road, and the dark, and the sound of the radio, and his own heart, going on.