She needed to get back to Mack, Brandon, and LeGrand. To warn them. She stretched her leg in front of herself, wishing she could take the damn thing off. Wishing she could run like she used to. Wishing a lot of things. Three minutes. She’d give herself three minutes to catch her breath, and then—
A shot rang out nearby. Not shooting at her, but shooting at someone not too far away. A voice of strangled confusion drifted on the air. Brandon. Safe to say he wouldn’t leave the hiding place without the others. Which meant they were on the move. Ava could join them.
But.
There was a gun somewhere along the fence.
She took stock of her supplies, what she could access, what she could use. She gently silenced the panic blaring in her mind and packed it away, because it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She had work to do.
* * *
—
Mack doesn’t throw her arms around Ava. She can’t believe what—who—she’s seeing. She stands there, staring, her eyes roving over Ava’s face like fingers, trying to memorize the contours, the freckles and scars and lines of a face she had thought was gone forever. She knows how fast she forgets, and she wonders what she had forgotten already in these few hours.
LeGrand is less emotionally overwhelmed. “You’re alive,” he says, walking up from his aborted escape route.
“Yeah. Let’s move.” Ava slings the rifle over her shoulder, hands him a bag of rubber duckies.
“No, we have to hide.” Mack feels slow and muddled, her brain still not caught up to this new development, this new tectonic shift in her reality. Why does Ava have rubber duckies? “Until dark.”
“It’s taking more than two a day,” LeGrand adds. Then he frowns. “Oh, except. It didn’t get you. That must be why it took Jaden.”
“How did you get away?” Mack looks like she’s staring at a ghost. She had never imagined this reunion, had never considered that something taken could be returned, and she doesn’t know how to process it. Maybe another person would have cried, hugged her beloved, felt happiness or relief.
Mack feels numb. She was finally at the end, and now…she doesn’t know what to expect. She had been sure she was going to win, then she had been sure she was going to die, and maybe in her head the two things had become one.
Ava shrugs. She sorts through her memories, reports what happened as though typing it up after the fact, removing herself and her emotions. Nouns, verbs, stripped of feelings. “Something ate Ava Two. I swung at it, but I didn’t hit anything, and since I couldn’t see it, I—”
“You couldn’t see it?” LeGrand asks.
Ava tilts her head, puzzled. “You could?”
Mack nods.
“What? Why can’t I see it? What did it look like?”
Mack understands now why Brandon couldn’t describe it. She ends up shrugging, too, echoing LeGrand’s movement. The monster is a weight on her shoulders, a psychic wound she worries will never scar over.
Ava’s frustrated, annoyed by their lack of helpfulness, and weirdly feeling left out. But she doesn’t have time. There is no time. “Fine. Whatever. You can tell me where to aim if we run into it. Where’s Brandon?” Ava looks around, expectant. They aren’t safe yet, not by a long shot, and she won’t stop until they are. She won’t feel until they are.
LeGrand shakes his head.
This one hurts, in spite of her determination. “The monster?” Ava’s worried now, too. Maybe it really is eating more than two a day, in which case waiting until nightfall makes more sense.
“No,” Mack says, and she doesn’t elaborate.
Anger flares in Ava’s heart. Whatever happened didn’t need to. Maybe if she had joined back with them immediately. But then they wouldn’t have a gun, wouldn’t have a plan. She made the right tactical choice. Stupid, sweet Brandon. All he had to do was wait. All they had to do was wait and trust that she—well, what? Trust that she would come back?
None of them have ever had that trust rewarded. Oh, Brandon. Ava takes the anger and the sorrow and tucks them away with the panic and the pain. Not now.
“Where did you find a gun?” LeGrand asks.
Ava’s itching to run, needs them all to move faster, to go faster, but she can’t push herself or her leg any more than she already has. She starts walking and they fall in with her. “Guard tower. I remembered the duckies from hiding with Mack.” She turns and winks at Mack, trying to draw her out. She needs everyone here, present. “Saved me twice over.”
Mack looks bad. She’s back to the Mack who wandered away, the Mack who left them. Empty. What had they seen that Ava somehow hadn’t? But this Mack, at least, walks close, offers her arm to Ava so Ava can lean on her and relieve some of the pressure on her ankle and knee. Mack is right here, but she isn’t, and Ava can’t have this, can’t have her people distracted, drifting. They have to focus. She has to get them out.
“Anyway,” she says, talking as though she’s not afraid, to show them that it doesn’t matter whether they whisper because they’re safe, she’s in control, she’s back and they’re going to be fine, “I found a stretch of fence without any guard tower sight lines. They probably assumed the electricity was enough. Made myself duckie gloves. Boots are already rubber-soled, thanks to my general practitioner, Doc Marten. Climbed over the fence, worked my way back to a tower. They switched shifts a couple hours back. The new guard stayed at the base smoking for a few minutes. Mean right hook.” Ava squints where she can feel a bruise forming on her cheek. She doesn’t mention it was someone they knew, the man from the diner. Not the really awful one. The other one. Didn’t matter who it was. “I won the fight, took his gun and his radio. No one has tried to check in yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they realize he’s gone.”
“Gone?” Mack asks.
“Him or us. I chose us.”
And Mack realizes Ava did. She was out. She faced death, she beat it, and she escaped. Outside the park, outside the fence, free and clear. And then she climbed back over and found them.
Mack feels number than ever. Ava should have kept running.
“Not that way,” LeGrand says in response to Ava’s direction. “That’s where we left Brandon and Jaden.” He doesn’t want to go there again. Not because he’s worried the monster is still lurking, but because he doesn’t want to see where it happened, doesn’t want to think about it.
Ava frowns. In this damn loopy park, it’s the most direct route to the section of fence they need. “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “They’ll be gone, right?” She doesn’t want to upset LeGrand or Mack any more than they already are, but they can’t risk wandering off course, like the paths want them to.