“Run, Sera.”
Anger flares through me at the words. Screw him. I will not run from him. Not one more minute. I’ll walk away when I’m good and ready because it’s crystal clear he’s not hurting anyone anymore.
He nudges the paper with his chin, but it goes nowhere, just flutters to his lap, her face bending over one of his thighs. He makes a noise that I think is supposed to be a laugh and a sob all mixed together. It is a monstrosity of both. Bile blooms at the back of my throat.
“I thought it was you,” he says. “I thought you were down here, hiding. I thought—”
I look down at the girl who isn’t me. The memorial card from her funeral, I guess. Her face is framed in appropriately somber ivy, her smile frozen beneath the bloody stamp of Mr. Walker’s fingerprints.
Hannah Grace Soral. Beloved daughter and stepsister.
Stepsister. His stepsister? Is that what he thinks? Is that why he looked out for me? Fed me? Called me Darling?
“I am not Hannah!” The words fire out of me without warning. “I am Sera Khoury.”
I don’t know if it’s rage or exhaustion or some need to hold on to the truth of my identity, but I see it now. I understand. I am not this girl, and I am not my mother. I’m just Sera, a theater director and a mediocre student and a girl who’s going to survive this hell.
“I’m not your sister.” I feel better for saying it—lighter maybe because I know it’s over. I will not end here, a bloody heap in this forest like him.
Mr. Walker moves his head so slowly, chin back and forth. He’s shaking his head, but I look away. I’ve seen enough I don’t want to see.
It’s time to go back to Lucas.
“Run!” Mr. Walker cries out. “Before she comes—” A cough. Some awful, stomach-curdling noise in his throat that swallows up half of his next words. I catch all the sticky bits that come between his hacks. “—pushed me down—zipped me in—can’t move my legs—it’s the anniversary, Sera—she thinks you’re Hannah—she thinks Lucas—”
He cuts off with another soul-shattering hack and something about a deer, I think, but after that, he doesn’t speak again. I’ve already heard enough. I move closer, look at the spattered paper on his stomach.
She. He said she. Oh God. Was it really Madison? Did we leave her with Jude and Emily? Panic tingles through my limbs.
“Run, Sera!” he says again, dissolving into a fit of coughing that spatters the paper and the bags with more blood.
“Who did this?” My voice is nearly as shattered as his. “Who killed Ms. Brighton?”
He’s coughing too much to speak, to even breathe well, but he jabs his hands at the paper again and again. Flipping it over at last. The words on the back are hard to read, smeared brown-red and turning my stomach to a bag of worms.
He gives a groan, and I flinch away, but he’s not reaching for me. He’s holding it out, letting me see. I scan the rest of it, focus on the line he’s jabbing.
When I read it, the world tilts under my feet. My eyes lock with Mr. Walker’s. He doesn’t have to tell me again to run.
Chapter 31
I slip, bashing my elbow, smacking my knees into a jagged rock. Up! Get up!
I’m on my feet. Climbing. My knees are weak, my muscles like Silly Putty. Like my old dollies that wouldn’t sit up or stay standing. I should not stumble like this. I cannot fall. I can’t.
I judge wrong in the dark of the crevice, and my foot slips. I reach to catch myself and drop the flare gun. It clatters and bangs all the way down the tunnel, landing somewhere at the bottom. I leave it.
There’s no time. I move forward again, bracing myself on the walls on either side, though pain slices through my bad palm and up my arm. I bite back my cry. Keep going. Just go.
I move up, one rock, then another, then the ground goes level, and I am out. Birdsong descends with a soft occasional patter from high above. I tear out from the gap between the stone outcrops, the not-a-bridge, the not-a-canyon, the not-a-path. Out of the cave where a man is dying and the truth took my legs out from underneath me.
A fat raindrop slaps into my forehead. Another on my arm. They feel like tears and burn like shame. How did we get it so wrong?
No. Don’t think about that now. Find Lucas. Make sure he’s OK.
My heart is pounding double time as I search. Trees, trees, the quad. Lucas.
He’s dozing where I left him, sweat-damp hair over his eyes and those soft lips parted in sleep.
My heart swells, and there is no time for me to think—not of the things I want or the fact that I can’t understand why I spent sixty-two days avoiding this face or all the kisses we shared in the last two days. But I think of all those things as I cross to him now.
I could have lost him. God, I could have lost him before I know what it means to have him in my life.
You could still lose him if you don’t move.