Chasing the Valley by Skye Melki-Wegner Read Free Book Online Page A

when the guards were chasing me I knew where they were. Now, though, I have no idea whether I’m being watched. I can’t see smoke from Rourton any more – I’ve travelled too deep into the forest. The canopy is thick and bushy enough to block out most of the moonlight. All I can hear is the rustle of the leaves, and once the cry of a distant owl.
    The world is black. I am alone.
    Now that the terror of the chase is over, and my numbness from the freezing water is fading, I’m rewarded with a surge of pain from my shoulder. It’s sharp and hot, still injured from my slip down the wall.
    To ignore the pain, I recite my times tables in my head. My parents were obsessed with education. They wanted me to learn my way out of downtown Rourton, I think. And so the tables come back to me in a rush, echoed in my mother’s sing-song voice like a lullaby: Five times three is fifteen, five times four is twenty, five times five is twenty-five . . .
    Five.
    There are five other teenagers in these woods tonight. I wish I could find them. But the forest seems endless: a sea of black that rolls across the horizon as if to reach the very edges of the contin­ent. There’s nothing in the world except this forest, this night, and the nervous hitch of my breath in the dark.
    Five times six is thirty . . .
    If I found them somehow, if I joined them, we would be a crew of six. That’s assuming that they’re all still alive and haven’t been captured by the guards. Not likely.
    Eventually, I can’t stand the pain in my shoulder any longer. I fall to my knees in the mud and shove a bundle of twigs between my teeth. I have never re-set my own shoulder before, but the blacksmith did it for me once and I think I remember the process. And this dislocation isn’t as bad as the first time; my tendons have already been stretched by the old injury.
    It helps that I can’t see. The darkness allows me to disconnect from my fear. I wrap my hands around a raised knee, intertwine the fingers and stretch back my neck. For a moment, I can’t bring myself to move. I just sit there in the darkness, half-convinced that I’m already dead. But the stink of rotting leaves is too potent and my skin is still cold with the remaining ditch water. This is real. I have to do this.
    I thrust my shoulders forward. There is a click and the mouthful of twigs muffles my scream. I spit out the twigs and force myself to my feet.
    Finally I find a hollow log half-submerged in mud and leaf litter. Well, I trip over it. After a few moments of stunned pain and silence, I remember to breathe again. Then I stumble along to an opening at its end, use my fingers to trace its length in the dark and shove myself inside like I’m stuffing a sausage. My shoulder still burns, so I’m careful to keep that side of my body facing upwards. There’s a scatter of frantic claws at the log’s far end, suggesting I’ve startled a rodent from its lair.
    It’s not a very good hiding place – in fact, it’s painfully obvious, and I probably smashed a clear path for my pursuers while I blundered through the night. But at least it’s a shield from the wind, and from the shine of a hunter’s lantern.
    And so, inside my log, I wait in silence for dawn.
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    I wake slowly, dazed and disorientated, struggling to remember how I ended up in this tube of rotting wood. My body is numb, except for my aching shoulder, and some kind of sharp wire is poking into my belly. The fuse of a signal flare. Slowly, I remember my desperate journey last night.
    I must have dozed for several hours. It’s now early morning and sunlight filters down through cracks in the log. I hear a noise. A crunch.
    Footsteps.
    I hold my breath. How have they found me?
    The footsteps crunch closer. A shadow blots out the light coming through the cracks in the log, as through someone is looming right above my hiding place.