Where the Lost Things Grow
The dusk comes down through the canopy like something poured, thick and violet, and Red moves beneath it the way a wounded animal moves—close to the ground, flinching at sound, trusting nothing.
Her bare feet find every root, every thorn, every stone that the fading light conceals. She has stopped feeling the cuts hours ago. What she feels instead is the hollow ache behind her ribs, the kind that comes from three days without food and longer still without sleep, and beneath that ache, a deeper one that has no name but feels like being erased.
The cap of fungus that grows along her scalp, where other girls might have hair, pulses faintly with each breath she draws. It brightens when her pulse climbs, dims when she manages to still herself, and lately it never dims enough. She has learned this about herself the hard way: fear makes her glow, and glowing in the dark is the surest way to be found by whatever doesn't want to be avoided.
Somewhere off to her left, something shifts the underbrush. Not wind. Wind doesn't pause mid-motion the way this does, doesn't seem to be listening for her the way this does.
Red freezes, pressing her spine to the trunk of an ancient oak whose bark…
