Gaby leapt out of bed. Automatically, as if she had done it every morning for the last three years, she pulled on her socks and sneakers, which she always kept by the side of the bed. She went to the closet and pulled out a backpack that was tucked into a back corner. Throwing on a rain jacket—it was not raining now, but it might later—she shrugged herself into the backpack, stuffed her phone in her pocket, and ran to the apartment door.
Quickly, before she had time to think and be afraid, Gaby wrenched open the door and looked out onto the landing. They lived on the third floor, with a set of outdoor stairs running from each side of the landing to the street. The night was still dark—she had not even looked at the clock—and the lights outside each apartment cast numerous shadows across the landing and down the stairs. There was too much shadow, she could not risk it. She took three quick steps across to the fire extinguisher, seized the hammer, and broke the glass.
Instantly an alarm jangled through the quiet night. This was the dangerous part. If they wanted her dead, now was their moment to strike. She stood in a pool of light, holding the hammer ready to swing, watching the ground around her feet. No shadows stirred. A minute later lights were coming on behind the blinds, and voices shouting and cursing behind the apartment doors. The door across the landing opened, and Gaby dropped her hand, holding the hammer casually at her side, as their neighbor Mrs. Bergstrom stepped out.
“What is it?” she asked blearily.
“I heard the alarm,” said Gaby. “I suppose we should go downstairs?” She wanted to get away quickly before Mrs. Bergstrom noticed the broken glass. Mrs. Bergstrom nodded slowly, and they went down the stairs together. They were joined on the second-floor landing by the Davises with their two small children, and another neighbor Gaby didn’t know.
“Is it a drill?” said Mrs. Davis. Downstairs, more people were gathering outside, looking curiously up at the building to see if there was any sign of smoke.
One of the first-floor neighbors came out swearing, then apologized as Mrs. Davis gave him a sharp look. “I’ve got a big meeting,” he muttered. “Up half the night anyway. Damn fire policies—sorry,” he muttered again.
Soon there were over a dozen people gathered downstairs, beginning to look restless as no sign of a fire appeared. Gaby judged that there were enough people there for safety, and started to edge away, just as the man who had a big meeting said, “This is ridiculous, we’re not students. If the fire department isn’t here in two minutes, I’m going back to bed. Catch me coming out the next time an alarm rings.”
“It’s to keep us safe,” snapped Mrs. Davis, as her two-year-old started complaining that he was hungry. The other neighbors looked uneasily at the two of them, and Gaby seized the opportunity to drop the hammer in a flowerbed and slip away. Once she was around the corner, she broke into a run. This was the other dangerous spot, the dim entrance to the apartment complex, and the small side street that ran up to the main road. She sprinted with an abandon that would have delighted her old coach, not allowing herself to listen for signs of pursuit, concentrating all her energy on getting to the main road, where there was light.
She reached the road safely, and slowed to a walk. Her heart was thudding, but it felt more like elation than fear. The approach of the hounds convinced her, as all her reasoning could not do, that it really had been Will who had come to her school and left that note for her. The chase had stopped, for her at least, when they had separated; now that they were together, it had resumed. The next few weeks or months might be restless and dangerous, but it would be the two of them, together, as it should always be.
She fervently hoped that nothing would happen to the apartment complex. In the early days of the chase, any place they had taken shelter was burnt to the ground within a day or two. She and Will had decided that this was most likely a tactic to keep them all on the run, and since she was already running, she hoped the complex might be spared. She supposed she had done them a disservice by setting off the alarm; they would be less likely to take it seriously if it sounded again today or tomorrow. Perhaps they could find a way to fix that, call in a bomb threat or something. But all that could wait until they were together again. After three years of having to do all the planning and analyzing herself, at last she would have her partner to meet and share ideas with again.
Walking quickly, Gaby came in sight of a Waffle House. Though she and her mother had been amused to observe that apparently Atlantans could not survive if there wasn’t a Waffle House within two miles, Gaby had recognized at once that they would be ideal if she ever had to put her emergency plan into action. It was a place to take shelter at any time of night, and armed with a textbook and notebook, she could stay there and drink coffee until it was safe to venture onto the streets again.
After her parents had picked her up at the airport, three years and a half ago, Gaby had spent the first four days in their new home curled up in her room, listening with terror for any sound of pursuing dogs, sleeping in fits and starts. On the fourth day she had broken into a fit of sobbing, and had cried violently for two hours while her parents, helpless and worried, had tried vainly to comfort her. Then she had slept for nearly a whole day, and when she’d woken, she’d packed this backpack with the essentials she’d need if she was forced to run again: clothes, a book or two, money, identification.
She checked the backpack every week to make sure its contents were safe, and took it with her every time she traveled. She always wore sweat pants and a T-shirt to bed, and kept a pair of sneakers ready by her bedside. Her parents had been uneasy about these things, but one of the therapists Gaby had gone to had advised them to let her do whatever she needed to feel safe. They, and the therapist no doubt, had assumed that as Gaby recovered from the shock she would stop compulsively preparing for an emergency departure; they had tried once, last summer when they’d moved to Atlanta, to suggest that she didn’t need the backpack any more, but Gaby had calmly contradicted them, and they had said no more about it.
And now, with the backpack bouncing comfortably against her back, here she was entering the nearest Waffle House in the dead of night. Just as she’d planned, except that instead of a catastrophe, it was a dream come true. She wasn’t fleeing alone into unknown terror; she was going off to meet a friend. The hounds were just an unfortunate side effect. Gaby slid into a booth and ordered her coffee.
Two plates of hash browns and many refills later, the street was lighter than the restaurant. Gaby packed away her books, and scanned the parking lot while she waited to pay her check. It was a grey morning, which was especially bad for her: the diffuse light would make it difficult to see shadows. But there were cars driving by steadily, and a few people already gathered at the bus stop across the street. The shadow-hounds had never attacked in the presence of other people. Even when it was just Gaby and the Colvens, she had only seen them attack that one time, with Hannah. Presumably they had attacked Will’s father and Paul, also, when the rest of the family had gone out to buy some necessities, but Will’s father had died and Paul vanished, so there was no one to tell what exactly had happened. All the knowledge they had to show for six weeks of terrified pursuit was that someone wanted them running, frightened, and isolated from anyone who could help them.
There was no way to be sure that the rules of the chase would be the same now as they had been three years ago, but Gaby thought she could count at least on the hounds’ still needing to remain concealed. A teenage girl being mauled by invisible dogs in the middle of a street would surely count as undesirable publicity to whoever was behind all this. So, taking a deep breath and telling herself firmly that there was nothing to fear for the moment, she stepped outside.
The air was cool and thick with moisture; it smelled of incoming clouds, of changing weather. Dark grey pavements and pale grey sky, the anemic light of a Dunkin Donuts sign across the street, red and blue raincoats huddled at the bus stop, all spoke to Gaby of a sullen, begrudging dawn. And here she walked through the middle of it, herself feeling more alive and awake than she had felt since she was eleven. This was her world now, hers and Will’s; the people on the bus would not know, could not dream, that they were being followed by invisible hounds. Gaby would know, but she would not be fearful. She had had plenty of time to work out a plan while sipping coffee at the Waffle House. For once, she would not be driven by the hounds: she would be leading them.
