He ran *east*, or what he hoped was east, the rabbit still in one hand because his brain hadn't caught up enough to drop it. The forest blurred past him. His Athletics kicked in hard — every footfall finding the right place by some skill he hadn't trained for, every duck under a branch executed before his eyes registered the branch. He had never run like this in his life. The video-game body that had walked into a literature class two days ago could not have run like this. Something between Athletics and Sixth Sense was *driving* him.

He could feel them behind him.

Three separate signatures. Closing. Moving in a pattern that wasn't a chase so much as a *coordination*, two of them flanking wide while the third drove him forward. Hunters. Real ones.

(*If they get me in the open I'm dead.*)

(*If they get me on the ground I'm dead.*)

(*Up. Up up up.*)

He looked desperately for a tree he could climb.

The trees were too big. Their lowest branches were too high. He was not — he was *aware* in a small clear far-off corner of his mind — going to be able to climb up before they reached him.

Something to his right went *fast*. Faster than he could see clearly. A blur of dark fur and reflected eyes — yellow-green-red, multiple, glittering — that paced him for three strides through the trees and then *cut in*.

He felt the strike before he saw it. Sixth Sense screamed. He twisted hard sideways — too late — and four claws raked across his left side, just under the ribs.

The pain was immediate. Sharp. Hot.

He stumbled, didn't fall, caught a tree with his free hand and kept moving. Wetness ran down his side under the robe. The wound was — he couldn't look — deep enough to feel. Not deep enough to gut him. Yet.

The thing that had cut him was already gone, vanished back into the trees on the other side. Repositioning. They were *playing* with him. They were experienced at this and he was not.

(*A tree. ANY tree.*)

There — ahead and slightly left — a tree with a low broken branch he could just reach. He veered. His foot slipped on moss and he almost went down and recovered and ran the last three strides at a sprint.

He sheathed the dagger in his right hand — one quick motion, hilt slapping home — because he was going to need both hands in a moment, and if he dropped a blade in what was coming next he would never find it again.

He activated *Shadow Step*.

Into the shadow under the broken branch. Then again, immediately, no recovery — into the shadow at the fork halfway up the trunk. Then again, the third time in sixty seconds, his stomach screaming, his vision flickering at the edges, into the shadow at the top of the canopy.

He landed hard on a branch sixteen meters above the ground and almost fell off it. He caught himself with both arms. Both daggers still sheathed at his belt. The rabbit had fallen somewhere along the way and he hadn't noticed.

He retched once, dry and hard, over the side of the branch. Nothing came up but bile.

Below him, in the dark of the lower forest, something arrived at the base of the tree.

He saw two eyes first. Then the rest of the head. Then more eyes — two more sets, paired up with the first, three creatures at the base, all of them *looking up*.

They were big. Black-furred. Long-bodied. He couldn't see them clearly in the dim — they kept slipping in and out of the gloom like the gloom belonged to them. The eyes were the worst part. The eyes did not blink.

One of them made a low chuffing sound. Another answered. The third paced once in a slow circle around the trunk.

They knew he was up here.

They couldn't reach him.

But they knew.

He pressed himself flat against the trunk and pulled the hood deep over his face and activated *Conceal Presence* without any intent, no kill in his head, just *please stop seeing me*. He held very still. His side was bleeding through the robe. The blood was running down into his belt, into his trousers, hot and then cool against his skin as it spread.

The creatures stayed at the base of the tree for a long time.

Eventually, slowly, with the kind of patience that meant *we will be back*, they melted back into the trees and were gone.

Dante stayed in the canopy.

He didn't move.

He didn't dare.

The first gray of dawn was just beginning to filter through the leaves above him.

---

He came back to himself slowly.

The sky had gone from black to gray. The dark below him had thinned from absolute to merely *bad*. Birds had started up again — the small ones, the daytime ones, the ones that did not announce themselves to predators — and somewhere very high above him a single thin shaft of pale morning light was beginning to find its way down through the canopy.

He had been holding the same position for hours. Both hands locked on the bark. His left hand under the robe was *wet*. Had been wet for a long time. The wet had gone tacky in the cold and was beginning to feel less like blood and more like a layer of something wrong glued to his skin.

[Dante.]

ALICE's voice was very gentle. Lower than he'd heard it before.

[Dante, you need to look at the wound.]

(*I know.*)

[Now. While there is light.]

He moved his hand. Very carefully. The robe peeled away from the side of him with a small wet sound and a fresh wave of cold air on the wound and a pain that was not new but was *louder* now that he was paying attention.

He looked.

Four lines, parallel, under the ribs on the left side. Each one as long as his hand. The two outer ones were shallow. The two inner ones had gone *into* something. Not muscle deep — he could see, in the gray light, that the cuts were maybe a centimeter at the worst point — but the edges had stopped trying to close. The blood had thickened at the surface but was still slowly seeping from the deeper parts. The skin all around it was an angry pink that he did not like the look of.

(*Right.*)

(*How bad.*)

[Bad enough that we need to deal with it now. Not bad enough that you are dying. Yet.]

(*Yet.*)

[Infection in this kind of forest is not a question of if. It is a question of when. Without disinfectant — which we don't have — and without sutures — which we don't have — there are exactly two things that can stop a wound like this from taking your life over the next few days. Cleaning it as best we can. And cauterizing it.]

(*Cauterize it.*)

[Yes.]

(*With what.*)

[The flat of a dagger. Heated.]

A long silence.

(*That sounds like the worst thing I have ever done to myself.*)

[It will be. I'm sorry. There is no easier answer. If there were, I would tell you.]

He sat with it for a while.

Then he started gathering what he needed.

---

He lowered himself carefully to a wider fork of the tree about three meters down — the branch he had landed on was too narrow for what he needed to do — and made himself a small flat platform of dead wood and accumulated debris that had collected in the join of two branches over what was probably years. The platform was not large but it was *flat enough*.

ALICE walked him through it.

She did it the way someone who knows things walks someone through them when there is no time for anything but exact instructions. *Two pieces of wood — one flat with a small notch, one a thin straight stick.* He found them in the deadfall caught in the lower branches. *A handful of the driest tinder you can find. Last year's leaves, broken up.* He had those. *A small ring of bark or stone to contain the fire — you cannot, under any circumstances, set the tree on fire.* He pried some bark loose from the trunk and arranged it in a circle on the platform.

The friction took a long time.

His hands were not strong. His arms were tired. His side hurt every time he leaned forward, which was every time he turned the stick. ALICE coached him on the angle, the speed, the *consistency* of pressure — *not faster, more even*. After what felt like an hour of nothing, his palms blistered. After what felt like another hour, smoke began to curl up out of the notch.

He fed it tinder with shaking fingers and it caught.

A small flame. Tiny. Yellow-orange. Real fire in a tree six meters up in a hostile forest after two days of nothing going right.

He almost laughed.

[Competence acquired: Survival → Lv.1.]

He fed the fire carefully — small pieces only, never enough to make smoke that would carry or flame that would be seen from below — and when it was steady he drew one dagger and put the flat of the blade into the heart of it.

He waited.

ALICE was quiet during the wait. He appreciated that.

The blade turned dull red. Then orange.

He pulled it out.

He looked at it. The edge of the blade was glowing. The flat — the part he was going to press against his own side — was a dull angry red that he could feel the heat of from a half-meter away.

[Dante.]

(*Yeah.*)

[The cuff of the robe, left sleeve. Bite down on it. Hard. You cannot scream. They are still hunting in this forest. If they hear you, they come back.]

(*I know.*)

[I am here. The whole time. I am not going anywhere. You will not be alone for this.]

A pause.

(*Thank you.*)

[Quickly. The blade is cooling.]

He gathered the cuff of the robe between his teeth. He bit down. He set his right hand on the hilt of the dagger. He pulled the side of the robe up and out of the way. The wound in the gray morning light was uglier than it had been in the dark — the skin around it was hot and tight and the inner two cuts had a faint *yellow* tint at the edges that he was not going to think about right now.

He pressed the flat of the dagger against the worst of the wound.

There were no words for it.

There was only a sound — a *T-S-S-S-S-S-S-S* of meat against hot iron — and the smell of it, instantly, in his nose: *cooking*. His own meat cooking. The pain was not a stab, was not a burn, was not anything he had a word for — it was a *whiteout*, an absolute deletion of every part of him that had been thinking about anything other than this. The cuff of the robe between his teeth was no longer sufficient. He bit through it. He bit into the inside of his own cheek and tasted blood. Tears poured out of his eyes in sheets, hot and immediate, blurring the wound he could not even see anymore through the white static of the pain.

[Hold. Hold. Hold.]

ALICE's voice, very steady, very close, like a hand on his shoulder he could not feel.

[Three seconds. You're at one.]

(*I can't —*)

[Two.]

(*Please —*)

[Three. Pull it off. Now.]

He pulled the dagger off.

The pain did not stop. The pain *transformed* — from the white absolute deletion of contact into the deeper darker red of a wound that has been *changed*, has been made into something else. He fell sideways against the trunk of the tree. His vision narrowed at the edges. The dagger, still red-warm, dropped onto the platform and almost rolled off the edge before he caught it with a hand he didn't remember moving.

He breathed.

He breathed.

He breathed.

He did not scream. He had promised himself he would not scream. He had promised ALICE. The promise was the only thing keeping him from screaming. He bit down on the half-shredded cuff of the robe and breathed through his nose and did not scream and the world slowly, slowly, *unwhitened* around him.

[Wound: Cauterized.]
[Infection: Slowed significantly.]
[Healing: In progress.]

His face was wet. His hands were shaking so hard the fire below him flickered.

[You did it,] ALICE said. The voice was not bright. It was not *proud*. It was — exactly what he needed — quiet and accurate. [It's done. The worst part is over.]

(*Is it.*)

[The worst part of the cauterization is. Yes. There is more to do, but it is smaller.]

(*Okay.*)

(*Okay.*)

He let himself collapse forward against the trunk for a long time.