in your calf, the worst pain of all in your Van Gogh ear. Ignore the way your arms and legs are trembling. Get going. But first . . .
He drew his fisted right hand back to his shoulder and flung the scrap of flesh in which the tracker was still embedded over the fence. He heard (or imagined he heard) the small click it made as it struck the asphalt surrounding the playground’s paltry excuse for a basketball court. Let them find it there.
He began to walk, eyes up and fixed on that one single star.
21
Luke had it to guide him for less than thirty seconds. As soon as he entered the trees, it was gone. He stopped where he was, the Institute still partly visible behind him through the first interlacing branches of the woodlands.
Only a mile, he told himself, and you should find it even if you go off-course a little, because she told Avery it’s big. Fairly big, anyway. So walk slowly. You’re right-handed, which means you’re right-side dominant, so try to compensate for that, but not too much, or you’ll go off-course to the left. And keep count. A mile should be between two thousand and twenty-five hundred steps. Ballpark figure, of course, depending on the terrain. And be careful not to poke your eye out on a branch. You’ve got enough holes in you already.
Luke began walking. At least there weren’t any thickets to plow through; these were old-growth trees, which had created a lot of shade above and a thick layer of underbrush-discouraging pine duff on the ground. Every time he had to detour around one of the elderly trees (probably they were pines, but in the dark who really knew), he tried to re-orient himself and continue on a straight line which was now—he had to admit it—largely hypothetical. It was like trying to find your way across a huge room filled with barely glimpsed objects.
Something on his left made a sudden grunting sound and then ran, snapping one branch and rattling others. Luke the city boy froze in his tracks. Was that a deer? Christ, what if it was a bear? A deer would be running away, but a bear might be hungry for a midnight snack. It might be coming at him now, attracted by the smell of blood. God knew Luke’s neck and the right shoulder of his shirt were soaked with it.
Then the sound was gone, and he could only hear crickets and the occasional hoo of that owl. He had been at eight hundred steps when he heard the whatever-it-was. Now he began to walk again, holding his hands out in front of him like a blind man, ticking the steps off in his mind. A thousand . . . twelve hundred . . . here’s a tree, a real monster, the first branches far over my head, too high up to see, go around . . . fourteen hundred . . . fifteen hun—
He stumbled over a downed trunk and went sprawling. Something, a stub of branch, dug into his left leg high up, and he grunted with pain. He lay on the duff for a moment, getting his breath back, and longing—here was the ultimate, deadly absurdity—for his room back in the Institute. A room where there was a place for everything and everything was in its place and no animals of indeterminate size went crashing around in the trees. A safe place.
“Yeah, until it’s not,” he whispered, and got to his feet, rubbing the new tear in his jeans and the new tear in his skin beneath. At least they don’t have dogs, he thought, remembering some old black-and-white prison flick where a couple of chained-together cons had made a dash for freedom with a pack of bloodhounds baying behind them. Plus, those guys had been in a swamp. Where there were alligators.
See, Lukey? he heard Kalisha saying. It’s all good. Just keep going. Straight line. Straight as you can, anyway.
At two thousand steps, Luke started looking for lights up ahead, shining through the trees. There’s always a few, Maureen had told Avery, but the yellow one is the brightest. At twenty-five hundred, he began to feel anxious. At thirty-five hundred, he began to be sure he had gone off-course, and not just by a little.
It was that tree I fell over, he thought. That goddam tree. When I got up, I must have gone wrong. For all I know, I’m headed for Canada. If