Little Lamb

PROLOGUE

LAZARUS

Six years, one month, and nine days.

That’s how long it’s been since I last slept.

People think you go mad without it. You don’t.

You go quiet. You learn to live in the long hallway between awake and asleep, where the lights are always on and nothing ever closes its eyes, and after a while you stop expecting the door at the end of it to open.

I don’t dream. I never have. The closest I ever came to rest was the borrowed kind, stolen through a wall, in a house that was never warm, with my ear against the cold plaster and a girl breathing on the other side of it.

In. And out. In, and out.

The only metronome that ever slowed the thing in me that wants to break.

She took that from me. She stood in a courtroom in a grey dress with her hair scraped back off her face, and a bruise on her cheekbone she let twelve strangers believe I put there, and she looked at all of them, and not once at me, and she lied.

Clean. Pretty. Devastating. The way only someone you’ve taught yourself can lie.

And the door closed, and for six years I lay on a concrete shelf and counted the breaths I couldn’t hear.

Now the door opens the other way.

There’s a buzzer, and then there’s daylight, and then there’s snow, falling sideways across the yard like the sky has been opened up and emptied out. A man in a uniform hands me a paper bag with the clothes I walked in wearing. They don’t fit the man walking out. Nothing does anymore.

He asks, almost kind, if I’ve got somewhere to go.

I almost laugh.

I have exactly one place. I’ve had it the whole time, the way you have a tooth you can’t stop pressing with your tongue, the way you have a name carved somewhere under the skin where the guards can’t confiscate it.

Hartsend. The ridge. The little rented house at the bottom of the hill where they let her hide, because everyone agreed that distance is the same thing as safety. Because someone signed a piece of paper that says I’m not allowed within five hundred feet of her, and they think paper is a wall.

They don’t understand walls the way I do.

I’ve spent six years learning that the thinnest wall in the world is the one you can hear someone living through.

I think her name like a prayer I’m not allowed to say in church anymore.

Wren.

Little lamb.

She put a wolf in a cage and went home and lived her quiet little life like the woods were empty.

The snow will cover my tracks.

I’m coming home.