Chapter 17
We didn’t stop that night. There were moments when the urgency thinned, when our steps lost their frenzy and settled into something slower, almost laboring, but we kept moving. The forest changed with depth.
At first, it was almost impossible to notice, just a weird feeling creeping under my skin.
The trees stood closer together, the air got thicker, damp in a way that clings to your clothes and settles into your skin.
The ground softens under your feet, less path, more guesswork.
Zwierek knew where he was going, or at least he walked like he did, which was enough for me, so I followed.
We found it by accident. Or maybe he already knew it was there and just didn’t say anything. With him, it was always hard to tell where instinct ended and intention began.
It wasn’t really a house. More some kind of structure, the forest had started reclaiming, board by board, as though it had never fully belonged to people in the first place.
A hunting shelter, perhaps. The kind raised for a season, used hard, then left to weather into obscurity.
It seemed less built than stranded there, dark with age, held upright by habit more than strength.
The wood was worn, darkened by years of rain.
Parts of the roof slightly uneven, one side sinking just enough that you noticed it if you stood still long enough.
But it was still standing, and that was enough.
Inside smelled like damp wood and old smoke.
There was a rusted metal stove in the corner, a narrow cot pushed up against the wall, and a table that leaned almost imperceptibly to the left like it had given up trying to stay straight. It wasn’t much, but it was everything.
We didn’t talk about staying, we just did.
The first nights were the worst, because of the silence. When everything finally went quiet, it was not relief I felt, little Ghost, but the nearness of something waiting.
I didn’t sleep much. Every sound felt wrong. Every shift in the trees outside, every crack of something unseen, every breath I took felt too loud. Like it might carry further than it should. And underneath all of it, that thought.
They’re going to find you.
I expected it. Every morning, every time we got close enough to anything resembling a road, a village, a place where people existed, I expected to hear it.
My name. Something about what had happened.
I listened for it without meaning to. I think it was the only normal reaction I’d ever had to anything.
I lay every night in that cabin listening to rainwater dripping against the wooden boards while my mind replayed everything that had happened all over again. Waited for it. Days began to settle around the absence, finding their own rough order.
We learned by necessity. There was no choice in it.
Zwierek dealt with food first, though never systematically.
It was trial and error, rough improvisation, fortune varying from day to day.
He taught me first to track small things.
Rabbits mostly. Birds, when we were lucky.
Creatures taken through patience rather than skill.
They did not resist much. Later, it seemed easier, or perhaps we had simply grown used to crossing that threshold.
There were other ways too. Small shops on the outskirts of nearby towns, where things could vanish piecemeal without remark. Bread, canned food, whatever could be taken quickly.
After a while, you learned the habits of attention. Where eyes settled and where they passed over. Money was never part of it. Clothes were scavenged the same way, taken where they could be taken, worn until they nearly came apart.
After a while, time ceased to feel measurable. It announced itself only through changes. A different chill in the air, light shifting through the trees, the body accommodating what it once resisted. Some days, the fear of the police coming to find us felt almost too big to live with.
I never talked to Zwierek about it, but I’m sure he knew anyway.
I’d always had an easier time than most disappearing into my own thoughts, and the days out there in the forest only made it worse.
Some days, it felt like the woods were going to swallow me whole if I stayed in my head for too long.
I started getting desperate for something to hold onto, and little by little, I found my way back to reading again.
I remember a small town at the edge of the woods, a window left ajar at the back of a building, and the dry scent of paper and dust drifting out before I knew what the place was. No alarms, no real locks, it was almost too easy.
I took what I could carry, but never indiscriminately. Whatever seemed worth keeping. I brought them back to a place in the forest I had kept hidden. Not from fear of losing it, only from the need for something to remain solely mine.
It was near enough to reach easily, far enough that the shelter’s sounds did not carry.
Beyond a small clearing lay a lake, modest and strangely still.
The water held an unnatural green, as though time itself had sunk into it and gone motionless.
That was where I sat, a book always resting in my lap.
White flowers grew there, drooping from thin stems as though burdened by themselves.
Their petals folded inward, protective, almost secretive.
They seemed out of keeping with the forest, almost too exact in their fragility. I noticed them early.
After that, I found myself returning to them as often as the books.
Sometimes, little Ghost, significance reveals itself only after attention has already taken hold.
I read there for hours at a time. Long enough for the light to alter without my noticing when it began.
What had once felt like a reflex began to feel closer to choice.
That unsettled me for a time, then even that passed.
Weeks passed. Then months.
The fear of being found did not leave so much as wear thin.
After a while, I stopped expecting footsteps, engines, voices moving through the trees. Nothing came. No one came. It was almost harder to believe in that than in pursuit.
We changed without speaking of it. Habits gathered slowly. We rose with the light, checked traps, moved through the woods with care, watched more than we spoke. Ate when there was food. Trained until movement became instinct. And the books, always the books.
By nineteen, survival no longer felt like the right word.
It was simply the life we were inside. What had happened remained between us, never named, never gone.
And somewhere in those months, my reading began to turn.
At first, toward animals, anatomy, survival.
Later, toward something I could not yet understand, only felt drawing nearer.
He never stopped me. That should say enough.
I began finding myself dwelling on things I once could not have borne to keep near.
By then, something in me had altered. Not only in what I had done, but in what was taking root.
You feel it too, don’t you?
Don’t lie to me, little Ghost. You don’t need to.
There’s a difference between hearing something and letting it register. You’ve let in more than you should. That’s what I like about you. Most people pull back. You don’t. You let it settle, like my good fucking girl is supposed to do.
But be careful.
Not with me, with yourself. Because once something begins to make sense, it does not easily loosen its hold. Change rarely arrives as a moment. It gathers beforehand. And we were nearing that, though I did not know it then.
It gathered in habits, in thoughts left unchallenged, in the way what once felt wrong could, little by little, lose even the sensation of wrongness.
Then one day, something small gives it away.
A hesitation that does not come. A refusal that never forms. Some boundary crossed so quietly you notice only in retrospect.
That is how it happens. By then, little Ghost, the moment you imagine yourself waiting for lies behind you.
And I suspect you know very well what follows.