THREE

It was just after dawn, and her father’s written words echoed in her head, words spoken from the letter.

She was thirsty. Frustrated. Afraid.

She was exhausted too, only able to hobble as she leaned heavily on a walking stick she’d made from a broken branch. The previous night, after leaving the cave, she had stumbled down an embankment and twisted her ankle badly, forcing her to rest every few minutes. She estimated she’d only traveled about a mile over the rugged terrain. Soon enough, she would be found.

She’d have to go down to the stream for water. But not until she found the strength to move ahead. Resting, she leaned one hand against the sun-warmed granite of a large boulder. A tiny brown spider crept onto her wrist, but she didn’t brush it away. The spider continued down one of her long fingers before moving back onto the rock and disappearing into a crevice.

Freak, she thought. Not that she needed a glance at her fingers to remind her of it. Every furtive step along the path in the shadows of the trees told her that she was a freak. A monster, and hunted because of it.

It was as if the forest around her conspired to prove it to her. A half hour earlier, she’d walked around a fallen log, almost into the jaws of a bear caught in leg traps, dead long enough to be a rotting corpse, swarmed by flies.

She’d never felt more alone. Before, she’d relied on the safety and comfort of her papa. No matter how difficult day-to-day living was, his love and the small, small world the two of them had created had been enough to cushion the apartness she felt.

But now she was without him, and the physical separateness alone she could have endured. Had she been simply lost, it would only have been a matter of finding a way back to him.

No, it wasn’t the physical separation that put her into her black loneliness.

Papa had betrayed her. On the mountaintop, he’d slipped a letter inside the microfabric. Its words had burned into her memory.

“We had agreed—the woman I loved and I—that as soon as you were born, we would perform an act of mercy and decency and wrap you in a towel to drown you in a nearby sink of water…”

She was a freak, and Papa had known it from the beginning. He’d wanted to put her down like an animal because of it. His letter said he’d been overwhelmed by protective love. More like overwhelming pity. Because she’d been born a monster.

There was more than her freakish body that spoke of his betrayal.

In the cave behind the waterfall, she’d found supplies in a backpack as he promised and a note directing her where to go next. Follow the stream downward into the valley that led to the town of Cumberland Gap, and there she was to wait at a certain place until the stroke of midnight.

The letter proved he’d known that he would bring her to a mountaintop and send her away; the equipment left in a hidden place behind the waterfall proved his intentions twofold. Yet Papa had not said a word to her about it. He’d found a way to abandon her. He dropped her into the abyss.

What did her future hold? Nothing a normal human hoped for, she knew. No home. No family. No love.

Maybe if she wandered long enough, her thoughts and loneliness and anger would drive her insane. She’d become what Papa had believed she was from the beginning.

An animal.