SIX

Theo Balder believed that luck had finally turned in his favor. He was hunched behind a log, feeling around in the water for crawfish, when a small man with a backpack knelt to drink about fifty yards upstream.

Theo had become so hungry that he’d begun to wonder if he would die of starvation. Anything but surrender. The backpack, however, could give him life. It might have money inside. Or matches. Or a knife. Or, best of all, maybe food.

In the factory, at night, older kids whispered stories about the people of the Clan who roamed the woods, looking for kids to kill, barbecue, and hang from trees as a warning to stay in the towns.

That’s why, at first, when he’d heard someone approaching as he fished, Theo was terrified that his company might be someone from the Clan. He’d crouched behind a fallen log in ankle-deep water, and the man had not noticed him, so he followed when the man left the streambed.

Fortune continued. Theo was farsighted, and anything within thirty yards was blurry, so with the distance between them, he was able to see that the man was limping and could only walk with the aid of a stick.

A small man. Crippled. There weren’t many other people that Theo could rob safely. Fate was treating him kindly after dealing him so many blows already.

Theo wouldn’t attribute any of this to God. He knew better than to believe in superstition. He saw no logic in believing that if someone had created the entire universe, he would care about a fourteen-year-old scavenging runaway.

Theo needed to be patient, however. With his bad vision, he had no chance of picking his way through leaves and branches to approach quietly enough to have any hope of stealing the man’s backpack. He’d have to wait until the man stopped and then decide upon the best plan of attack.

He felt around in the water for a large smooth stone. Big enough to knock the man out.

Theo listened carefully for the man’s progress along the path, then began to follow.

Caitlyn held herself to the branches, motionless in the shape of a cross, hanging parallel to the ground from more than ten feet above it. Her face and toes pointed downward.

She’d looked for a place on the path where solid branches would be far enough apart to assist her maneuver. She’d jumped, grabbed the branches, and tilted her body from vertical to horizontal, just as she’d done countless times under Papa’s supervision.

Outside, Papa told her, gymnasts called it the Iron Cross, but in Appalachia, there were no gymnasts, so it had no name for most people, and there was no one to be amazed. Papa usually called it, simply, the Cross. The exercise was an unexplained part of her life. Papa would hang two ropes down from a thick tree branch, three feet apart. The ends of each rope were knotted and at least four feet off the ground. The exercise she secretly performed daily would have been astounding to any gymnast. Because her body was so light and thin, she could hold the position almost without effort. From there, her body vertical to the ground, she could tilt forward until her body was parallel to it, arms still outstretched, and remain like that without trembling for half an hour.

Until now, the Cross had seemed purposeless. But she’d finally found use for it, given that it was unlikely her pursuer would look up in the air to find her. Who would expect her to be in this position, and she was well hidden by smaller branches and leaves.

She doubted that her pursuer was much danger anyway.

It was the boy. The annoying skunk boy.

Down at the stream, getting water, she’d smelled skunk and looked around, then saw him hiding in the water behind a log. He’d begun to follow her.

Caitlyn had spent the previous twenty minutes following deer paths up a hill, trying to lose skunk boy as best she could with her twisted ankle, but the boy had stayed with her, keeping a constant distance of twenty or thirty paces behind.

She knew he was behind her, as every few minutes she would hear a grunt as if he had walked into something. Occasionally, the swirling breeze brought her the smell of skunk until she’d decided it was time to end this.

She held herself in the shape of a cross and waited.