EMBER’S POV
That’s the thought I leave the medical wing with. It follows me through the great, cold halls of a house I still don’t know my way around.
More or less by accident, I find a set of glass doors and push through them, stepping out into a grey morning and a wide frozen lawn that drops away toward the tree line.
I need air. I need to think.
I need to figure out how a woman reaches a thing that lives inside her own chest and refuses to come when called, and I’m so deep in it that I’m halfway across the lawn before I register the sound.
The sharp, unmistakable blast of a gunshot rings out.
Then another.
Hale is standing at the edge of the lawn where it meets the trees. An open shotgun rests across her forearm.
She loads the shells with the unbothered competence of a woman who
