“Yes, sir,” I say, and rub my nose in the back of her hair, savoring her earthy, herbal smell. Wishing I never had to move again, I breathe her in and close my eyes.

What feels like moments later, I open them again. Sunlight is streaming through the sides of the tent. It’s already morning. “Juneau, wake up,” I say, and pat around in the blankets for a second before I realize I’m by myself.

I unzip the tent door and look outside. “Juneau?” I yell. I scan the woods around the tent and see no sign of her. And then I spot a piece of paper skewered on a tree limb right in front of the tent. It’s a note from Juneau. I know what it says before I even read it. I know what she’s done. She’s gone ahead and left me behind.

Miles,

I have decided to follow my heart instead of my head. To barge in like gangbusters. It doesn’t make sense and isn’t strategically sound, but maybe I’m not the great leader I’m supposed to be. Maybe I’m just a girl who misses her family.

I can’t take you with me. I’ve chosen the dangerous route—the one that will require me to use all of my gifts in order to hide, find my people, and survive. I’ve chosen to place myself in danger, but I won’t choose the same for you—not when you aren’t equipped with the same advantages I have. I almost lost you once. I won’t take that risk again.

If you wait here, you won’t be in danger: Whit wants me, not you. If I succeed, I promise to return. But if you need to leave the mountain, for whatever reason, I will come and find you.

There is, of course, the chance that I won’t succeed. That I will be imprisoned with my clan. Or worse. You have your own battles to fight, Miles. Your own parents to save. You still have your mother, and, once she gets better, she will need you.

This is my fight. My clan’s fight. You are not yet a part of our world, and I won’t pull you in before you’re ready. I won’t risk your life.

Don’t forget that you’re my desert island friend.

Juneau

27

JUNEAU

SWEAT STINGS MY EYES. I WIPE THEM AND GLANCE up to measure the angle of the sun. If it’s this hot at 10:00 a.m., the afternoon is going to be sweltering.

I peer out from behind the boulder that hides me and watch the jeep full of camouflaged guards drive slowly along the inside of the perimeter fence. One sweeps the landscape with his binoculars, looking for anything that stands out against the brown-on-brown landscape.

They are the first sign of life I’ve seen today, besides a band of wild dogs I spotted early this morning, jogging just inside the fence as if they were doing their own surveillance of the land. They looked like the picture of hyenas in the EB, which, considering Avery’s collection of zebras and antelope, fits right into the African theme.

I turn my attention back to the jeep, and watch the guards stop parallel to my hiding place and jump out. My heart seizes as the one with the binoculars yells and points in my direction. Even though I have masked myself to match the desert behind me, I duck down and shuffle sideways so my entire body is hidden. There is complete silence for a full ten seconds, and I am about to stick my head back up to see what they are doing, when I hear a rifle crack, and a few yards to my right something goes flying up in the air.

I hear triumphant shouts as I watch the rattlesnake fall to the ground, twisting in nerve-damaged death throes. Easing myself up, I see the shooter being clapped on the back by one of his fellow guards, and bumping knuckles with another.

“Ah, man, I want that rattle!” he yells, eyeing the dead but still-writhing snake through the fence.

“Yeah, well, we’re not going to cut off the juice just so you can go get your trophy,” says another.

“Why not?” the snake slayer asks. “We’ll just tell the boss another deer got stuck in the wires and we had to reboot the section.”

Two guards get bored with the conversation and head back to the jeep, leaving the shooter and his buddy to argue. “If anyone double-checks the video, they’ll know we fooled with the fence. And I’m the one who’ll catch shit for it.”

The men stare at each other, one unsure and the other pleading. “Come on, Sergeant, I’ll give you a bottle of my bootleg Oaxaca.”

“Is that the tequila Sully drank when he mistook the cactus for a bear and unloaded a semiautomatic into it?”

“Same poison,” the shooter says.

The sergeant rubs his chin, and then says, “Hell, Sanders, you’ve got yourself a deal.” He pulls from his pocket an object that looks like Miles’s cell phone, and aims it at the metal box affixed to the top of the fence. The red light underneath it stops its slow flashing and turns a steady green. Letting out a whoop, Sanders climbs three times his height to the top and scrambles halfway down the other side before dropping to the ground in a crouch. I squeeze myself tightly behind the boulder, my brown, cracked skin blending in like an extension of the rock as the man jogs over to the dead snake. Mere feet away from me, he draws a long hunting knife from a sheath at his waist and chops the rattle off the snake, leaving the stump spurting blood in the dust.

I can almost taste my anger: It is coppery like the taste of fear. My nose wrinkles in repugnance as I look at the rattlesnake’s remains. Killing for sport is something I will never understand. Killing for protection . . . for food . . . that is the way of nature. Killing for fun is the vilest of crimes.

As Sanders pockets his prize he scans the landscape, looking right through me as he does, and then jogs back to the fence. In a minute he has scaled it and is climbing back down the other side. I see the guards joking among themselves, and the sergeant points the black box at the green light. “Let’s see you jump, Sanders!” he calls, and the light switches to red. Sanders immediately lets go and drops the final ten feet to the ground.