Free Killing Woods by Lucy Christopher

off foxgloves. I can’t believe she caught me! I’m never caught; not unless I want to be.
    As I run, I’m checking where I am – deep inside Darkwood, Game Play. Ashlee and the rest of us would have run round here stacks of times. Maybe this is where Shepherd watched Ashlee; maybe I’m somewhere near his bunker too. That would explain why his daughter knows this place so well; he must’ve showed her it. That should’ve been her detention: to show me that bunker too, to make her go there and face the truth. ’Cause the police still ain’t telling no one where it is.
    I’m breathing hard: two months off the Game and I’ve got unfit. Emily Shepherd looked too small and weak to run that fast and far, I didn’t think she’d keep up. If I was any sort of decent sports prefect I’d get her on a school team; instead I’ll get as far away from her as I can.
    I snap the branch, chuck the ends at a clump of bracken. The rain slides over my skull and inside my sports shirt: it’s cold, winter rain that’s come too early. I go faster. It feels weird running like this again, so fast and without the Game. This is how Mack and I used to run when we’d first come into these woods, when we’d run through town, sneak silently through the crack in the barracks fence as a shortcut, when we’d sprint through here. We’d lie exhausted on the forest floor after, breathing in time. Then we were brothers, part of the same pack – we was training for the army and stopping the bad thoughts inside of us same time.
    â€˜Push yourself,’ Mack had said. ‘How much can yourbody can take, how much pain?’
    I’d made my body hurt so much I’d stopped thinking of anything else. For a time I did.
    I turn on to a bridleway. It’s not like there’ll be any horse riders out in this weather anyway, but there are deer. I hear them surging through the forest to my left. There are flashes of movement in the trees as they start to run with me – same direction, almost the same speed. The thick undergrowth they leap in makes them slow. If I was with Mack and the others we’d be running after them, seeing how fast they could go. But this time I try to keep my feet in rhythm with the thud of their hooves, try to keep running as if I’m part of their herd. It’d be easy to be the stag leading those hinds away. As a stag, I could forget. I could piss off out of here and no one would notice. Emily Shepherd couldn’t catch me then. No one could.

13
    Emily
    T he rain is tipping down cold. Suddenly, being alone in these woods doesn’t feel so good: I get going. I don’t understand what just happened, why I’d felt so angry, why I’d wanted to push Damon over and make him listen. I don’t understand why I’d wanted to touch his lips either.
    Maybe I’m exactly like Damon said I am, like Kirsty said too: a freak, a psycho. No wonder people look at me strangely in the street. I am strange.
    I go the quickest way home, on a path that passes near to where the bunker is. I should find out what has happened to it – I know I should – but I’m still not ready. Not when it’s getting dark, not when shadows areslipping like unwanted thoughts between the trees. I glance left, study the dark spaces between silver birch trunks. It would be so easy for someone to stand still in there without me ever knowing. There are thoughts standing at the edge of my brain too. There are the questions Damon asked that I don’t have answers for.
    Today I’m glad to get out of Darkwood. I go through the wooden gate and stand on the cobbles in the lane behind our house, head bent and lightheaded. I feel like a horse just bolted, something that was wild a moment ago, caught and thrown into the light. Without looking back at the trees I turn right towards our house, keep walking down the middle of the lane to the end of