At dawn Chey climbed down out of the tree.

It was harder than she thought it was going to be. Her body was stiff and exhausted. Her ankle, where the wolf had snagged her, had swollen alarmingly. A crust of dried blood glued her Timberland hiking sock to her skin. Every time she tried to put weight on the ankle her entire leg started to shake uncontrollably.

Going up the tree had taken mere seconds—driven by panic and the survival instinct, she had reverted to her monkey ancestry and just done it. Getting back down took some thought and planning. Finally, after long minutes of adjusting and readjusting her position, moving from one branch to another, teetering on the edge of a bad drop, she hung down by her arms and then let herself fall onto her good foot. The shock of touching solid ground again ran through her with a spike of adrenaline and she dropped to her knees, wishing she could drop farther, that she could fall down entirely, lay down and go to sleep.

Not when the wolf was still out there, though. She would not sleep again until she knew she was safe.

With filthy weak hands she went through her pockets and checked the small collection of items she still possessed. Absurdly enough she had thought often in the darkness that her things might have fallen out of her pockets as she raced up the tree. But no, she still had them. She had one last quarter of an energy bar, which she shoved in her mouth. The foil wrapper went back in her pocket—as bad as things were, Chey didn’t litter. She had her phone, the battery almost dead. It got no signal at all but when the keys lit up blue for her she almost cried in gratitude. At least something, no matter how useless, still did what it was supposed to.

She didn’t think she could say the same for the tiny compass attached to the zipper pull of her parka. It pointed north for her, had done so for nearly ten days. Either it or her map were completely wrong, however. She should have reached the town of Echo Bay days earlier—it was almost perfectly due north of where she’d started—but she had seen nothing so far except the endless crazily tilted forest.

Maybe the town didn’t exist. Maybe when they printed the map they’d made a mistake.

Maybe she was going to walk for weeks more, heading north like a good little girl scout until she ran right into the Arctic Ocean. Or maybe, long before that—yes, almost certainly before that happened, the wolf wound find her again when there were no tall trees around, and it would kill her.

She closed her eyes and bit her lower lip. She was so scared her back hurt. Fear tried to bend her in two, to make her fall down and curl up and wish herself into non-existence.

“Okay,” she sighed to herself. “Okay.” The sound of human words broke the spell the fear had on her. Hearing a voice, even her own, made her feel less alone and defenseless. She brushed off her parka as best as she could—it was covered in tiny shreds of birch bark and less pleasant materials—and stood up. Her knee buckled the first time she stepped forward with her hurt ankle and she had to stop for a second and wait for the roaring in her ears to stop. The next step hurt slightly less.

“Okay,” she said. Louder. More confidently. The hard K sound was the part that helped. “Okay, you little idiot. You’re going to be okay.”

The trees swallowed her up without comment. Her slow pace made it easier, actually, to cross the rough ground. She had plenty of time to look and see where each foot should go, to avoid the potholes and the knobby tree roots. She had time to listen to the sound of pine needles squishing and crunching under her feet, to the squeak of old snow as her boots sank down through it. She could smell the forest, too, smell its pitch and its rotting wood and its musty perfume.

She walked for an hour, according to the clock display of her cell phone. Then she stopped to rest. Sitting down on a dry rock she pulled her knees close to her chest and looked back the way she’d come. There was no trail or path there—she felt really proud for how she’d covered so much unbroken ground. Then she looked up and saw the paper birch she’d sheltered in the previous night.

It stood no more than a hundred meters behind her. In an hour that was all the distance she’d covered.

Tears exploded in her throat and threatened to leak out through her skin. Chey bit them back, sucking breath into her body. “No,” she said, though she didn’t know what she was rejecting, exactly. “No!”

Her shout echoed around the trees. A few needles fell from a spruce that stuck up at a thirty degree angle to the forest floor. In the distance a bird called back to her with a high bell-like note she didn’t recognize. It sounded almost mechanical, actually, less like an animal sound than something man-made. Maybe it hadn’t been a bird at all. It sounded almost like a fork clinking on a metal plate.

She looked down at her compass. North was straight ahead, which meant the sound had come from the southwest. She closed her eyes and concentrated, and heard the clinking sound again. If she concentrated, really concentrated, she was pretty sure she could hear something else, too—the sizzle and pop of frying food.