DRIFTING TENDRILS OF SMOKE slithered on the ground like snakes.
“Run!” Hope screams.
Everyone tears up the hill: scrambling, falling, picking themselves up. Four Fingers still doesn’t understand.
“Run?” he asks, a string of drool dangling from his lip.
The others pull him along.
“Stay together!” Hope yells, and the two outer flanks move inward.
In no time the smoke overtakes them. At first it is thin and delicate, like wispy tentacles, making the world a hazy blur. Following it is a hollow, rumbling roar so deep it shakes the ground beneath their feet.
“The fire,” Twitch answers.
At first, no one believes him. No fire makes that kind of noise. But this isn’t just any fire. This is the Brown Forest: the biggest, driest box of kindling ever put on earth.
Something tells Hope this is no accident. This is the Man in Orange’s doing, meant to consume the Sisters and Less Thans and burn them to a crisp.
Leave no trace.
The smoke thickens and they run faster. Behind them is the inferno, like a pursuing monster. Though they can’t yet see it, they can imagine its dragon’s mouth.
They make it to the top of the ridge and Hope glances down behind her. The smoke is suddenly thick and heavy, like an avalanche—an avalanche coming uphill, billowing past the trees. They cover their mouths and noses as best they can.
“We have to reach the end of the forest before the fire does,” Hope yells.
“No way,” Twitch says. “We can’t outrace it.”
“We’ll have to.”
“How about that stream?” Flush shouts. “We could lie there till the fire passes.”
“The water’s too shallow. We’d be cooked in no time.”
Which is the worse way to die, Hope wonders: consumed by flames, or poached in a thin stream of boiling water?
A spark of light catches her eyes and she turns. Nearly a mile away are the first hints of flame, cutting through the thick white smoke. Jagged bolts of red and orange and black. A mesmerizing sight.
“Let’s go!” Cat cries, grabbing Four Fingers and pushing him forward.
They’re on level ground now, tearing through the forest like panicked rabbits fleeing the coyote’s jaws. Hope trails the others to make sure everyone’s keeping up—Helen especially. No one gets left behind.
But before she knows it, Hope’s lost the others. Their shapes grow dim and she can barely make them out in the smoke. Then can’t see them at all. Can’t hear them either. There is only one sound: fire. Complete, engulfing flames.
Smoke burns her mouth, throat, lungs. It pricks her eyes, like a thousand needles jabbing her cornea. A throbbing, stinging agony.
Worse is the panic of falling farther behind, and in her confusion she stumbles and falls, slamming into the thick trunk of a spruce. Stars spot her vision. Dazed, she pushes herself to a standing position, prepared to start up again . . . and realizes she’s completely turned around.
Utterly lost.
She no longer knows which way the fire is coming from and which way the others went. The smoke is all around her. Flames, too. She opens her mouth to shout for help, but all that comes out is a strangled yelp, immediately swallowed by the din of devouring flames.
The fire is closing in, the heat pressing against her like a smothering blanket. Furnace waves of air brush her face, tug at her clothes. Between the stinging smoke and blinding heat, she can barely open her eyes. She staggers forward, hands outstretched, waving weakly at the smoke.
Sound swallows sound until the fire becomes a living, breathing thing. No longer emanating from a single direction, but from many. All around her.
She stumbles to the ground and falls. The hot earth accepts her. This is the end, she tells herself, knowing it’s only seconds before she’s consumed by flames.
A lone figure materializes in the wall of fog: Argos, bounding forward with a series of insistent barks. He’s followed by a person—a Less Than by the looks of it—but Hope can’t tell. Whoever it is, he heads right for her, waving at the smoke, his silhouette wreathed by fire. Only when he’s by her side can she make him out.
It’s Book. He’s come back for her. She has to stifle tears at the sight of him.
“Come on!” he says, extending his hand. She grabs it and they run, led by Argos, who seems to know exactly the best way out. She has touched Book’s hand before, but this time as she grips it, it feels oddly different. It seems a thing of strength, of comfort, of salvation.
They find the others in a small clearing, where they’re coughing and gagging and spitting great gobs of black mucus. Hope has never been so happy to see them in her life, and she gives a sideways glance to Book—a look of gratitude and thanks. He is staring off in another direction.
She’s still shaking from being stranded in the smoke, and barely notices when a flaming ember torches her cheek. Then another lands. And another. The air is suddenly full of them, tiny red coals being borne along by the ferocious wind. They tattoo her skin and burn holes in clothing.
A red ball of fire explodes a couple hundred yards away—not from the ground but from the forest canopy itself. The fire is crowning, leaping from one treetop to another. There’s not even the slightest hope of outrunning it now.
Hope realizes with a shudder their fate is obvious. Either they find some miracle path out of there . . . or they’re cooked. The fire scorches their backs. They have to do something.
It’s Book who comes up with the idea.
He rips off his shirt and begins tearing it in strips. The others watch, dumbfounded. No one seems to know what he’s doing.
Except Hope.
She rips off her outer shirt and also tears it into long rectangles. “Come on!” she yells. “Help us!”
Others follow, not knowing what they’re doing or why they’re doing it, only that Book and Hope demand it. Book turns to Cat.
“Give me your arrows.”
“How many?”
“All of them.”
Cat doesn’t hesitate. He empties his quiver onto the ground. Some still have Hunters’ blood on them.
“Wrap those around the tips,” Hope orders.
The Sisters and Less Thans look at her blankly. Most of them think she’s lost it.
“Now!” she shouts, and they begin doing as she says.
When all the arrows are capped with tiny cloth coverings, Book and Hope begin moving through the haze, stopping at an edge of the Brown Forest. Before them, bathed in white smoke, stretches a wide pasture, free of trees but covered in tall prairie grass. The Brown Forest resumes on the other side.
Book looks to Hope and gives a nod. “You’re the better shot,” he says.
Without hesitating, she dips the arrow’s tip against an ember and sets it aflame. She draws the arrow back, angles it, and sends it flying. It soars high above the prairie in a perfect arc, landing somewhere in the middle of that enormous grassy field. A small fire erupts.
Now it’s Book’s turn. He does exactly the same, lighting a second small blaze.
“If we ignite this whole prairie . . .” Book begins.
“. . . then there’s a chance it’ll burn out before the fire reaches us . . .” Hope says.
“. . . and we can dig in and hope the fire passes over.” There’s an ease in how they complete the other’s thoughts. Like their minds are suddenly and perfectly in sync.
Cat’s eyes open wide above his bandanna. “You really think this’ll work?”
“It has to,” Book responds.
The rest of the archers follow suit, sending flaming arrows into the pasture, landing more or less along the line Hope and Book created.
Soon, the prairie is ablaze. A dozen different fires stretch from one side of the clearing to the other. The flames spread, then join, pushed along by the firestorm’s winds. Their idea is either the smartest of all time . . . or the dumbest.
The back-burn has to devour the entire pasture before they can even think of moving forward. In the meantime, the wall of flame behind them creeps closer. Century-old trees plummet to the ground with earsplitting crashes.
“Stay down,” Hope commands, pressing herself into the dirt. Whenever she lifts her head and peers through the darkening smoke, the prairie is still in flames. Have they misjudged? Is there too much grass? Will it take too long to burn out?
Meanwhile, the red flames behind them leap from tree to tree, emitting roiling spheres of black smoke. The sky is dark, the sun completely blotted out.
“How much longer?” Flush shouts.
Hope and Book both understand the need to wait. They also know if they hesitate much longer they’ll be cooked to a crisp. When the rubber soles of Twitch’s shoes burst into flames, they can wait no longer.
“Now!” Book and Hope both cry, and the Less Thans and Sisters take off in a mad dash.
They run as a clump, a force of bodies. There are no trees to dodge, no boulders to hurdle, just prairie grass six feet high in places. Their arms are machetes, hacking at the offending blades of grass, parting them as though stepping through a curtain.
With no warning whatsoever they emerge from the tall grass, finding themselves in the middle of a vast field. The earth before them is scorched and blackened, topped by thin ribbons of white smoke. Twenty yards away is the backside of a wall of flames, devouring the next section of prairie grass. But it’s moving the other way.
They’ve done it. Book and Hope have come up with the plan that just saved their lives. The two exchange a glance, and this time they don’t look away.
“Hey,” Cat says, and something in his tone whips them around.
The inferno is nearly upon them. The pasture they just ran through is an advancing army of fire and heat. It won’t be minutes before it reaches them, but seconds. Any sense of self-congratulation is burned away in the charging flames. Panic swells in Hope’s breast. All she can say is a single word.
“Dig!”
She flings herself onto the scorched earth, the heat scalding her knees and hands. She doesn’t care. Like a dog digging a hole, she tears at the blackened dirt, carving out a shallow trench, even as the heat singes her fingertips and bites into her skin.
Once the others figure out what she’s doing, they do the same, creating small cavities in the earth. Even Four Fingers senses their desperation and digs as frantically as the rest.
The wall of flame grows closer. The searing heat blisters Hope’s back like bubbling tar. Trees fall, crash, explode. Embers zoom and soar, pasting their clothes and bodies. They shake them off as best they can, but the ash is coming down like snow. A spring blizzard.
Although Hope’s trench is ridiculously shallow, it will have to work. She’s run out of time. “Cover yourselves! Now!”
Just as she’s about to fold herself into the narrow ditch, she notices Argos off to one side. Tail drooped, hypnotized by the flames, he seems incapable of movement.
“Argos!” she yells, but he doesn’t hear her. She tries again. “Argos! Come!”
Nothing. He just stands there, slowly backing away, whimpering, his tail between his legs.
The wall of fire is nearly on them. And suddenly, as though emerging from the flames themselves, Book is scuttling forward and grabbing Argos up. When he races back to the hole, he rolls into a tight ball with Argos tucked safely against his chest.
A second later the fire hits.