Ugly stumbled down the slope, falling onto her knees in the slush and snow, but couldn’t stop moving. She ignored Niibin’s voice from behind her, the sounds of the wolves growling all around her, and just kept moving. Crawling, first, then up on her feet, trudging through underbrush until she finally broke free, and then running…running toward the darkest corner of the forest, where the world might as well have just stopped existing.
Branches and twigs sliced her face, made her eyes sting, broke apart in her hair, but she didn’t slow. No, she ran faster, with her legs so numb and her heart racing and each second bringing another tree she might run headlong into if she wasn’t careful—and she wasn’t careful, but somehow just lucky enough.
She ran until there was nowhere else to run, until the growling of the wolves was all but absent. She wanted to keep running, to never stop running—but she knew in her bones that her dread—her other dread—had outpaced her. All she could do now was to stop and face it.
She dropped to her knees, crushing her palms down into the frozen soil below, and screamed. It came up from somewhere under her ribs and tore her throat raw on the way out, a ragged, wordless thing that went on until she had no air left to give it, and flushed a few roosting birds clattering out of the pines and up into the dark.
Snow drifted down from the clouds above, and a vicious wind blew through, freezing her skin but doing nothing to lessen the burning fury inside her.
“What’s east?” she asked, voice low and crackling with anger.
All around, the snow fell, and the trees creaked in the wind, and silence reigned.
The cold had already soaked through her skirt where she knelt, a wet ache at both knees, and her hands had gone past stinging into a dull, wooden numbness against the ground. It was dark here, properly dark: the moon was somewhere behind the clouds, turning them a dirty grey, and that was all the light there was. Enough to make out the black trunks nearest her and the paler ground between them, and past that, nothing. Somewhere back up the slope, the little fire they’d fought so hard for would be no more than an orange speck by now, if she turned around to look. She didn’t. She couldn’t hear Niibin calling anymore, either. Just her own breath, hitching, and the snow ticking down through the branches.
“You lied to me,” she said, feeling the bile rise up inside her as fragments of images moved through her memory, trying to come back together again.
“You know I can’t lie to you,” said the stranger, leaning against a nearby tree.
“You didn’t tell me,” she said, trying to find the courage to stand and face him, but feeling her body fight against the very notion. “You could have told me.”
“I can’t tell you what you don’t want to hear,” he said. “I didn’t make you forget, darlin’. You did that on your own.”
“What’s east?” she asked, locking eyes with him. “Why won’t you tell me?”
“What does it solve, if I do?” he asked, and started pacing around her, in a circle, like a predator toying with its prey.
“How can I know, if you won’t tell me?”
He gave her a shrug like the question really didn’t bother him at all. “All that matters is it’s over,” he said.
“What’s over?” she asked, twisting to keep her eyes on him.
“What you’re runnin’ from,” he said.
“What am I running from?” she asked. “Why won’t you let me go—”
“Go? You can go any time you—”
“Just not east!”
He threw up his arms in frustration. “What’s wrong with west?”
“I don’t know!” she shouted. “But every time you tell me to go there, I feel this…this twisting inside me, like I’ve been poisoned and my guts are turning inside out, warning me not to trust you. And I want to trust you. That’s the worst part of it—I feel this need to trust you, but you’re just making it so damned hard!”
The stranger paused by another tree with low branches that he climbed up onto like it was a ladder, staring down at her with a troubled and pensive look on his face. He stayed there, deep in thought for a few heartbeats, before an affable smile broke across his face and he gave her a playful shrug. “What do you want to know?”
“What’s my name?” she asked. “My real name?”
“I don’t know,” he said, apologetically, and she could tell he really did feel sorry.
“Where am I from?” she asked.
He struggled for a moment before offering a meek: “You’ll get angry.”
“East,” she sighed. “I’m from the east.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“What did I do? Why am I running?”
He looked at her for a long moment, then hopped off the tree and started to leave.
“Wait!” she called, up off her knees and chasing after him. “Where are you going?”
“This is the wrong time!” he called back. “You’re not ready!”
“Ready for what?” she shouted, running after but somehow never quite closing the distance. “What aren’t you telling me?”
He stopped suddenly, turning on his heel to face her—and she nearly ran into him. She skidded to a stop, gasping for breath as the stranger’s face went through something she couldn’t follow—mouth opening, closing again, eyes darting off into the trees and back—before he settled on:
“You don’t want to remember.”
“I do,” she wheezed.
“You think you do, but you don’t. What you’re chasing will only end in pain. For you, for Niibin, for everyone you care about.”
Ugly’s eyes narrowed. “Who else do I care about?”
The stranger was looking downright exasperated—but, Ugly realized, it wasn’t with her questions so much as his own inability to answer them. He was willing to fill in gaps, but he couldn’t. He was a ghost with a faulty memory, just like hers. But maybe, working together…
“Why are you helping me?” she asked, as gently as she could.
“Because I need to. It’s what I do.”
“Who are you to me? How do I know you?”
He winced again. “I can’t say. If you know, you’ll know. It’s…” He rubbed the back of his head like a thought was stuck there, and needed coaxing to get loose. “Memories are built upon one another. You pull the one, and the rest all come loose. But if you can’t remember something like that…”
The only way to unlock her memories was to find the thing at the root of it all.
But the only thing connecting her to her past life was this ghost, this stranger, who seemed to be the key to everything—but was also, infuriatingly, no use to her at all. Beyond him, there was nothing about her existence that hadn’t been taught or learned by Niibin, except—
Her right hand had curled itself into a fist without her asking it to. She opened it and looked at her palm in the grey light, half expecting a welt. There was nothing there. But she could still feel it: the jolt that had gone up her arm to the elbow the instant her fingers closed on Niibin’s knife, the way they’d sprung open on their own and let it fall, and the picture that had flashed up behind her eyes for half a heartbeat—gone before she could see what it was, leaving nothing behind but a taste like copper at the back of her tongue.
“I touched a knife,” she said, eyes open wide, “and it felt like it was on fire. Why?”
“You’re scared of knives,” he said, though it sounded like he wasn’t entirely sure. “Let’s change the subject.”
“No,” she said. “Memories are built upon one another. They’re built on this memory. You have to help me remember.”
“I don’t think—”
“Why am I scared of knives?”
His eyes twitched as something flashed through his memory. When he made eye contact again, he seemed winded, but more confident. “It’s not because of me.”
She wanted to believe him, because he looked like he wanted to believe himself, too…but even the fact that he’d said the words made her worry he was wrong. What if this stranger she’d been talking to all this time, what if he was the one who’d shot her and left her for dead in the forest? What if she was talking to the hallucination of a nightmare and didn’t know?
She had to make those memories come loose. She had to know for sure.
“Give me a knife,” she said, holding out her hand.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
She insisted. “You can.”
He stomped a foot on the ground in frustration. “You know I can’t do that.”
She stepped closer, her hand nearly touching his stomach as she glared up at him. Her voice, when it came, was low and flat and perfectly steady, and she didn’t recognize it. It sounded like some other woman. One who’d done this before. “I don’t know what I know. You won’t tell me. Now give me a knife.”
He nodded faintly, reaching a hand behind his back and sliding a long knife from his belt. He held it out, to the side, so she could see it first. A shiver ran through her, far colder than the world itself. Her outstretched hand wanted to drop. Her fingers wanted to curl back into her palm and hide there, and her feet wanted very badly to take her one step back, then another, then turn and run again—west, anywhere, it didn’t matter. Her breath came short and loud in her ears. But she tightened her jaw, and kept her hand right where it was, and nodded to him: give it to me.
He flipped the knife around, holding it by the blade, and brought it closer to her hand—but then paused.
“I’m sworn to protect you,” he said. “Whatever it takes, I have to protect you.”
“From who?” she asked, watching his eyes carefully.
He swallowed, spoke softly: “Yourself.”
She glanced at the knife in his hand, waiting to be taken. She remembered Niibin’s knife, taking it to carve the branch, and the sudden jolt of agony she’d felt, just by touching it. It had made no sense in the moment, but what if it had been her past self clawing its way to the surface to warn her not to repeat the mistakes that had left her dying in the forest in the dead of winter? What if that pain was to save her from something far worse—like remembering?
What if the stranger was right, and the only way forward was to carry on west, and never look back?
What if knowing was the greatest danger of all?
She looked into his eyes, and felt at peace.
And then the words rippled into her mind, unbidden: Every sunset is the same, except the one you didn’t watch.
She had to know.
The stranger seemed to sense her mood. He bowed his head and let the knife drift closer so she could reach the hilt easily. She held out a trembling hand, fingers flinching every time she got close to their target, but moved closer, closer, closer to the knife, and—
“If you do this,” said the stranger, “I can’t stop what happens.”
“I know,” she said, and put her hand on—
The growling was unmistakable. She snatched her hand back and spun toward it. To her right, somewhere she couldn’t see, but far too close for comfort, she could hear the wolves closing in. Their eyes shone ominously—four of them, maybe five, spreading out as they approached. Circling her. Locking her in place. As they came out from between the trunks she could make out their shapes against the snow: lean, rangy things, gone narrow through the flanks the way everything went narrow by the end of a hard winter, heads low, breath steaming.
They’d followed her through the forest, trailing her until they were sure she was alone, and had nowhere to run. They were hungry, too; she could hear it in their growls. A raspy sound, beneath it all, and desperate. They would take unnecessary risks to get what they wanted.
But this was no risk. This was no risk at all.
Ugly turned back and reached for the knife, but it was gone. The stranger had taken a few steps back, a desperately apologetic look on his face. “You know it won’t help,” he said, and faded back into the darkness, leaving her alone once more.
She had to get away, but there was nowhere to go. She couldn’t outrun them, now that they were set on feasting. She couldn’t fight them—even with a knife, there were too many, and they were too determined to be scared off by a show of force. Every second she left herself exposed was another second they could use to grab her, hold her down, tear her apart.
She backed a step, then another, eyes darting over the dark trunks for anything, anything at all, and then she remembered—
“That’s my girl,” whispered the stranger from the darkness, as Ugly turned and ran as fast as she could, back toward the tree the stranger had perched upon—the one with the low branches like a ladder. The wolves had spread themselves wide to circle her, and the gap between the two nearest was the side that faced it; for one heartbeat, as she bolted straight through that gap, they hesitated, startled that their prey would run at them. One heartbeat. It was all the start she was going to get. She had never climbed a tree, that she could remember, but he had gone up that one like it was a staircase. She could barely see where she was going by the pale moonlight, but she knew it was somewhere nearby. It was just a matter of finding it in time.
She could hear the wolves giving chase, their feet pounding into the snow as they tore after her. She could hear their barking, snarling, vicious breathing as they closed the distance with no trouble at all. She knew it was only a matter of seconds before they struck, and she couldn’t even see—
There! Just a few yards away, she saw the tree she was after! Her mind plotted the steps she would need to take to get up and out of the way of the wolves: skip the lowest branches, up to the third, and then pull herself the rest of the way until she was—
Something grabbed her skirt and pulled, and the force of it threw her off-balance so suddenly she tumbled sideways, crashing through sticks and rocks and snow until she collided with a tree. She felt her ribs crack, the wind knocked right out of her, as the wolf that had made the lunge crashed farther away, whimpering at its own impact.
Ugly rolled to her stomach despite the pain, trying to push herself back up, but before she could make it, another wolf lunged at her. Acting on instinct, she held out her hand to stop it, and it latched onto her arm, pulling so violently she was thrown backwards, landing in the snow as the wolf tried to tear her limbs right off her.
Desperate and panicked, she flung herself around, kicking at the wolf with everything she had; over and over and over again until her heel finally connected with its body and it let go, scampering back to regroup and prepare for another strike.
Three others joined it, their mouths dripping with anticipation—the smell of her blood filled the air and fuelled their hunger like nothing else. Their heads sank low as they closed in for the kill.
Ugly’s right arm was torn to shreds and hurt too much to even think about. It was impossible to breathe with her ribs battered and bruised, and her vision swam with spots every time she tried to move. She was beyond panic. She was beyond fear. She knew what was coming, and just wanted it to be over.
She reached a hand out into the darkness, taking a sharp breath to steel herself, and then looked straight into the eyes of the stranger, who was standing there, watching her die, with the saddest look on his face.
“Give me the knife,” she wheezed.
“It won’t save you,” he said.
“Give me the knife.”
“You don’t want to remember…”
The wolves crouched lower, eyes shining like devils in the darkness, and Ugly squeezed her eyes shut and screamed: “Give me the knife!” and the stranger did as he was told, and she—