She knew her body. She had always healed faster than most—an oddity she learned to keep to herself—but never like this. Never with wounds so deep, mended as though time itself had been tampered with.
The forest around her pressed in with suffocating silence. It was the kind of silence that belonged to places untouched by daylight, where the canopy strangled the sun and left the forest floor in a perpetual twilight. Rain tapped steadily against the leaves, a sound that blurred the boundary between one day and the next. In this place, hours dissolved, and even memory began to lose its footing.
Still, Easther knew. It had been five, perhaps six days since her escape—since she had stumbled into Zaki Lee, and their fragile, wordless alliance began.
But her wound… it whispered of something el
