POV: Ryan
It started with a smell.
Pine, cold and sharp, came drifting down the stairwell as Violet and Kendra left the staff locker. It pulled at a loose thread of the past until images tried to assemble themselves like a child clumsily building a tower.
I was in the woods. Rain like a sieve. Mud sucking at my boots. A throat-wide scream. Two men — not from our neighborhood — moving like snakes. The little girl—skin like honey, hair braid untied, eyes nothing but terror—wedged against the trunk of a tree. I remember the way the wind used her as a bell, how her little hands grabbed my jacket like a lifeline.
“Run,” I told her. “Run, little firefly. Don’t stop.”
She looked at me then, up at me with a trust that felt like cool water on a fever. She ran. I didn’t see where she went exact
