Chapter Text
The fire had burned down to its bones. The last scraps of wood gave off a faint orange glow that barely reached the edges of their circle. Smoke curled upward in thin threads before vanishing into the dark canopy. The woods around them were silent, too silent, as if even the wind had gone still to listen.
Lucy Gray sat closest to the fire, her guitar resting across her lap. Her fingers brushed against the strings, but no sound came. She wasn’t playing, only feeling for comfort in something familiar. Her eyes were fixed on the flames, and the light picked out the smudges of coal dust still streaked across her cheek.
Sejanus paced just beyond the light, boots stirring up the damp leaves. He had been doing it for an hour, wearing a shallow path in the soil. His coat hung loose on his frame, and his hair clung to his forehead with sweat despite the cold. Every few steps he stopped and looked into the trees, as though expecting something to move there.
Coryo sat a little apart from both of them. He had pulled his knees close to his chest, his arms locked around them, watching the smoke coil and break. His hands were raw, the skin at his knuckles split and pale from cold. The smell of the dying fire mixed with damp earth and iron, a scent that clung to everything now.
No one had slept. They didn’t even bother trying.
“Running’s a good way to get shot,” Sejanus said at last. His voice cracked in the quiet. “The fences might be weak in places, but the patrols aren’t blind. You’ve seen the towers. They sweep the lights every few minutes.”
Lucy Gray didn’t look up. “And staying’s a good way to end up back in the Capitol’s labs,” she said softly. “You want that for him?” She nodded toward Coryo.
Sejanus stopped pacing. His mouth opened, but no words came for a moment. “I just think we should plan before we throw ourselves into the woods,” he said finally. “We don’t even know what’s out there. Wild animals, old traps, peacekeeper routes. You think we’ll last a day?”
“Plans don’t last long in places like this,” Lucy Gray said. “We wait, they find us. We move, maybe they don’t. Simple as that.”
Coryo stirred the ashes with a stick, watching the ember at the end flare and fade. “She’s right about one thing,” he said quietly. “The longer we stay, the easier it’ll be for Gaul to trace me. Or for someone to sell us out. All it takes is one person from the Hob recognizing me.”
Sejanus frowned. “You really think she’s still looking for you?”
“I know she is,” Coryo said. “She never loses interest in her experiments.”
The fire cracked weakly, and a thin curl of smoke rose into the cold air.
Lucy Gray drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them, her chin resting on the curve of her arm. “You got any better idea?” she asked.
Sejanus opened his mouth, then shut it again. There wasn’t one.
When the fire finally died, they began to move. Lucy Gray packed the guitar first, wrapping it in a scrap of cloth before strapping it to her back. Sejanus checked the inside pocket of his coat for the folded map, tracing its creases as if the lines could still be trusted. Coryo emptied the ashes from the small tin they had used to cook, scattering them into the dirt until no trace of fire remained.
The forest beyond the orchard was black and close. The trees crowded thickly together, their trunks slick with cold. Even the air felt heavy, as though it were watching. Coryo went first, picking his steps carefully over the roots and wet leaves. Each movement made a sound, too sharp, too sudden.
The Capitol still lingered here, invisible but constant. The faint hum of the electric fence somewhere far off. The distant glint of a searchlight sweeping across the sky. The smell of smoke carried from the town, thick with coal and iron.
Lucy Gray stopped now and then to listen, head tilted, her eyes narrowed as if she could hear the hum of danger before it arrived. Sejanus whispered what he remembered from his maps—guard routes, weak points, places where the current in the fence might be broken. His voice was almost too low to catch.
“South perimeter,” he said. “There’s an old section near the slag heap. The current used to cut out after midnight.”
Coryo glanced back. “Used to?”
Sejanus nodded uneasily. “That’s what the miners said. It was years ago.”
“Years are a long time,” Lucy Gray murmured, but she didn’t slow down.
They kept to the low ground, skirting the edges of the fields where the winter crops had already been stripped bare. The mud clung to their boots and made every step heavier. Lanterns bobbed in the distance, two pale dots swaying as Peacekeepers crossed the far road.
“Down,” Coryo whispered.
They dropped behind an old cart half-buried in weeds. The wood smelled of mold and rot, and the ground beneath was damp.
Voices carried faintly through the cold air.
“...caught another one near the train yard.”
“...Capitol wants them alive this time. Gaul’s orders.”
Lucy Gray’s hand found Coryo’s sleeve and held tight. Sejanus crouched low beside them, eyes fixed on the moving lights until they drifted away.
When the night was still again, Coryo nodded. “We go now.”
They crossed the road quickly, keeping low. The moon had slipped behind the clouds, and without its light, the world turned to shapes and shadows. Every step sounded too loud, every breath too fast.
After what felt like an hour, the air began to change. A faint metallic tang filled it, and a steady hum rose from the ground beneath their feet. Sejanus slowed, listening. Ahead, through the trees, a dark line cut through the night.
“The fence,” he whispered.
The posts stood in a long row, glimmering faintly with frost. The wires stretched between them, quiet and silver. Lucy Gray stopped a few paces away and looked up. “That it?”
Coryo nodded. He listened for the hum of current, but heard only the wind brushing the wires.
For a moment, he just stared at it. The fence looked harmless, almost beautiful, the frost tracing the wires like veins of light. But he knew what it meant. He had seen people die against fences like this, bodies still twitching from the current. He had once thought the fences were protection—proof that civilization held strong against the chaos outside. That was before he learned who the chaos really was.
He could still hear Gaul’s voice sometimes. Calm, precise, every syllable like a scalpel cutting through doubt. Every system needs containment. Every creature needs a cage. When it forgets that, it becomes a threat.
For years he had believed her. Believed that peace was something you could enforce if you just tightened the cage hard enough. But standing there now, staring at the fence that divided the districts from the world beyond, he realized the truth was simpler. The cage had only ever been for them.
His hands were shaking. He clenched them until the tremor stopped.
Sejanus broke the silence. “Looks dead.”
“Looks can lie,” Coryo said quietly.
Lucy Gray crouched near the base of the fence, brushing snow from the bottom wire. “No scorch marks. No hum.” She looked back over her shoulder. “If we’re doing this, it’s now.”
Coryo stepped forward, the breath curling white from his mouth. Beyond the fence, the forest looked endless. No lights. No houses. Just dark, unmarked land stretching out toward whatever waited past the Capitol’s maps.
For a long moment, none of them moved. The fence was more than a barrier of metal. It was the line between who they had been and what they might become.
He thought of Tigris. The way she used to fix the seams on his shirts by the window, humming to herself, her hands never still. He thought of their grandmother, counting sugar cubes, whispering that one day the Snow name would rise again. He thought of the white marble of the Academy and how clean everything had seemed, how cold.
He wondered if she’d still say that now, if she saw him like this—mud-streaked, hunted, about to crawl through the fence he had once sworn to protect.
He reached out slowly, his fingers trembling, and touched the lowest wire. It was cold and still. No shock. No sound.
He looked back at the others. Lucy Gray’s gaze met his, steady and fearless. Sejanus swallowed hard but gave a small nod.
The horizon was beginning to pale. The first light of morning touched the tops of the trees and turned the frost to silver.
Coryo’s voice was low and even. “Once we cross, there’s no going back.”
Lucy Gray’s answer came after a moment, soft and certain. “Wasn’t ever going to be.”
He nodded, took one last look at the town sleeping behind the trees, and stepped toward the fence. The wires gleamed faintly in the gray light as the three of them drew closer, their shadows merging into one shape.
And together, they stood at the edge of everything they had ever known.