I mark off the mountain with three lines, drawing all the dots in the middle. The deepest one is for the leader, then the second deepest is for the second in command, and it goes on like that until there are twelve. Twelve is the most stable number, because it is our number, even if we're not stable. I part the group like our group, just to see-- three-four-four and then me. When I was with the group it was three-four-five or four-four-four which are both good numbers, but now we are a dog with a broken leg.

It wasn't my fault. I was the one who got hurt. I lick the old blood off my mouth. There's iron there from the catch I made on the side of the mountain, with the dirt in my pads and the silt on my coat. The dirt and blood don't go anywhere when I change back. I know because everyone else keeps the blood all over them even after they wash it off by the rivers.

Red is pulled from the riverbanks, iron and clay and blood. I think this makes his name appropriate but I can only see the color red half the time. Animals see in movement. Nothing around here moves. We are the dammed stream, and Red is the dam.

I draw the single person outside of the triangle and down towards my last game. The people don't know the game is over. I snuff them out for good luck but I left this one with all the lines drawn in. There was a huge battle. I know who did what but they don't get names. I just make the movements with the stick and things resolve themselves, and then, that's because someone has my hand. It's the only way that things have ever worked. It's the only way that I can make my human hand do all the complicated movements that are supposed to mean anything.

Trees whisper and drops their heads.

"We were looking for you," Trace says. Her voice is a slamming door on the side of the mountains where people live alone, whining on the hinges like the living things do when they are hurt.

I draw up my stick. The jagged line twitches to a halt, balancing over the other party. All the people there look up, confused, at the lost child who appeared out of the woods. It's a bad place to end things but everyone always gets in the way at the good parts. "Why," I ask. I don't care but you're supposed to ask 'why', or at least, Trace always asks why and then she pouts her lip out. I look around her to her shadow. Adaline is not in her shadow. Adaline is not behind the trees. I put my hands to the ground and lean forwards to sniff the air, becoming a cat. Adaline is not anywhere.

Trace grabs me and lifts me into the air. I unsheathe my claws in her arm and bounce out of it, turning back before she can get her hot hands around my fur again. Trace grabs her arm and screams, which hurts my ears. I hiss again.

"You're holding the whole group up!" Trace is standing over me, kicking the dirt circles aside. I can sense the noise emanating off of her and the movement off her hand, where the red clay of the riverbanks drips down her arm and hits the earth. "Why are you so selfish? Don't you understand anything about what's going on right now?"

"Why did they send you?" I grip the dead leaf litter below me, which is covered in frost. The entire earth is barren up here. "They never send you. You're younger than I am."

"No one sent me. I'm getting you 'cause I can," Trace says.

"Angel didn't send you," I follow.

Trace grabs me with the arm I hurt. I can feel an entire cave collapsed around my arm. Her grip is like that, an angry mountain. I lean down to lick the blood off, the scent distracting as her pain, and she thrusts it back, her nose crinkled with anger. "Freak."

The sticks snap underneath us. I can hear the entire earth's revulsion at our intrusion. No one has been here but us for years, this far off the human trails. We're on the downwards side, heading out towards a nothingness that goes on forever. The plains are nothing. We are going to survive off of that nothing for as long as it will take us. I imagine everyone with their stomachs full of dust, eyes heavy and red. There is so hungry we can get and something more dangerous takes over.

They don't know that we can't starve.

They don't remember.

Ms. Grace would tell me not to tell them, but Trace doesn't need to know anything. Trace is big hair and the scariest powers. Space wreaths around her like the small spirals of wind that blow around each other, picking up leaves with an almost deliberate hand. Trace is the hand, the air, and the leaves.

The earth hums the low winter music during the dusk where nothing is awake. Birds fly overhead in a single straight 'v', following the leader to where the land ends. "Why did you stop hanging out with us?" asks Trace.

"I bit Angel." Something clatters around in the bushes, desperate, hungry. The squirrels are stocking for the winter. They don't remember where they leave things. That's how the trees grow, surrounded by all the acorns that didn't make it, in forgotten crypts under the earth. I know because of the year we were in the same place, last year. Before that we were running a lot. I liked running. The squirrel has my gaze but he is less afraid of humans. He does not know that he is next to a dragonfly and a cat.

Dragonflies don't eat squirrels, but they will kill any insects that breathe on them wrong. They are intimidating when the light hits them the right way. "If I bit Angel, I bet she would still make me stick around and read her stupid books and learn her stupid garbage and do stupid things and hold her hand in public. If Addie bit her, I bet Angel would say it wasn't Addie's fault. Or it was and she should feel bad and then Addie would cry for hours--"

"I can't read," I say, twitching. The conversation is like fifty bees. I left my stick behind in the woods and want to go back for it but Trace will pull my tail if I transform. I keep having to leave sticks and I already miss them. This one had a good curve to it for my hand.

"Did you even care when Addie got sick?"

No. Adaline wasn't trying to die. Adaline was trying to break out of her chrysalis, like a butterfly. Red and Angel shoved her back in their with their big kid fingers. Chrysalids are scary and messy. The whole body inside of there is just a bunch of mush and dreams of flying. When I cracked one open it split like an egg. I didn't realize I would kill it. If you try to open flowers early, you can see the petals still forming, and the plant is fine. Animals aren't like that. We would make bad plants. Too fragile. Only one heart, one body to open up.  No flowers."You don't miss me," I tell her. "You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to. We are not friends."

"I want to miss you, but there's not much to miss," Trace says. "No one realized you were gone when I went after you."

The people up on the hill split three-four-four and an extra. Like the moldy acorn that doesn't become a tree. It just becomes the dirt that everything else eats. "I want to leave," I say. I put my hands over my mouth.

"Cool," says Trace. "I thought you liked Red and Dylan, though. They're like the whole reason no one else has left yet. If you ask me the whole thing is just a big unfair waste of time. We're going all the way back so we can get caught again when we could do anything else or be anyone else. The west coast is safe."

The east coast is not safe. It is full of ghosts. Trace knows this so I don't know why she's telling me it. Trace keeps trying to talk to me. "Are the others close?"

"They're up the hill." Trace shrugs it off.

"Is Adaline there?" I ask.

Trace makes a loud noise with her mouth. "I can do things without Adaline. She needs space occasionally."
"No she doesn't," I say.

"What if I decided you didn't need space?" asks Trace.

"I'm bigger and scarier than you, and I would eat you." I show off my teeth. Trace shows off her teeth. This is just a thing that humans do. Most other species show their teeth off when they are about to eat you, but that is because they have useful teeth. Human teeth are prey teeth with added predator ones on the side. I run my hand on my predator teeth. I'm still hungry even though I ate earlier.

"They're not that big," Trace says. "Also, you should come back. Angel is really bad lately."

"Everyone has been bad since we decided to leave. We're not safe from each other," I tilt my head. There is noise and smoke in the distance. That looks like a Veritas fight. Mary is not transformed, just next to the trees. Gillian and Damien are holding her back by the arms. The fight is not sparring. Angel is holding Adaline. There is fire damage on the trees. Kali's fingers teem with blue. Elle is crawling mandibles and dark, hollow eyes, staring out at us all from halfway into Veritas.

Dylan is yelling at Red. "She's doing something terrible! You know she has to be doing something! And you won't investigate it? Come on, Red. Listen to your brain. Listen to me!"

"Listen to you?" Red says, and his voice is a thousand knives through the filmy surface that is normalcy for us. "You're being hysterical and you're screwing the group harmony. I would expect something like this from Kali. I might expect it from the middle kids. You and I are supposed to be on the same team here, so when I tell you things are okay, I need you to listen to me."

Dylan's face twists backwards.

Trace drops my hand.

Elle takes in a breath. She massages the hideous insect half of her face back into snow white flesh with her hands and says, "I haven't done anything that you can prove, let alone punish. If you have any kind of sense you'll leave me and my doings alone." Her voice is refractive ice. Everyone there has it all in their head and heart, because yes Elle, we could never disagree with Elle, we're sorry for doubting you, Elle, questioning your motives.

Dylan crumples to the ground. He says something but the words won't come out. Everyone is choking. I can sense it. My fur goes up. Red catches me through the trees and makes a gesture with his hands. "I'm sorry," Red says, "For doubting you, Elle. Everyone, this has been a tumultuous afternoon for everyone, but right now we need to remember we're all family. The plains are going to be hard. There's almost no cities there. We're going to have a lot of long patches with near no cover, no people, and nothing to do. Things have been strange lately. That's fine. We've survived much worse, haven't we? But we always, always survive it as a team. We're going to need that teamwork now if we want to survive."

"Call them off and I'll behave nicely," Elle says, pointing at Dylan and Kali.

"I'm not a dog you can call off, honey," Kali snaps, but she still clenches her hand into a fist and extinguishes the fire. Smoke rises up from around her clamped fingers. "Red, you can handle this." She stomps off in our direction, her feet turning earth. I fold myself against a tree as she passes. Trace is gone. I reach out several times, my throat trembling with a little cry of distress, but no one is there. Kali turns in an arc of dark hair, a descending raven around her face. Her eyes dilate to snake points, cat points. She hisses, "Nice of you to come back, Mimsy."
"I wasn't gone anywhere," I say.

Kali's finger alights. I curl back against the tree, cat fear and cat anger sharpening my teeth. "How much do you know about all this?" she asks me. "You know about the powers. Where are we really going?"
"I don't know," I lie. "It's a... labro... a..." Kali's finger presses closer to my face. All the water in my throat the only thing left is my cracking voice. "...ah..."

"I know you're lying to them. I've seen you give up the information before."

I don't remember this ever happening.

"Now just tell me what you've told Red..."

I don't tell anyone anything. Ms. Grace has both of her hands on my mouth. She doesn't like when people touch me or talk to me. She doesn't like the way they look at me, the greedy way they put their hands on me when they're trying to coax me into or out of bodies. Become a human. Become a cat. Become this person. We have the pictures right here. "There was a room with no people and a hallway that goes on forever. Everyone was there. Then there was the darkness, the light, and then we were at the beach. Everything was on fire. I don't remember it all because I said I wasn't going to talk about it anymore, and no one was going to talk about it, and no one talks about it."

Kali draws her finger away. "That would be because no one remembers it but you. Once we get over those plains? Back on the coast? They'll know where we are again. Don't think for a heartbeat that they won't come back after us when any of the humans know that the monsters are back. The only reason we never got caught out here is because we didn't make any mistakes."

"We might never make mistakes," I mew. Kali is in the corner of my vision, sheltered from my sight by the side of my face. I can still feel the heat of her finger trembling across my skin.

Kali's eyes sharpen. "He's slipping."

"Red's doing a good job," I say. "Red's so brave and so smart."

Kali's face is a mask of snake. She twitches once, shaking her head, and exhales. "I guess you're right, Mimsy. We're so lucky to have him."

"Yes," I say. "You don't even know how lucky."

The golden braids of time part and Red emerges from them, in a moment of clarity. I can see him back in the white rooms, holding universes in his head. Learning all the ways to pass down the stream of time, paddling upshore in the one-way river.

"I guess this one is a failure," said a man, and the child in the room, wearing the face of a human, looks dismayed.

Fools. How would they know when time has or hasn't been altered? I don't know myself. There is only the river, flooding until it pools at the edge before the waterfall, and the promise that not a drop will go over as long as there are stones.