Juniper frowned, instinctively lowering her voice although there was no one else around, and she followed Ranger as he veered off the narrow path and pushed through brittle ferns toward a cluster of fallen birch limbs, the kind of place that looked unremarkable unless you were looking for something specific.
Silas hesitated only long enough to slide his phone from his jacket pocket, not because he expected trouble but because their mother had a way of repeating, “You never know,” until the phrase lodged in his mind like a rule carved in stone, and then he stepped after his sister, boots damp with dew and the metallic scent in the air just beginning to register as wrong.
Juniper saw the boot first.
It lay at an angle that no foot would choose willingly, half-hidden beneath leaves, attached to a leg that disappeared into the tangle of branches; for a heartbeat her mind tried to rearrange the image into something harmless—a mannequin, discarded hunting gear, a prank—but then Ranger lunged forward and began whining, urgent and sharp, and she pushed the branches aside with hands that were already trembling.
The man beneath them was very real.
He lay on his side, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath him, his face mottled with bruising that had bloomed in dark purples and yellows, and his jacket was soaked along the ribs with a spreading stain that Juniper recognized instantly despite never having seen that much of it outside television; blood has a way of looking darker in real life, thicker, less theatrical, and the sight of it snapped something in her chest so tight she could barely breathe.
Silas’s voice came out thin. “Is he breathing?”
Ranger pressed himself against the man’s shoulder, whining low, as if proximity alone could keep him tethered to the world, and Juniper dropped to her knees, her mind skimming desperately through half-remembered health class lessons, placing her hand near the man’s mouth, feeling for warmth, counting seconds she wasn’t sure she was counting correctly, and finally nodding once when she felt the faintest whisper of air brush her skin.
