They broke camp in the blue hour before sunrise, and nobody talked about the attack.
Joel kicked snow over the dead fire and picked up the dropped dart rifle, turning it over once before slinging it alongside his own. Hale took it from him without asking, worked the action, and sniffed the dart reservoir.
"Measured doses," Hale said. "Tranq, not toxin. Enough to put a grown man under for six hours." He looked at Ethan. "They wanted you breathing, kid. All of you."
"I know," Ethan said.
"Do you know why?"
Ethan didn't answer. He was watching Ellie rewrap Carrow's arm — the sling dark and stiff with blood, Carrow's jaw tight, Ellie's hands steady in a way that would've surprised him a month ago.
"Hold still," Ellie muttered. "You're worse than Joel."
"I've had worse," Carrow said through her teeth.
"Had better too, I'll bet."
A ghost of a smile touched Carrow's mouth. "Smart kid."
They moved out single file as the light came up: Joel on point, then Carrow, then Ellie and Ethan, Hale bringing up the rear. The snow thinned as they dropped elevation, giving way to pine forest and the smell of wet bark. Ethan's thigh throbbed with every downhill step — a deep, honest ache that the cold sharpened. He didn't mention it. Nobody would've listened anyway.
An hour in, Joel dropped back until he was walking beside Ethan.
"Rook," Joel said. Not a question.
Ethan kept his eyes on the trail. "I told you. The logs."
"I've read field manuals, kid. I've read captured orders. That wasn't in a manual." Joel's voice stayed level, conversational almost. That was worse. "Scrambled channel. Fifty yards. Under gunfire. You called his name like you'd served with him."
"I heard it."
"You heard a sub-vocal squelch and translated it into a callsign." A pause, footsteps crunching. "Try again."
Ethan's mouth was dry. The truth sat in his chest like a stone — the other life, the memories that weren't supposed to exist, all of it balanced on the edge of his tongue. Ellie knew part of it. Joel knew none of it. And Joel had a way of looking at a person that made lies feel like trying to hold water.
"Luck," Ethan said.
Joel stopped walking.
Ethan stopped too. Ahead, the others kept going a few paces before they noticed, and then they stopped as well, not looking back — giving them room the way people do when they know a conversation isn't theirs.
Joel studied him for a long moment. "I'm not asking again today," he said at last. "You've got enough to carry. But hear me: the next time your secret gets someone hurt — Ellie, Carrow, anyone — that's on you. Not on luck."
He walked on. Ethan stood there a second longer, the stone still sitting in his chest, heavier now.
Ellie fell back to walk with him after that. She didn't ask what Joel had said. She just matched his pace, close enough that their shoulders nearly brushed, and after a while she said, very quietly, "Your leg. You want to stop?"
"I'm fine."
"Liar." But she said it fondly, and didn't push.
At midday they rested in the lee of a fallen spruce, and Hale unclipped a flat canvas case from inside his jacket — the kind of thing that holds maps.
"Took this off a dead Warden in the tunnel," he said, spreading it on his knee. "Was going to mention it before the shooting started."
It was a hand-marked topo map of the whole region: Echo Ridge, the river, the highway west. Red grease-pencil marks clustered along their route — positions, dates. And a larger mark, circled twice, sitting squarely between them and Jackson.
"Forward post," Hale said, tapping it. "Supply cache, comms relay. That's where the second team stages from." He looked up. "They're not just hunting us, people. They're herding us. Every move we make pushes us toward that post."
"Then we don't go toward it," Joel said.
"We go around," Hale agreed. "Adds two days. Carrow—" he glanced at her, "—can you walk two more days?"
Carrow was pale, but her eyes were clear. "Try to stop me."
Joel took the map, studied it, then folded it into his own pack. "Tommy's patrols run wide. If we swing north of the post, we might hit one of his scouts before we hit Jackson proper." He looked at Ethan. "That work for you?"
Ethan nodded, and hated how grateful he was for the normalcy of being asked.
That night they camped in a dry wash, no fire. Ethan sat with his back against cold stone and unfolded the crushed log sheet for the hundredth time — his mother's initials in the corner, the typed lines he'd memorized weeks ago. Photographic memory meant he didn't need the paper. He kept unfolding it anyway. It felt like holding her handwriting was the closest thing to holding her.
He read it the way he'd been taught to read ground: slowly, looking for what didn't belong.
And there — halfway down, in a transfer notation he'd skimmed past a dozen times — a date. Three months ago. A file transfer order for Subject D-09, marked active.
He'd been presumed dead for years. Someone had moved his file three months ago.
His hands went very still on the paper.
Ellie settled beside him without a word, close enough to share warmth. She didn't ask what he'd found. She just sat there, watching the stars come out between the branches, and after a long while her shoulder tipped against his and stayed there.
They didn't speak. They didn't need to.
At dusk on the third day, swinging wide north of the Warden post, Joel raised a fist and the line stopped cold.
Ethan heard it a half-second later: boots, deliberate, from the treeline to their left. Not Wardens — wrong rhythm, too open. Then a voice, clear and young and absolutely certain:
"That's far enough. Hands where I can see them."
Through the pines stepped a woman in a patched Jackson patrol jacket, rifle held low but ready, eyes moving over each of them in turn. When her gaze reached Joel, it stopped — and her whole stance changed.
"Joel?" she said. "Joel Miller?"