She'd made it down the hill it had cost her so much to climb no more than two hundred yards to the east. Marsh grasses poked through snow and frozen mud, thick up to the treeline. Beneath black boughs and the gloom that drifted from day to dark with no need for twilight, she was protected from eyes on higher ground. She crawled. The creek was close; she could smell it. Thank God for small fucking mercies, a cramped and bitter part of her mind hissed. Unaccustomed to creeping on all fours, her arms shook with exhaustion. On the few occasions she dared to stop, her muscles had twitched and quivered. Her shoulders ached; the ball joint in one of them-heard through her skeleton rather than her ears-grated as if broken glass ground in the rotator cuff. Soon, Anna knew, she would devolve further, from quadruped to arthropod crawling on her belly. Worms tended to have short life spans. Duff gave way to layered rock, slabs of stone overlapping like flagstones for a giant's patio. Her trail would not show here; the tree cover kept the frost off, at least in the so-called heat of the day.
