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of gray ribbon.
    Aidan pointed with his finger, and she followed the invisible path with her eyes. “See the plateau? If you keep going across the escarpment about three or four miles as the crow flies, you’ll come to the canals. It’s pretty hard going.” She could just make out the slender silhouettes of rope bridges slung like webs above the cement-veined crevasses, and clusters of stilt houses sticking up along the slopes like bunches of strange flowers.
    “There,” he said, stabbing the air with his finger, “the Hell Gate.” He sounded proud and embarrassed at the same time. “The camp was actually part of Wards Island before the floods.”
    “What’s with the name?” she asked, thinking it sounded overly dramatic. “I thought the Hell Gate was a bridge or something?”
    “We adopted it because it seemed appropriate.”
    “Sounds homey,” she said sarcastically.
    A dog howled suddenly from outside the thicket. Under their tree the pack lurched to its feet, barking raucously. The howl came again, a long, sustained cry like a signal of some kind, and the pack, jostling one another and snapping at the air, scrambled about in excitement, tearing up the mossy ground with their thick claws. Lucy tracked them as they milled and broke apart, never moving more than a few yards away from the tree. Something had gotten them riled up again. She sensed his eyes on her.
    “You can’t just hide in your hollow like a mouse.”
    She stared at him. “I’m not hiding,” she snapped. “I’m surviving. And I’ve been doing just fine on my own.”
    His gaze flicked away. She felt him tense beside her.
    “Those are not feral dogs,” he said. “They’re hunting dogs.”
    “So what are they hunting?”
    “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not me. They didn’t appear until you did. They’re trackers. They’re looking for something.”
    She felt her jaw drop open. “What do you mean?” Her voice was a croak. “What are they looking for?”
    “I don’t know exactly.” He frowned. “But something makes them go crazy. I’ve watched them before,” he said. “They’re sent out from the Compound. I’ve seen them around, out on the Great Hill, on the Cliff, in the Hell Gate, down in the Village. They go out, they find people who are hiding, and then the Sweepers come.”
    She blinked. Her brain felt fuzzy. Her knife was in her hand again. It felt clumsy in her hand, as if she couldn’t will her fingers to hold it properly.
    “So they’re just keeping us here until …”
    “Until the Sweepers arrive.”
    “How did the dogs know?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “I guess they smelled you.”
    She shot a swift glance at him, but he wasn’t smirking. His eyebrows were drawn across his forehead and one hand raked through his hair.
    She judged the jump to the ground. Maybe she could push off from a branch before dropping, get some distance from the dogs before running. She thought there were maybe a couple of dozen of them. And more beyond her sight, out there in the gloom with the dog that had howled the announcement of their location. She squinted into the gathering darkness, straining to see a sign that the Sweepers were coming. Could she kill a dog? If she had to. But would that stop the others? Or would the blood drive them into a killing frenzy?
    “Give me that bandanna,” he said, pointing to her wounded hand.
    “Why?”
    “Come on!” He made an impatient gesture when she remained frozen. She held out her arm and he untied the knot from the bandage. Dark, fresh blood clotted the blue and white paisley design, and there were older, rusty stains where it had dried. He shoved it in the back pocket of his jeans and pulled two large, smooth rocks and a slingshot from the pouch of his sweatshirt. “Stay here until they’re gone, then run as fast as you can,” he said.
    “What are you going to do?”
    He grinned, his teeth very white.
    The dogs were huddled beneath the tree in a solid mass of resting