Chapter Six

Unhappy smells. Old sweat, tears, fear. The stink of human urine. And over that, something sharp and strong that Lucas could not name. Unnatural.

He hadn't been paying enough attention, his thoughts flying like the whipping snowflakes all around him. And then there had been the truck where a truck had never been before. The big machine that roared and rumbled and left deep tracks in the snow. But he hadn't run. Hadn't fought. Because he'd wanted to see the man who drove it. Up close. Wanted to know if he might be a friend or if he was an enemy.

Were there really still enemies? Or had Driscoll been the only enemy? He still didn't know. He was trying to figure it out.

The man in the truck had steered off the road when he saw Lucas and then taken out his gun and pointed it at him. His hand had been shaking, and Lucas had smelled his fear, knew he could overtake the man, steal his gun if he wanted, but he didn't. The man had asked him to come into town and answer questions. Lucas didn't want to answer any of his questions. He could have darted away like a fox. Too quick to catch. But he had needed to know more about what was out there.

So he'd let the man drive him into town, and the man had put him here, in the cell that unhappy people had sat in before him. Sweating. Crying. Peeing on the floor? Why? He couldn't make sense of that. Even animals peed far away from where they slept.

Driscoll had talked about a cell. With bars. A cage. This must be what he meant. But the men who told him to sit there had also said he could go home after they asked him questions. But maybe they were lying.

He looked at the camera in the corner. He knew what a camera was. The redheaded woman had told him what to look for, and he'd remembered. Remembered from the long-ago world, the one he'd lived in. Before. The life where there had been cameras and cars and food in cans and boxes, even bottles of sweet orange-colored drinks with little bubbles that'd popped on his tongue.

Some of it he could remember the names for, some of it he could not. The tastes though…the tastes had already left his memory.

He looked up, and a red light on the camera flashed. On. Off. On. Off. Like the slow blink of a red-eyed owl. They were watching him. Taking pictures. Why?

If they didn't have guns, he could fight them all. He was bigger, stronger than both men, the one who had driven him there in the truck and the other one who asked him questions and then put him in the cage.

That man was in the room next door, he could smell him, his scent both strange and familiar. Like pine trees only…too much. Too… everything. The smell made Lucas picture pine trees as tall as the sky and as wide as a mountain. Bright, blinding green with pine cones huge like boulders. Lucas wasn't sure what to think about that. His smell was just very.

But suddenly, underneath that, there was something else. He leaned his head back, closing his eyes and trying to pick up the scent beneath the other one. It was faint, very faint but he caught it and held on. A faraway wildflower field after a rainstorm. Clean. Earthy.

A woman.

Her smell…soothed him.

Confused him.

Her scent made the whispers stir up inside. They weren't whispers, that was the wrong word, but the only one he knew to use. The feelings he got when everything else disappeared, except for his instincts. They were always quiet, but sometimes he understood them, and sometimes he did not.

He pulled in another breath. The scent of her was new and old, something that was not known and already a part of him. Deep down. Deep, deep down. Something came alive like a spark, rising up to greet its match, a singing in his blood that was like the wind that showed up on a cold winter morning telling the forest that springtime was in the close faraway.

Startled, he opened his eyes, letting the feeling settle, until his breath evened again.

Now there was another man in the room next to the cage Lucas was in. Lucas could smell him through the thing high on the wall that blew air out of it. Hot. Cold, he thought. Both. What was the name of that thing? He couldn't remember. But the scents of the men were stronger than the lighter scent of the woman, and he lost his grasp on it. She faded away.

After a time, he smelled the man getting closer and was unsurprised when he showed up, using a key in the door with bars and sliding it open, coming into the cage with a smile.

"Thanks for waiting for me," the man said. He had hair the color of the big rocks that sat on the river's edge—light gray and dark silver all speckled together. "If you'll follow me this way, we can talk."

Lucas followed the man, turning his head to see the woman. But the door of the room she was in was closed. The man brought Lucas to another room with a table and two chairs. "Please sit," the man said, and when Lucas did, the man sat too. "My name is Mark Gallagher. I'm an agent with the Montana Department of Justice." He smiled again. His eyes are nice, Lucas thought. But he didn't trust himself to see niceness. Or meanness. Lucas knew well that people lied and pretended. "I know you've been Mirandized and that the sheriff already asked you some questions, but I have a few more if you don't mind."

Lucas nodded slowly, not wanting to answer questions but understanding that they weren't asking, they were telling.

"Good. Will you tell me again how you knew the victim, Isaac Driscoll?"

"He traded things with me. Things I needed but couldn't get."

"Okay. And why couldn't you get the things you needed?"

He didn't tell the man why. He wasn't sure he should. Didn't know who to trust and who not to trust. Not yet. "I didn't want to leave the forest. I wanted to stay there. And I…didn't have a car."

"I see. Okay." But he could tell by the man's face that he didn't see. Did he know Lucas was lying?

"Is there anything else you can tell me about your relationship? Anything you knew about him that we should know?"

"No." He tried not to picture the blood when he answered, the puddle that had grown and grown moving across the floor.

"Okay. And you live in a house on Isaac Driscoll's property?"

"Yes."

"And you traded things with him in exchange for rent?"

Rent? Lucas wasn't sure what that meant, but he knew the man—the agent—expected it was true, so he answered, "Yes."

"So, in essence, you depended on Isaac Driscoll to obtain things not available to you?"

There were too many words in that sentence he didn't understand, but he nodded anyway. "Yes."

"Did you like Isaac Driscoll?"

"I don't know. I just traded with him."

The agent waited for a second before talking. "Okay. Have you seen anyone unusual in, er, your area of the woods, so to speak, recently?"

Don't tell anyone about me.

"No."

"Okay." He gave Lucas a long look, and Lucas stared back. "Have you ever been to town before, Lucas?"

"No." That was almost the truth. He'd been to town once, but only walked a few steps into it. He didn't want to tell the agent about that. His muscles still got achy and tight when he thought about it.

"How did you come to live way out there?"

"I… My…parents couldn't care for me. Driscoll let me stay on his land."

The agent stared at him, but his face didn't say anything. "So you've been living out there how long?"

"Fifteen winters." So many. So much cold. So much hunger. So much loneliness.

The agent was looking at him in that funny way. Lucas didn't know what he was thinking. "Alone? All of them?"

"Yes."

The agent was quiet for a minute. "All right, Lucas, thank you for your time. We'll be out to talk to you if we have more questions. And, of course, to return your property once it's been tested."

Lucas had no idea what they were testing for , but he nodded. I want to go home. But even as he thought it, his heart dropped. Because the forest was no longer the place that made sense. Everything was different now.