And miles to go before I sleep

[Jilly]

((Eve continued from the dining hall))

It had been a few hours since the landscape changed from the drab grey buildings into the drab green and white and brown trees of the forest, and at least an hour or two since the sun started passing down over the horizon to go to sleep and wake up for another day of the same. At least it stopped snowing now. That was something.

Regardless Eve still didn't know where the fuck she was going and was honestly kind of lost. She'd never been great at following maps; honestly it was a blessing she never got lost at her job at the museum in the first place. But getting lost was also how you stumbled into cool places off the beaten trail. As long as you followed a straight line, you'd get somewhere. You'd find something you weren't supposed to find.

So she was going to keep following this straight line through the woods, flashlight in hand, bear skin in the other, singing a song to herself in her head that leaked out through her whispers in the night and listening to every crunch of her footsteps in the dead snow to keep her mind off of how fucking mad she still was.

"-You were such a P-Y-T,
Catching all the lights.
Just easy as A-B-C
That's how you make it right.

Do the D-A-N-C-E,
One, two, three, four, five..."

She should've slapped that jackass. Both of them. That one dude probably wouldn't have fired his gun at her, anyway. And even if he did, she'd have the moral victory. She wasn't the one threarening to shoot an unarmed women. She wasn't the one provoking a psychopath.

She hoped Ingrid was doing okay. She seemed like a tough girl that could manage herself, getting licked or not. Eve couldn't just walk that off. She hoped she'd never have to.

She hoped Eden... she hoped he was okay too. She knew she should've looked for him. It was what a beloved sister was supposed to do for her beloved brother. But she was still mad, mad at both of them. Mad at him. Mad at herself and her last words that night. The last words that ever came out of her mouth in the company of her brother.

"I hate you."

She knew she needed to apologize, but at the same time, would it have mattered? Would it make her feel better? Bring her a sense of closure? Would it change anything?

Was it better or worse if it could have?

She wasn't going to think about it. It made her a jackass, but she couldn't think about it. She was going to keep running up that hill, keeping her eyes to the ground and singing late 2000s pop songs to herself.

...She was kind of thirsty, now that she thought about it. Maybe some water would do her good.

Eve kept walking through the snow, juggling the bear skin, the flashlight, and her bag like a one man band.

With the oversight of not looking where her feet were actually stepping, her left foot touched air, and she went tumbling into the side of a ditch, rolling all the way down.

((continued in part 2))