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“Leopardstar,” Blackfoot says, “we need to go, now. We’re already delayed.”
Fifteen more minutes, she thinks.
“Leopardstar?” Tawnypelt asks. “Why are–”
“Go back to your room,” Leopardstar says. “This will all make sense soon.”
She’s lucky Tigerstar hasn’t deemed Tawnypelt old enough or responsible enough or monitored enough to deserve a phone, because all Tawnypelt can do is go back and wait.
Not that it matters. She thinks Tigerstar is far enough away by now that hearing about her tying Blackfoot to a chair won’t change anything.
(Hearing she gave him a black eye might, but Leopardstar didn’t do years of boxing for nothing.)
Leopardstar fiddles with the key, taking it on and off the key ring. Everything in the house is quiet. She doesn’t have to wait, but if she is the one to open the door, she is the one to face them, to meet Mistyfoot’s eyes, to see Featherpaw, and she can’t be that person.
So she waits.
Tawnypelt’s footsteps come tumbling down the stairs. “Leopardstar,” she pants, “Leopardstar, there’s–”
“I know,” Leopardstar says. “Go back to your room, Tawnypelt.”
For a moment, Tawnypelt looks like she’s going to argue. Leopardstar sees her jaw set and her hands twitch, and then the girl relaxes, her face going slack and complacent.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“I don’t know,” Leopardstar says. “Tawnypelt, please.”
Tawnypelt turns, going up the stairs without looking back. Her footsteps are less confident.
“They’re this way,” Leopardstar says, feeling her hands tremble. She feels sick, because she’s going to open the door that she’s always known she could open.
She’s always known what’s behind it.
“They’ll need shoes,” she says, in part an afterthought, in part another delay. They’ll need more than that, but Leopardstar supposes an extra few hours in ill-fitting, ratty hand-me-downs won’t kill Featherpaw, if it hasn’t already.
One of the officers repeats this on their radio. Leopardstar can’t understand the static-filled, garbled response, but the officer smiles. “They’re sending two pairs up. Just some slippers. One size fits all.”
“They don’t have anything.” Anything is better than nothing.
Tigerstar liked to burn things.
He burned clothes and books and school assignments and once, notably, Featherpaw.
Most of Leopardstar’s things are intact, but not for luck. They are tucked into the cracks of her childhood room, innocuously slid between book pages or folded in set of sheets at the very back of her closet.
The smell of burning plastic and leader and rubber clung to all of them for days.
Leopardstar couldn’t bring herself to light a candle to cover it. Her fingers kept slipping on the lighter.
The door is unmarked. Leopardstar stands forward, holding the key. She’s really shaking, now. It takes her three tries just to get the key in the door.
She unlocks it, leaves the key in the handle, and steps back, then to the side.
“You should open it,” someone says. “You’re a familiar face, we don’t–”
“I’m worse,” she says.
The door opens.
The room used to be a storage closet. A large one, admittedly, the kind that awkwardly sized gifts get shoved, or pieces of furniture no one has need for. It has no windows, just a single light, and Tigerstar disconnected that.
“No need to waste electricity,” he said.
Leopardstar isn’t sure what it used to hold, but she knows exactly the contents now: a mattress, a dresser.
Featherpaw, Mistyfoot.
Out of some sense of obligation, she looks up. If Mistyfoot wants to meet her eyes, Leopardstar will afford her that.
Mistyfoot doesn’t look at her.
(Mistyfoot sees her, of course. Featherpaw grips her hand tightly, and Mistyfoot ignores how terribly this hurts, because she has not forgotten that she will walk out of this house on her own two feet.
She sees Leopardstar in the corner of her eye, standing to the side, head held high as always, and doesn’t give her the satisfaction of looking away. She just never looks.
It’s easier that way. She gives Featherpaw her elbow as they walk down the stairs, clutching the railing in her other hand because she thinks she really couldn’t do it without that, now.
The realization burns.
But Featherpaw is holding onto her, and Mistyfoot can’t aford to prove anything.
All the same, she sees Leopardstar follow them down the stairs.)
Leopardstar does her best not to contemplate the obvious pain Mistyfoot is in, or how Featherpaw is terrified and clinging to Mistyfoot and looks too weak to stand.
“Tawnypelt?”
The girl opens her door. Her eyes are red.
“What?”
“We’re leaving, now.”
“What about Blackfoot?” It stings that she does not consider Mistyfoot and Featherpaw worth asking after. Featherpaw and Tawnypaw used to be friends.
“Police custody.” Leopardstar escaped that fate by making the first phone call, by unlocking all the doors, by doing something.
It’s not enough to undo everything.
“Where are we going?”
“A hotel,” Leopardstar says. “And then, I don’t know. But tonight, we’re going to a hotel.”
Tawnypelt nods, then swings a backpack over her shoulders. She catches the bemusement in Leopardstar’s eyes. “I kept it. And then I packed it.”
Leopardstar closes her eyes and counts to ten.
“Okay,” she says, “let’s head out.”