Twelve hours later, and the vibrations of the hopper felt like a part of her body, liquefying her bones and boring into her teeth. The scavenging grounds were still nearly a half day's ride away, and she knew she had to stop for something to eat before she fell off her hopper from exhaustion. She'd been going all night, and now that the sun had come back up she would have to take it easy anyway. The Dead Wood gave very little protection against the sun's rays.

By the time she found a suitable place to park her hopper, her neck was slick with sweat and her mouth felt full of cotton. After balancing the hopper on its stand, she went to sit on a tree root to dig through her pack. She ended up eating dried rat meat and gulping water from her canteen. She'd made sure she had enough to last the three days she thought it would take her to find her dad, but she still worried about her water supplies as the sun beat down on her.

Trying to forget her worries, she chewed on the dried meat and closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her eyelids she finally found enough peace to let her mind wander. She briefly thought of the broken water purifier back home, then moved on to a bit of fuming about Aston. But then her mind took a turn toward the fantastical as her exhaustion caught up with her. 

Her imagination pulled up a dark and cruel world that she recalled from bedtime stories of her youth. The Dead Wood had featured heavily in these stories, as a place of fear and death. The trees hid a creature that could rip a grown man in half with just its teeth. Its red glowing eyes always were the first thing you saw, followed by the stench of rotting meat. By the time you saw its massive hairy head, bigger than a hopper engine, it was too late. Its fangs would sink into your throat, its barbed tongue lapping at your skin.

Bo snapped herself back into reality, shivering as she glanced at the trees around her. Any one of the trunks could hide the Beast of Lyx, a creature known for its brutality and blood lust. It was so terrorizing, that the adults in the camp had used it as a scare tactic to keep the children from wandering too far in the Dead Woods.

Or at least, that's what Bo had to believe in order to keep pressing through the trees and face the soon-approaching evening.

She cracked her neck and rolled her shoulders as she climbed to her feet and walked back to her hopper. She still had a long time to ride, and she couldn't afford breaks for too long.

Then she heard it. 

Not a twig snap. Not a bandit's battle cry. Instead it was a piercing animal cry, reverberating against the air and in Bo's ears. She froze, all her senses going dead except for her ears as they strained to hear more. And they did. The sound of growling, the sound of claws against roots, and the sound of huffing breath.

Fear scuttled down her back as she spun to take in all her surroundings. Nothing was visible yet, but Bo's mind supplied gruesome images of the Beast of Lyx crawling through the dust with red eyes already locked on her. 

She shook her head and berated herself for thinking such silly things. She knew perfectly well what the sounds were from, but she wasn't sure they were much better than the Beast of Lyx.

A moment later, a howl cracked the silence only a few feet away. Bo pivoted to face it, but soon the howl was joined by another and another. She stumbled back one foot, trying to remember that fear drove their predator instincts. She straightened her spine and peered into the tree trunks, telling herself to be brave even as she saw movement.

A flash of gray there.

The glint of eyes there.

The smell of dead things there.

Only three, but they were spread out perfectly around her.

Wolves. 

Her hand stole to her rifle and pulled it close. The creatures were deadly to scavengers, and Bo knew many families in her village that had become smaller because of them. Whole groups had been killed by wolf packs, and Bo knew that it was practically a death sentence to be caught completely alone. She had no one to help her but her guns, and the wolves were starving and desperate enough to not show any hesitance. 

Snarling filled her ears, and she glanced to her right just in time to see the nearest wolf lunge forward. Its teeth snapped closed a few inches from her arm. The wolf's lips curled back, showing long teeth and hot saliva. Time was running out.

As the wolf retreated and circled around to find a better attack point, Bo took that moment to rush for her hopper. The wolves closed in behind her as she turned her back to them, but she pressed forward. Her sweaty palms slid on the bars of the hopper but she couldn't even wipe them down. She kicked up the stand and cranked the motor on. The sound startled the wolves, who backed up just enough for Bo to have the time to jump onto the seat. 

Now that she was on her hopper, her blood flowed just a bit braver. She raised her rifle and shot as a wolf approached. The power beam only grazed one of its ears, taking a chunk with it. The wolf yelped and fell back, but its companions were right on its heels. One's teeth clamped down on Bo's boot, and she had to slam her rifle's stock down on its skull to get it to release its grasp. She managed to scare the other wolf with a wild shot, which bought her enough time to let the rifle fall across her chest on its strap and grab the hopper handles.

She spun the accelerator on the handle until the engine flared into life. The wolves scattered at the sound, retreating to the safety of the trees. Bo knew they would regain their courage after only a few seconds, so she took the opportunity to turn her hopper toward the biggest gap between the wolves. She yanked her goggles over her eyes and hunched down over the handlebars. 

She pushed the accelerator to its max, making her back wheel kick up a fountain of dirt before it finally found purchase and launched her forward at nearly full-speed. The wolves tried to snap at her as she passed them, but she was beyond them in less than a second and speeding through the trees. She glanced back only once to see them running after her for a few seconds, but then realizing that she was prey not worth their energy. They came to a stop and watched her in their pack of three, and she tried to not take too many glances in the rear-view mirror as they got smaller and smaller as she left them behind.

The urge to throw up washed over Bo, but she sternly told herself not to. Luck had been uncommonly good to her. The wolves had just eaten some sort of sustenance, or else they would not have let a meal go without a bigger fight. Bo had seen the bodies of those caught by a pack of wolves. There was no reason she should be alive right now, but she wasn't complaining.

As she put as much distance between herself and the animals as she could, her radio suddenly beeped. After nearly jumping out of her skin, she unclipped it from her belt and raised it to her lips.

"Yes?"

"Bo." Aston's voice, muffled by the wind whipping in her ears.

She thought about hanging up right then. No doubt he had thought up a long lecture about abandoning the group, and after almost dying, Bo wasn't in the mood to hear it.

"Make it quick, Aston. I'm riding and I kind of need both my hands."

Instead of the angry scolding she expected, Aston's voice was completely level. "Your father's signal came back online."

She slammed on her brakes, coming to such a dead stop that she had to throw her legs down to avoid going over the handles. Her hand shook and she thought maybe she had misheard Aston through the wind and radio interference.

She had been silent for so long, Aston seemed confused. "Bo?"

"I'm here. Repeat what you said before?"

"Your dad's signal just suddenly came back on. We have no idea how. Felicia said it just popped back on screen a minute ago, strong as ever. Do you think he maybe turned his radio off by accident and only just noticed?"

"I don't know," Bo said. "What are the coordinates?" she asked.

Aston's voice grew distant as talked to someone else on the other end of the radio. They were too far away from the receiver for Bo to hear their words, but she heard the muffled sound of voices. She ran a hand over the top of her hair and let out a shaky breath as she waited for Aston. Dad could be alive. He could really be alive. It wasn't until now that she realized she had believed he was dead.

"He's near your own signal," Aston said, the note of surprise obvious in his voice. He then supplied the exact coordinates of both herself and her father, which Bo wrote down to check against the map.

"Go find him."

"I will," she said.

"Be careful."

They hung up and Bo pulled out her map, laying it across her lap as she clicked on the flashlight and held it in her mouth. After a few seconds of tracing lines and plugging in coordinates, she circled a spot. Her father. Only a few minutes from here. It was unbelievable.

After a minute of memorizing the path she would take, she stuffed her supplies away and turned the hopper to face to her left. Her dad was off the normal path, somewhere out in the parts of the forest that no one ever ventured to. What he was doing so far from the marked paths, Bo couldn't guess. She only hoped he had his reasons.

As she drove she sent up a dozen prayers. And when she saw his hopper laying on its side, tangled around the roots of a tree, she sent up a flurry more.