Night crept in. The little blue clock read 2:06am. At the top of the cellar stairs, six children huddled behind a seventh, who stood by the door, pocket knife in hand, tinkering with the lock. They had no suitcases. No backpacks. No momentos they wished to take with them other than each other. The Funhouse children were quiet as they waited for Derek to pick the lock. Only the sounds of seven hitching pairs of lungs could be heard echoing against the concrete.

And then there was a click, and something shifted in the air. The buzzer had sounded. The checkered flag had been waved. It was time for the prey to outwit the predators. Moving as one, they snuck up the stairs.

The front door of the Roycewood house, they knew, was locked from the inside with a key that Roger kept on his person at all times. This was perhaps the most volatile part of their plan; they were leaning heavily on the assumption that the back door was unlocked. It was their only viable escape route. If it turned out to be sealed, they were, as Emily would put it, totally fucking screwed.

"Step lightly," Jason whispered as the children inched across the dusky living room. "And keep quiet. Keep quiet like your life depends on it."

The because it does tacked onto the end of that sentence was left unspoken, but the children all felt its resounding weight.

Aaron was the first to successfully scurry through the shadowy parlor and reach the back door. With a tight-lipped glance back at the others—a glance that said that this was it, this was the crossroad, the crux—he closed his hand around the knob and twisted. Pushed. Pushed again.

"No," Emily whispered as Aaron tried again and again to shove the door open. Spencer and JJ clung onto each other's shoulders like two equally spooked animals. Penelope pressed a hand over her mouth to muffle her sobs. Derek simply stepped backwards, away from the door, away from this devastating dead end. He felt as if he was going to suffocate. Like he was going to drop down right there onto that mite-infested carpet and choke on his own misery.

"No," Jason said. "No way. Stop it, all of you. I can feel you giving up. We can't quit now. We just can't." He turned to Derek, panic dancing in his eyes. "How badly did it hurt when you jumped out the window that one time?"

"Are you serious?" Aaron hissed. "The Roycewoods will hear the smashing. They'll round us up in seconds. Roger's fast, and he knows the lay of land. We don't. The woods must go on for miles around this place. It'll never work."

"If we stay here, we die," Jason replied. His face fell just slightly, that I-don't-give-a-fuck facade faultering for the first time in Aaron's recent memory. "Please, Aaron. Please. I still have a mom, man. My mom's still out there, waiting for me to come home."

Shaken to his very core, Aaron thought it over. Stay and eventually die, or leave and probably die? Play the long game or the short one? Aaron wasn't one for rashness; he thought that almost every act of life was better executed when it was stringently planned and practiced. Spontaneity gave him pause. Recklessness gave him hives. He hated not having safeguards and backup plans and alternate escape routes. He hated not knowing what to do next.

But ultimately, he decided he hated the idea of going back down to the cellar even more. It was Emily's death grip around his upper arm that sealed the deal for him. She was trembling. If Emily, the unflinching girl who, even after all this time, could still muster up the spite to sneer at the poker men as they struck her, was trembling, things had gotten bad. Aaron swallowed hard.

If we stay here, we die.

"Fuck it," he whispered, herding the others into a semi-circle around him. "Okay. Here's what we do. There's a window on either side of the front door. We'll make two lines in the living room and jump through it in pairs. Derek and Emily will go first because they're the biggest besides Jason and I. Then Penny, then JJ and Spencer, then Jason and me."

He shot a solemn look at Jason, who simply nodded in reply. They were the two original captives. It was their duty—their birthright, in a strange and sullen way—to get the others out of the Roycewood house before them.

"You've got to run straight through the glass," Derek said, grimacing at the memory of his own window-jump all those months prior. "No letting up. No hesitation. You'll land right in the azalea bushes. It'll hurt, but you just have to put it out of your head."

"From there," Aaron said, "you get up and start running. We'll scatter; they can't get us all. You have to run faster than you ever have in your life, okay? Run for every time they ever hit you." He turned to JJ. "For every swing of that goddamned belt." His gaze wandered to Emily. "For every poker game." His eyes landed on Spencer. "For every last name they stole. They'll come after us once they hear the glass breaking, but we have to keep going anyway. If we run far enough, eventually we'll get to some place better than this place." His voice caught, suddenly sounding pleading. "There's got to be somewhere better."

Standing there in that circle of seven in that dark, dusty living, they each felt the heat of the other's bodies by their sides. It was as if some blazing golden thread had been strung between their hearts, attaching them, entwining them. They were one. They were not alone.

"Aright," Jason said. "Game time."

When Derek tumbled in the azalea bush, glass raining down behind him like hellfire, he took a moment to appreciate that unlike the last time he made this leap, he hadn't landed facefirst.

There was a shattering from his left. Emily popped up from the bush on the other side of the door, her arms peppered with bloody scrapes. Derek's wide, night-mirrored eyes found hers. For a second, both adolescents were frozen. Had they really just done that? Was this a dream? A nightmare?

A body tumbled into the bush beside Derek. All he could make out was a streak of neon pink hair. Penelope. Right. He shook off his shock; freezing was a luxury he couldn't afford right now, not when his friends still needed to make their own leaps of faith. He grabbed Penelope's hand and hoisted her up. She was shaking, her eyes unfocused, flitting back and forth from the moon to the grass to the treeline.

Above them, an upstairs window lit up. There was a low rustling. A man's gravelly voice grunted, "What the hell?"

A chill spread from Derek's skin to his marrow. He watched as Emily's lithe silhouette took off into the night.

Yanking Penelope along behind him, Derek launched his body forwards, hurtling across the yard, through the thicket, into the forest. He ran like his legs didn't belong to him. Like he was gathering up the speed to fly.

Yellow light flooded down the staircase. JJ could hear floorboards moaning above her, wailing to the rhythm of Roger's gait. Only Derek, Emily, and Penelope had jumped; she, Spencer, Aaron, and Jason were still trapped in the house, and already, the Roycewoods were awake. From across the room, JJ locked eyes with Spencer. He was trembling in the purple twilight, his eyes like headlights.

JJ thought of her sister. She remembered the warmth she'd felt whenever a giggling Ros would chase her through the hallways of their home. She remembered that unmistakable feeling of wholeness.

She didn't share blood with the other children in the basement. She and Spencer had separate DNA, double helixes that would never intertwine. But that feeling of wholeness—that was something that could exist separate from genetics. That was something that sparkled in the air between her and Spencer regardless.

Even now, as the thump-thump-thump of Roger's footsteps pounded above her, JJ could feel it.

She figured there was no reason to worry about staying quiet any longer.

"Now, Spencer!" she yelled, sprinting towards the shattered window, the wind lifting her hair like a catching flame.

JJ dived. Residual glass screamed against her limbs. She rolled into the bushes, her body assaulted by twigs and thorns.

She should have run straight into the woods. Jason had said not to hesitate or pause or look back. Scatter, he'd said. Every man for himself. So JJ shouldn't have made a beeline for the bushes on the other side of the door. She shouldn't have dragged Spencer out of the shrubs, shouldn't have run beside him, hand in hand, into the forest.

But JJ did. And she didn't feel bad about it. Since when had the Funhouse children ever lived by the "every man for himself" principle? Since when had they ever left one of their own behind?

For Aaron, it was as if history had rewinded.

Here he was, standing side by side with his original cellar-mate, sheathed in darkness. Here he was, staring at Jason, wondering how he got into this mess, wondering if there was any chance at all of getting out of it. Was this not the very same dread he'd felt on his first night in the basement? Sure, he was older now. Taller. More guarded. But that nagging sense of lostness remained, and it was so powerful that it seemed to swallow up everything else, reducing this night to the same as Aaron's very first.

"You little shits!" shrieked a voice from the top of the staircase, where the footsteps had finally reached. "Don't move another inch!"

Aaron startled out of the soupy slow motion of memory.

"Go!" Jason screamed, and then Aaron was running, and the voices on the staircase were growing louder, closer, and as his body slammed into the bushes, he heard the jiggling of the front door being unlocked. Aaron staggered to his feet. His pulse was a tidal wave in his ears. He stumbled into a sprint, dashing headlong toward the trees. Jason was beside him in an instant, matching pace.

The door of the Roycewood house crashed open. Without slowing down, Aaron shot a brief glance over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of Roger's seething silhouette. He had a long black object pressed to his shoulder.

"A rifle," Jason panted just as they slipped past the front line of trees. "Keep going."

As if on cue, there was a cracking sound, and a bullet drilled into a tree trunk right next to Aaron's head. He bit back a scream, his ears ringing with the reverberations of the gunshot. Vaguely, as if the sensations were rising up from another world, he felt his feet crunching against the dirt, propelling him forwards. He wasn't running out of intention anymore; his body was simply carrying him forth on some desperate chariot. It was all instinct now.

Another gunshot. A bush by Jason's feet exploded in a flurry of green.

"He's following us!" Jason yelled.

Aaron snuck another look over his shoulder. Sure enough, back in the Roycewood yard, a distant, pudgy shadow was barreling in their direction, rifle raised.

Crack!

Aaron felt the breeze of a nearby bullet ripple against his tee-shirt. He couldn't gulp down his cry of fear this time; it flew from his throat unbidden.

"Stop right there you fuckers!" Roger screamed.

Aaron looked back one last time. A grave mistake. His foot caught on a tree root, folding his ankle underneath him and sending him plunging to the ground. His left leg exploded with pain. All he could do was lay there, sprawled in the cold dirt, gasping for air. His eyes welled, blurring the distant tendrils of tree branches into gangly claws. Above them lay the stars. The stars that Aaron had studied and marveled at and wished upon. The stars that he'd trusted. The stars that hadn't saved him.

At once, there was a figure standing above him, but not it wasn't the sinister one he'd been expecting.

"Run, Jason," Aaron choked. "Go. Get out of here."

Jason practically lifted Aaron up, draping the younger boy's arm around his shoulder. "I'm not leaving you," he said, dragging both of them forwards.

I'm not leaving you. No one had ever said those four words to Aaron Hotchner. Not his parents, not any of his foster families, not his friends from school. In those four words was the loyalty he'd been searching for all his life.

Crack!

The very air particles seemed to still for a moment.

Jason stopped in his tracks, a look of confusion drawn into his face. He put a bewildered hand to his chest, then held it out in front of him.

His crimson-coated fingers glistened in the moonlight.

"Jason?" Aaron whispered.

Jason's body fell limply to the forest floor.