I have to get as much space between myself and the police as I can. I have to find a river. If I find a river, they won’t be able to trace my scent. I would be somewhere so far downstream and they would not find me.

The forest is thick around me. It cloaks me. Envelops me. Like armour it surrounds my body, shielding me in shadows. I always hated the idea of being in the shadows. Because, metaphorically, that’s exactly where us slaves have been for all our lives. But these shadows, these shadows hide my soul from the masters, and from the police, and they keep me safe.

The forest has given me much more than just cover. It has given me berries, both sweet and sour, to fill my belly with, and it has given me good, clear stream water to drink. It has given me soft pine needles to hide my tracks and it has given me large, sturdy branches to tie myself to when I needed to sleep. I am beyond grateful for the forest and I am beyond grateful for all the grandparents who have taught me how to survive in the forest.

Because without these thick woods, I would not have been able to escape. And I need to escape. I’ll be damned if I let the child I’m carrying within me grow up in chains just as I did. I have to give them a better life. I have to give them a life where they can be seen as, understood as, and treated as a human being. A human being with dignity and equality and rights just like anyone else has. I have to give them a life where they are more than a servant, more than a thing to be used and discarded, more than an object to be exploited as the masters see fit. Because they will be a whole person. And they have to grow up knowing that they are a whole person.

I am exhausted. I am cold. I have been walking nonstop for hours, at a desperate pace, and my feet hurt, my legs hurt, and I so very desperately want to sit down by a fire, I so very desperately want to rest. But still, I have to keep going on. I have to keep going on. Because, no matter how gruelling this journey is, it’s better than slavery, it’s so much better than slavery. And I have been tired before. I know how to feel weary, how to feel absolutely exhausted, and how to power through it anyways.

Because the rewards will be beyond worth it.

If I can just find the secret village, where many other runaway slaves have formed a community, then I will be safe. I will be safe, and I will be able to start my new life. And I will be able to start my child’s life. Hidden away, deep in the forest, much deeper than in this forest, where the masters and their hound dogs and their slavecatching police officers will never find us, and we can build a society of our own, a society that is the way that we want it to be, a society that is equal.

So I cannot stop walking. I cannot slow down. No matter how bone-exhausted I am, I cannot stop walking or slow down. Because, for the first time in my life, I’m using my energy to help the people I care about.

I am overcome by a sudden feeling of dread. It seizes my heart and almost makes me double over with how sick I am. My mind goes into high alert. There is something behind me. I can hear the faintest whispers of feet upon the ground. I turn around. Off in the distance, there, there are shadows. There are shadows. There are shadows. I am being pursued. I have to outrun them.

I break out into a run, trying to be as quiet as I can. My heart thuds in my chest, thuds in my ears, thuds in my throat. My mind is screaming at me to go, go, go. And there is some faint part of me that is absent, that thinks this is all a strange dream. But this is not a dream. It’s all too real. This is the realest that anything in my life has ever been, ever. And the stakes right now are the highest stakes that I have ever had to deal with, and considering that I have lived my whole life as a slave, that is saying a lot.

My legs burn, my feet burn, my throat burns, my lungs burn. Everything inside of me is screaming at me to stop. Everything inside of me is screaming at me to go. And I feel so terrifyingly human, so human and fallible and capable of messing up. I gasp with each breath, taking in as much air as I can possibly get. And I ignore the burning everywhere inside me, I ignore the heaviness, the weariness, and everything that is telling me to stop. The only thing that matters right now is the life growing inside of me and all the alarms in my head telling me to go.

There are shouts behind me, and thudding feet. I let it sink into me with its many hot needles, sending a fresh wave of panic flooding through me, panic that merges with the panic that is already pulsing with my heartbeat, coursing through my blood flow. They are gaining on me. With each desperate step that I take, I can tell that they are gaining on me. I can tell that they are going to catch up to me, unless some type of miracle occurs. I am not giving up yet. Even if everything is against me, I am not giving up yet.

I pray for a river. As I thud through to forest, as I almost fly like the wind all around me, I pray for a river. And, in a handful of steps, each more frenzied than the last, my prayer is answered. There, in front of me, rushes the only black outline of my only hope for deliverance.

But the river is much more daunting than I ever hoped it would be. I come to a stop just within its waters, still near the banks. And I cannot make myself go on.

It’s black. It’s black. It’s so only black. But even in the blackness I can see it rushing, I can see it frothing and foaming with how fast it’s going. The full, barely-there glow of faint white foam, gray in the nighttime, is scattered across the river. The water is dead cold. So cold that it steals my breath away. And the current, even here in the edges, where I’m standing right now, is rushing at an unbelievable pace. I cannot imagine how fast the river will be in the middle, where there is no ground to slow its flowing. I have learned to swim before, but it has been in secret in the pond on the estate. I have never swam in anything like this.

I will die. I will die. I will die if I go in there. My mind is screaming at me to go in there. I would rather die than bring a child into a life if slavery, but I don’t think I have the strength to save myself.

I look up. The moon shines in the darkness, among the bright stars. Just a tiny sliver of glowing silver. Just a tiny smudge of hope across the darkness all around.

I take a deep breath. And I rush into the river. The strong current, the frigid waters, they almost take me. They leave me struggling, leave me gasping, but they leave me alive on the other side, soaking wet and unpursued.