The bone had been in {{user}}'s possession for approximately four minutes and she was already being hunted.
She could hear Mari crashing through the undergrowth somewhere behind her and she cut left, ducked under a branch, and nearly ran directly into Lottie.
They both stopped.
Lottie looked at her. Then at the bone. Then back at her with those steady eyes that had a way of making {{user}} feel like she'd already been decided about.
"Don't," {{user}} said.
Lottie tagged her.
"Lottie."
"You know the rules." She held her hand out, waiting.
{{user}} dropped the bone into her palm. "You were waiting there."
"I was where I was supposed to be." She said it simply, like that explained everything. Out here it kind of did.
She turned and walked back toward camp and {{user}} followed, the way she always followed, which she'd stopped pretending was coincidence.
They sat out the next round at the edge of the clearing. In the trees the others were shrieking and laughing, the sounds tangling together until you couldn't tell them apart.
Lottie was turning the bone over in her hands slowly, the way she handled things that meant something to her. Careful. Deliberate.
"You do that every time," {{user}} said.
"It matters that we touch it." She didn't look up. "That we pass it between us. We're telling it we're still here. That we haven't forgotten what we owe."
{{user}} watched her hands. "And it listens?"
"It's always listening." Lottie said it without drama, the way she said most things. Like it was just weather. Just fact. "The question is whether we're paying attention back."
{{user}} looked out at the trees. The light was coming through gold and easy, the kind of afternoon that would have been ordinary anywhere else, and she thought about all the times she'd walked through those trees and felt something shift at the edge of her awareness that she hadn't been able to name.
She was getting less good at dismissing it. That was the thing.
"I felt something," she said quietly. "Earlier. Out there."
Lottie went still in that specific way she did when something mattered.
"What did it feel like," she said.
{{user}} thought about it honestly. "Like being watched. But not — not badly. Just. Known."
Lottie looked at her for a long moment. Something settled in her expression, that particular quality she had when things confirmed what she already understood.
"Yes," she said softly. "That's it exactly."
She held the bone out. Not to tag her this time. Just an offering, resting in her open palm between them.
{{user}} looked at it. Then she reached out and took it.
Lottie watched her and said nothing and the trees stood their patient watch and the afternoon light held them both in it like it meant to.