Piper took a deep breath. She pressed down on the walker and stood.
No screech, no click in the knee, no blade of pain stabbing the inside of the joint. Only the weight of her own body flowing smoothly down into the concrete floor for the first time in 11 years.
She breathed just one small, "Oh," but it held an entire decade. She took her first step, then a second.
The new knee joint turned in perfect harmony with the true motion of her leg, supple as if it were part of her body. Piper laughed, a trembling, choked-up laugh, and walked faster, a fourth step, a fifth.
She wanted to go faster, faster still. Fast as the little girl on that sunset trail all those years ago.
"Wait," Boon called out. "You're not used to it yet.
Don't."
But 11 years of hunger had no brakes. Piper pivoted too sharply on her sixth step.
Her left thigh, weakened by all those years, couldn't keep up. She lost her balance.
The walker tipped sideways and she fell. Boon lunged.
He couldn't catch her fully, but he got an arm under her back in time, turning the crash into a slide down to the floor. Piper lay there, gasping, her hip aching, but unhurt.
The new braces had even done their job, soft-locking the knee joints so her legs wouldn't twist. And in that exact moment, the shop door burst open.
Genevieve Larkin stood in the doorway, backlit, and what she saw was this. Her daughter lying on the oil-stained concrete floor of an auto repair shop in the arms of a strange man.
Her legs strapped into some homemade metal contraption she had never seen before, while the $400,000 braces lay discarded on the workbench like a piece of junk. Every fear Dr.
Crane had planted in her detonated at once.
"Get away from my daughter." Her voice wasn't loud.
It was more frightening than loud. She swept across the shop and dropped to her knees beside Piper, her trembling hands checking her daughter from head to toe.
"Are you hurt? Your neck?
Is your neck all right? Your back.
Piper, look at me. Can you feel your legs?"
"Mom, I'm fine. I just fell."
"Just fell?" Genevieve whipped around to face Boon, and 11 years of guilt inside her turned to fire, all of it pouring onto the man standing there.
"Do you have any idea what one fall could do to her? Dr.
Crane warned me word for word. You, what qualifications do you have?