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Efforts were made to keep big predators provided with enough deer and other prey that they would never get too hungry, but population dynamics were always fluctuating. So in these dark dashes through the forest, often following ridgelines between steep-sided ravines that increased the land surface of the wilderness region, Freya wore night goggles, and ran tree to tree, keeping the trunks between her and the group she followed.
    Perhaps predictably, there came a time when the people she was tracking caught her. They doubled back and surrounded her. Euan stepped up and slapped her face.
    She slapped him back instantly, and harder.
    Euan laughed at this, and asked her if she wanted to join their gang. She said she did.
    After that she joined them more often. They wandered the wilderness together as a gang. Early in these days, Euan passed his wristpad across her bottom and told her he had deactivated her ID chip with an electromagnetic pulse. This was not true, but ship did not inform her of this, being uncertain of the situation’s proper protocol. Ship records all human and animal movements in the ship, but very seldom mentioned this to people.
    Euan and Huang and Jalil together were particularly bold in their reconnaissances. In the alpine biome next to Nova Scotia, they found doors leading down into the chambers and passageways underneath the granite-faced flooring. They also had the passcode to a maintenance door leading to Spoke Six, where a spiral staircase on the inner wall of the spoke took them up to Inner Ring B. The inner rings are structural-support rings connecting the six spokes near the spine. B’s inner ring was locked to them, and the spine too, but they roamed up and down Spoke Six as often as they could.
    In these furtive jaunts Euan took the lead, but Freya soon pressed them to try new routes. As she was bigger than the boys, and faster, she could initiate explorations that they then had to follow. Euan appeared to delight in these adventures, even though they often almost got caught. They ran hard to evade anyone who yelled at them, or even saw them, laughing when they got back to the park behind the Fetch.
    Huang and Jalil would take off then, and Euan would walk Freya across the town, and hold her against alley walls and kiss her, and she would embrace him and pull him up and against her, until his feet hung off the ground as they kissed. This made him laugh even more. Released, he would butt her in the chest with his forehead, caress her breasts, and say, “I love you, Freya, you’re wild!”
    “Good,” Freya would say, while patting him on the top of the head, or rubbing him between the legs. “Let’s meet tomorrow and do it again.”

    But then Devi checked the chip records and saw where her daughter was going in the evenings. The next evening she went to the edge of the park and caught Freya returning from a run with her gang, just after Freya had said good-bye to the others.
    Devi grabbed her hard by the upper arm. She was quivering, and Freya’s arm went white under her grip. “I told you not to go in there!”
    “Leave me alone!” Freya cried, and yanked her arm free. Then with a shove she knocked her mother sprawling to the ground.
    Awkwardly Devi got back on her feet, keeping her head down. “You can’t go in the wilderness!” she hissed. “You can wander every part of this ship if you want, circle both rings if you want, but not the parts that are out of bounds. Those you have to stay out of!”
    “Leave me alone.”
    Devi flicked the back of her hand at her daughter. “I will if I can! I’ve got other problems I have to deal with right now!”
    “Of course you do.”
    Devi’s glare went cross-eyed. “Time for you to do your wander.”
    “What?”
    “You heard me. I can’t have you here embarrassing me, making things worse in exactly the areas where we have the most problems.”
    “What problems?”
    Devi convulsed and bunched her fists. Seeing that, Freya raised a