After the narrow passage, the rest of their journey through the tunnel passed quickly and easily. Eli had taken the time, once they both recovered their breath, to heal her various aches and pains, as well as the small chafe marks on Nick’s hands and knees, and when they set out again they adopted a leisurely pace.

“We’ll have to wait for nightfall to leave,” Eli explained. “So there’s no rush.”

Around midday, according to Eli’s watch, they reached the foot of a staircase similar to the one they’d descended from the Hive. The steep stone steps loomed overhead, gray stone fading to a pitch black maw as they ascended out of range of the small light.

In the shadow of the stairs, they ate, drank, and then slept in shifts. Mara slept first, pillowing her head on her pack with Nick snuggled into her side. She expected a struggle, what with it being midday, but the darkness and the exertions of the night were apparently enough to trick her body into thinking it was time to rest, because she plunged directly into a heavy, dreamless sleep. Only seconds seemed to have passed before Eli was shaking her awake.

He handed her his watch as she sat up, rubbing at her eyes, and she squinted down at the face. She’d slept for six hours.

“Wake me at eight,” he said, and she agreed. He’d let her sleep for a disproportionate amount of time, and Mara added ‘guard shifts’ to the growing list of things to monitor and manage. Just because she’d become the kind of person who needed rescuing didn’t mean she was incapable of taking her share of night shifts. She was a mother, after all–a practiced hand at not sleeping.

Relatively short though it was, her shift began to feel long after around fifteen minutes of sitting alone in the dark silence. When boredom percolated into edgy fear, she pulled her pack toward herself. Aside from the few items she’d tossed in when they fled, it had been over a year since she’d seen the contents of this bag. Surely an inventory was a prudent use for her time. Better, at least, than sitting and stewing in her thoughts.

In addition to the items she’d grabbed as they ran out the door, the bag had been stocked for survival. She had a fresh pair of pants, two fresh shirts, and a half dozen pairs of socks. There was also a knife, a flint, and a tin box of tinder. A length of fishing line and a hook. A thick blanket rolled around a sleeping mat and lashed to the bottom of the pack. One of the outer pockets contained a basic toilet kit–tooth powder, toothbrush, a hairbrush, and a bar of harsh soap. She gnawed on her lip as she studied the meager supplies. She ought to have grabbed at least one bar of her good soap. Neither her skin nor her hair would appreciate the lye.

The second of the three outer pockets housed a rudimentary physik’s kit. Bandages, protective balm, and three small stoppered vials–one with a red-painted cork, one blue, one green. The red was a universal code for pain relief. Blue always marked rejuvenatives, and green typically identified potions intended for digestive issues.

The final outer pocket, to her relief, offered forth a map and compass. She unfolded the map eagerly across her knees and studied it, trying to guess the path they’d take to The Ripshaws.

The quickest, easiest route was undoubtedly out of the question, as it would carry them out of Loftland into acres upon acres of Order-controlled farmland. Mara still found it hard to believe that the Order would leverage even a fraction of its might to find the widow of a dead rebel, but she understood that Eli’s intent was to act with caution, which meant avoiding any place under effective Order control. That included the farmland.

Instead, she guessed, they would stick to the forest, headed east to Ashfall. Those forbidding, heavily wooded hills, while technically under Order control, were also known to harbor bands of criminals.

She’d heard from other Order wives, as well as from Davy himself, that the town of Cinder was little more than a trading post for ill-gotten goods, though the Order didn’t bother with it beyond sporadic raids. Davy’s theory was that the Order let Cinder stand because it consolidated all the contraband and stolen goods from the Midway route in one place. Much easier to raid a few establishments in Cinder than to send units out into Ashfall to hunt down small bands.

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Mara had never asked, because she knew he couldn’t tell her, but she guessed Cinder was likely a hotbed for rebel activity as well. Perhaps they would stop there before turning north.

If they traveled north from Cinder, the hills of Ashfall would ultimately deposit them on the banks of the Great Ribbon. They’d have to ford the river somehow, and after that she couldn’t guess which way they would travel. North by some route, toward the Ripshaws, but there was a westerly route across the Moro Plains that consisted mostly of grassland, and an easterly route that passed through the forbidding Smokestacks woodland. Both options seemed equally dangerous to Mara.

She cursed her lack of knowledge, of worldliness. She’d only been outside the city walls twice in her life, and had never traveled farther than a few days’ ride from the Capital. The first time she was five years old, and she barely remembered the trip, except for her father’s hunched back and red-rimmed eyes, her mother’s casket lashed down in the back of the wagon. They’d buried her in her home village, a quiet little hamlet along the banks of the Great Ribbon. There had been no celebration or meeting with old family. They’d slept at an inn and returned home early the next morning and Mara had slept most of the way, her head pillowed on her father’s leg as he drove the empty wagon.

The second time was more recent and sharper in her memory, about a year into her marriage. Knowing how badly she wanted to see the world, Davy had begged and pleaded and traded his way into a signed pass for the two of them to travel north to Bedford. They’d ridden on horseback–a novelty for her–in the shadows of the snow-capped Trinity. Bedford, while unmistakably Order-controlled, was a stunning city of granite stone and spiked towers, its history too rich, carved too deeply into the architecture for even the Order to wipe free. They’d slept that night with the windows of their room thrown open the mountain winds and made love as if war and rebellion were in the past, gone down with the sun behind the jagged peaks.

But beyond those two adventures–one solemn, one hopeful–her knowledge of the world outside the city was limited to what she read in books. As resolved as she was to be useful on this journey, she was in truth helpless. She knew plants, but she’d never slept out of doors, never had any need to learn field craft. She couldn’t fight, she couldn’t hunt, she had no innate magic.

Without Eli, she would be utterly lost, lacking both the knowledge of where to go and the skill to get there.

She studied the map for the rest of her shift, committing every river, every town, every mountain to memory.

At eight o’clock, she kept her distance and said Eli’s name, reaching out with a foot to nudge at his leg. Davy tended to wake violently when he was roused from a dead sleep, never lashing out at her but always jack-knifing up with a gasp, hand grasping at his side for a weapon that wasn’t there, eyes wild until they found hers. She’d learned it was best to keep her distance, lest he feel crowded.

Fortunately, Eli didn’t seem to share Davy’s struggles with sleep. It was almost as if he hadn’t been asleep at all, just resting his eyes. They flipped open when she said his name and he sat up, rubbing at the back of his neck.

“Time to go?”

In lieu of answer, she handed the watch over and he flipped it open, squinting at the face.

He sighed. “Time to go.”

~~~

Maria’s plan to interrogate Eli about their route while they climbed the stairs fled her mind almost immediately. Though not as arduous as their journey through the narrow tunnel, the ascent was brutal. Within minutes, she was soaked in sweat, her legs on fire with exertion.

They stopped often, but the stops were never conversational. They merely slumped on the steps, gulping water and panting for air before beginning again. That’s how she spent the time, anyway. She’d gone so deeply within herself, Eli could have spent each break singing pub songs and she wouldn’t have noticed.

It took an hour, and by the time they reached the top her legs were no longer burning but numb and heavy. When the steps ended, not at a door to freedom but in another tunnel, Mara was too weary to despair.

“Rest here,” Eli said, handing her Nick, and she sat without argument, not bothering to shrug out of her pack. She leaned back against it, letting her head fall forward as she fought to regain her breath. When Eli didn’t sit as well, she frowned up at him in question. He nodded his head down the tunnel. “The Order doesn’t usually patrol this deep into Loftland, but I don’t want to take chances.”

“Okay,” she said.

“If I’m not back in an hour, turn back.”

The thought of traversing that tunnel, Nick in tow, by herself…

“Okay,” she said, ignoring the dread simmering in her belly. “But I don’t want to, so be… be safe.”

He nodded grimly and was gone, once again leaving the light with her.