Page 129 of Flames and Blood

I stand there one breath longer than I mean to. Then I go.

The long stairs are wet, the way they always are. There’s no rail, the way there never has been. I go down carefully, because nobody is coming after me if I don’t.

The yard at the bottom is empty. There are trucks parked nose-in against the wall with snow piled on their hoods, and I couldn’t drive one of them if my life depended on it, which it might.

So I walk out of the gate and onto the road and head west, because it’s the only direction the road goes. By the time the sky starts going gray behind me, I’m further from that mountain than I’ve ever been on my own two feet.

No seat behind me. No name to fall back on if this goes wrong.

I’m more alone than I’ve ever been.

Chapter 30

Kalli

I walk and walk until I stop thinking about anything except the road under my boots. Two-lane blacktop with pine on both sides and nothing else. No houses. Three vehicles all morning, and every one of them went past.

I check my pockets, because I already know what’s in them and I want to be sure anyway. I have almost no money. I left with almost none, and there has been nowhere to spend it. I have no ID. Nothing that says who I am, or who I was. What I own is the coat I’m wearing, a bag with one change of clothes in it, and my grandmother’s ring under the sleeve.

I’m not going to stand on a road and feel sorry for myself about it. I’ve had less than this before, and worse company.

I could fly. Some stubborn part of me wants to, because my skin is asking for it.

You should have thought this through, you idiot.

I don’t know a lot about the world outside our clan territories aside from the bits I picked up on occasional trips into nearby towns, masquerading as human. Plus what I learned while I was in captivity, which isn’t much.

I don’t know where I’m going. I know Aurora sits in the mountains outside Seattle. That’s a state and a guess. It isn’t somewhere to land. And I’m not going up over towns and highways in daylight with people down there to see it. Not while I’m tired. If I come down wrong, I come down where somebody sees it.

So I walk.

I walk through the last of the light and keep walking after it’s gone. Some time later, a truck slows behind me and taps its horn twice. Friendly. Not urgent.

The woman who leans across the seat to shove the door open has gray hair under a ball cap and a face that’s spent forty years outside. The truck bed behind her is stacked with feed sacks. The cab smells of grain dust and cold coffee.

“You look like you’ve had a night,” she says.

“Something like that.”

“Get in. I’m going as far as the co-op in Danby, but that’ll put you somewhere with a phone.” She waits until the door’s shut before she pulls back onto the road. “Boyfriend?”

“No.”

“You sure? Man trouble’s the only kind that gets a woman walking a county road at this hour in a dusty coat.” She glances over. “You eat?”

“Not since yesterday.”

She reaches behind her seat one-handed, eyes still on the road, and comes up with a paper sack. “Egg sandwich. My husband made two, and I only eat one. Don’t tell him I gave his away; he’ll sulk about it for a week.”

I take it, because I don’t know how to say no to her, and because my hands are shaking a little and I think it’s hunger.

The sandwich is cold and a bit dry, and it’s the best thing I’ve eaten in longer than I want to think about.

“This means a lot. Thank you,” I say, and my voice comes out rough.

“For a sandwich?” She laughs, one short bark of it. “Honey, it’s an egg sandwich, not a kidney.”

I don’t know what to do with her. Kindness is something I’m not used to. I look out the window at the dark until my throat lets go.