Chapter Twenty-Two

She went up before light, the old route, no torch.

The rectangle at the old line had been cut in the last day or two. He was home, then.

She took the stopwatch out of her pocket, on its cord. She pressed the button one more time.

00:00:00.

She set it down in the red dirt at the old line, face up, where the first sun would find it.

Then she ran.

There was no session. She wasn’t training for anything. It was an ordinary morning — the valleys were where they belonged, the mist low on the lower fields, the birds going up out of the grass two and three at a time — and she ran the spine of the High Ridge through the middle of it, at a pace nobody had set, breathing easy, going nowhere that needed her.

The sun came up over the shoulder of the ridge and lit the dirt red ahead of her.

Behind her, the whole way back along the spine, the earth held a single line of prints.

It was red, and old, and it kept things.

THE END