But the thought didn’t end there.
If she was going to believe that Harper had returned to Fairbanks, she would have to puzzle out why the truck had been half-hidden back in Circle Poke. The problem turned over in her head. Madelyn considered it from every angle. She considered the truck, the roads, Gabriel, Harper, and the weather. There simply wasn’t enough information available. She pushed the problem away, hoping that when it popped back into her head, it would be magically solved.
Gabriel was so annoying. He had professed concern for her well-being. He had implied that her mental health was questionable and that she might require intervention. It was impossible to consider him altruistic. She had never seen him commit either crime, but to her mind he was likely a murderer and a rapist. David had told her the rumors. Of course David loved to spread gossip when he had some homemade wine warming up his tongue. It wasn’t always important for him to distinguish between the truth and a good story.
She refused to believe that being reclusive was a disorder.
She only had one female role model in her life. Through her grandmother’s strength, Madelyn saw a solitary existence as a noble endeavor. She was proud to emulate that woman. Madelyn’s mother had remained in her committed relationship. What had that gotten her? She had died before she even had a chance to meet her first daughter. Noah’s wife had died the same way. Madelyn wondered if it was possible for a family of men to be attracted only to women who were unsuited to give birth to girls.
The terrain began to rise under her feet. Madelyn quickened her pace, wanting to summit the ridge fast. It was time to check the map, and it would be easier for her to guess her location if she could see the mountains on the horizon.
The noise made her freeze. She waited for the next click.
Her eyes found the black bird before it had a chance to call again. Madelyn scowled. She had never noticed the birds until a few years after the cull. As far as she knew, they had come with the madness. They made a click that sounded almost exactly like a Roamer. David used to say that the birds had learned to mimic the sound because it drove off birds of prey. Madelyn didn’t know what to believe. She was merely angry that the thing had set her nerves on edge.
When the bird clicked again, Madelyn bent for a stick and then hurled it towards the stupid beast. It flapped off to the south.
Madelyn climbed.
She got lucky at the top of the hill. She was able to spy a couple of mountain peaks through the trees and backtrack her location based on their headings. She had moved a tick on the map. The trip was going to take roughly forever. Getting back to the cabin would require every ounce of her stamina and a huge helping of luck.
Madelyn dropped her head and sighed.
#
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She lost track of the days.
Looking at the map, she could only account for the first three or four days of hiking. After that, she had dropped down into the valley and lost track of everything. She had no excuse. The route through the valley was a result of pure laziness. If she had stayed up on the ridge, she would have been able to track her progress by the changing horizon. But that route required a lot of bending, stretching, and climbing. She had taken the softer valley route because her middle aged bones demanded it. Now she was lost.
She walked for hours with the compass in her hand. She followed the wall of the canyon as it curved around to the east and then spat her back south. She never saw any good way to climb the rocks. She never found a stream or a creek. There should have at least been a dry riverbed to follow. Her world was featureless and there was no way to escape.
She was lost.
If she ignored everything she knew about the journey to get there, Madelyn could look at the valley and guess where she was on the map. Never mind the fact that it was impossible, she seemed to be just south of a feature marked, “Garret Bend.”
It was funny that she had never seen that name before. “Garret” was what her grandmother had always called the little loft of the cabin, where Madelyn still slept.
“Get your butt in the garret before I beat it dry,” her grandmother would call each evening.
Madelyn had never thought to look up the word.
Her water was running out. In a desperate move, Madelyn turned south. With each step she moved farther away from her cabin and her dread grew. Darkness was beginning to fall as she climbed the rocks to leave the valley. There was no good place to make camp. Every flat surface was covered in jagged rocks. There was nothing to do but climb. As her legs got weaker, the light grew dim. The next step might result in a twisted ankle, or a fall.
She was old enough to stay away from big risks. Her downfall was going to come from a stack of poor decisions. On their own, none was catastrophic. They would pile up until she died alone.
A rock shifted under her foot and Madelyn nearly went down.
She paused, hunched over, and looked at the ground.
“I’m not going to die like this,” she said aloud. “Meditating about failure will only bring failure. This is
not
the person I want to be.”
She straightened herself slowly until she was standing tall. She took a deep breath and stared at the horizon. Maybe it was just the last of the setting sun, but she thought she could see the glow from the bonfire down there. Was that really keeping her safe? She hadn’t heard a trace of Roamers the whole trip. Sleeping outside, she had been on guard, wondering when her time would come. The only clicking sound came from those damned black birds, and those always happened during the day. Maybe Harper had been right. Maybe the city people had been on the right track.
Madelyn lifted her foot and set it down carefully. She had a wrap in her pack. A twisted ankle or a broken wrist wouldn’t be the end of the world. She could take care of herself if need be. If she was careful, she wouldn’t need it. Before too long, she found a rock that was flat enough to curl up on. With her thermal blanket, it was almost comfortable.
#
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Madelyn woke with the sun. She found that her mind had changed during the night. She walked south with fresh purpose. Finding her way back to the road turned out to be fairly easy. She already knew the landmarks and the hills seemed to funnel her down to the correct path.
She had spent days wandering through the woods. It only took a day and a half to find her way back to the truck.
They had been there. It wasn’t anything precise that she could put her finger on, but she knew that the people of the city had found the truck and investigated it. She didn’t slow her pace or give any indication that she thought she was being watched. With her eyes focused on the truck, she let her attention wander through her peripheral vision.
She expected movement. It still surprised her when it came.
People emerged from the woods on both sides.
She put up her hands and stopped.
When they ordered it, she dropped to her knees.
“You remember me?” a man’s voice asked.
Madelyn didn’t look up at him. She thought that eye contact would only make the situation worse.
He grabbed her hand and twisted it around, shoving it up to the middle of her back. Madelyn didn’t have any choice but to stand up and move forward as he pushed. Hot spikes of pain rain up to her elbow.
As the man drove her forward, he raised a dirty, smelly cast in front of her eyes. His filthy fingertips poked from the plaster.
“She had to re-break it twice to get it to set right,” he said.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. It was a mistake. Her sarcastic apology made him wrench her arm even more.
#
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“Do you understand the charges that have been alleged.”
Madelyn moved her upper lip from side to side, trying to scratch her itchy nose. The blindfold was about to make her sneeze.
“Why can’t I face my accuser?” she asked.
“You are facing them,” the woman said. Madelyn recognized her voice. It was the older woman who had sat on the other side of the bars when Madelyn was locked up. She was probably the leader of this clan.
“Then I should be allowed to see them.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Do you understand the charges or not?”
“I suppose,” Madelyn said. They weren’t complicated charges—spying, breaking free, breaking a man’s hand, and blowing up the bonfires. They left out the part where she took Harper hostage. That probably meant that Harper hadn’t returned and the man who witnessed the abduction had probably denied seeing anything. He would have looked stupid if he had admitted that Madelyn had gotten the jump on both Harper and him.
“Do you dispute any of the charges?”
“I wasn’t spying,” she said.
She heard some murmuring, but couldn’t pick up what was being said.
The older woman spoke again. “We agree to drop the charge of spying.”
“It seems to me that all the rest of the charges came from the false spying accusation,” Madelyn said. “You can’t blame me for breaking out when you had me falsely imprisoned.”
The old woman’s voice was flat. “The other charges stand.”
Madelyn didn’t have a chance to respond.
The woman’s voice grew louder, like she was announcing to a crowd. “On the charge of breaking free from jail?”
“I saw it,” a man said.
“Guilty,” the leader pronounced.
“On the charge of fracturing a man’s hand while attempting to flee?”
“It was me,” the man said. “She broke this hand.”
“Guilty,” the leader pronounced.
“On the charge of destroying the bonfires?”
“She did it,” a young man’s voice said. “At the shopping center, at least. I didn’t see the airfield go up, but it must have been her.”
“Did anyone see the second fire?” the leader asked.
The room was silent.
Madelyn wriggled her shoulders. Her hands were bound loosely, but the plastic cuffs were solid enough to hold her. If someone had offered to scratch her nose, she might have admitted to any crime at that moment.
“We’ll drop the charge on the second fire if nobody can produce evidence.”
“It had to be her,” a man said. Madelyn guessed that it was the man with the broken hand, but it was impossible to be sure. “She blew up the one at the center, and then continued on to the airfield. Why is there any doubt?”
“We may not have doubt, but we also don’t have evidence,” the older woman said. “I pronounce guilty on the center fire only. Punishment?”
When the crowd began to debate, Madelyn finally got a sense of the size of the audience. She picked out the occasional voice, but mostly what met her ears was a din of opposing viewpoints. Somehow, despite the chaos, a decision was reached. The voice of a young woman read the decree. “Imprisonment and starvation for two weeks during which she rebuilds the jail. Then she does Oliver’s right-hand chores for a month, and has primary fire duty for three months.”
“And I say we still can’t trust her. Put her near that fire and she’ll blow it up again,” a man said. He cleared his throat as a punctuation of his statement. Madelyn thought his voice sounded familiar. It was too raspy to be Gabriel, but it sounded like him.
“Horatio’s point is taken,” the leader said. “Let’s increase the prison term to three weeks and fold in the repairs. Then we’ll know.”
Everyone stood at once. They marched her out of the courtroom with her blindfold intact. The person leading her didn’t jam her wrist up her back, like Oliver had. Madelyn was grateful for that. They also didn’t warn her of the stairs. She nearly had a heart attack when her foot descended through the open air. A hand caught her shoulder as she landed on the step.
“Keep going,” a voice said.
She walked for what felt like an hour. They passed outside and then back into a building again. She was warned of the next staircase. The world seemed to tighten in around her as she descended. The cuffs were removed and the lights went out.
#
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#
#
The lights came back on and Madelyn’s eyes pulled in the details she already knew. She was back in the cell. Her hole was still there. There was no guard stationed at the desk. Madelyn wondered if she was being watched.
She found a book on the bench.
Madelyn picked it up and moved to the bars so she could tilt the cover towards the light.
“Basics of Welding,” she read.
She opened the book.
The next time she looked up, it was because a cramp had formed in her neck. Madelyn set the book down and stretched her head to the side while she tried to rub the knot from her tight muscle. After a minute, she gave up on the cramp and returned her attention to the book. She was exploring the benefits of gas metal arc welding.
She ran her fingers over the pictures and tried to imagine the regular ripples of a perfect weld. The hot metal would smooth, bridge, and then fuse the pieces. The welder would create order from chaos. It was a comforting notion.
Some time later, the grunts of people on the stairs drew her attention. She looked up to see a burly woman back through the door, carrying one half of a generator. A spindly man brought up the rear.
They dropped the generator on the floor. Madelyn looked at it and realized that it wasn’t a generator after all. It was trailing a heavy cord though. The door to the stairs was still propped open by the cable.
“Do you have any water?” Madelyn asked.
“You’re on starvation,” the woman said.