Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,31

spent over a hundred and fifty dollars.

Raven's gaze shifted aside. "Why don't you leave that to me?"

"Why don't you find some brainless groupie to complete your quest? I want to know where I'm going."

The school counselor had told Kelsa that becoming an "overcontroller" was a natural response to the chaos and disruption caused by a death in the family. She said that as long as Kelsa recognized where her need to control her life and the people around her was coming from, she probably wouldn't become too big a pain in the ass.

Her counselor had some good moments, but Kelsa wasn't about to let someone else take control of her life right now. Especially not someone whose handsome dark eyes weren't meeting hers.

"I can tell you roughly where the next nexus will be," he said. "It's somewhere around Flathead Lake."

Kelsa had never been that far north. "That's in Montana, isn't it?" She unclipped her father's ... her new com pod and brought up a road map. His screen was bigger than hers had been, but not by much, which was why people used boards for detailed work. "We'll have to go back to I-15," she said. "But after that it's a straight shot - "

"I want you to take a different road," Raven said. "Through the Sawtooth Mountains."

Kelsa squinted at the small map. She could see that route, but...

"It would keep us from backtracking, but it would probably take more time than just getting back on the highway."

"I've been in the Sawtooths," Raven told her. "They're beautiful."

Kelsa laid the com pod aside. "What aren't you telling me?"

"Well, mostly, I want you to follow the Salmon River. It starts in the Sawtooths and runs right beside the road most of the way to Flathead Lake. By the time you get to its end you'd have a real affinity for the river, and you could call on water to open the next nexus."

"Call on water? I thought the nexus here was an 'earth nexus.'"

"It was," said Raven. "This time. But the part I wasn't telling you is that I'm going to send you through the mountains on your own. If I fly by the shortest route, I should reach Flathead Lake around the same time you do."

"And that way," Kelsa said slowly, "you wouldn't have to worry about the Idaho-Montana border. You do realize that I have to be granted government permission, which I don't have, to exit the U.S. and enter Canada? And that in Canada, as foreign nationals, they'll be checking our PIDs - which you don't have - all the time?"

"I'll take care of it."

Kelsa had serious doubts about that - and he still wasn't telling her everything. But short of quitting the quest and walking away there wasn't much she could do about it. And she couldn't quit.

She'd seen pictures of the kill zone in the Amazon, not only in her father's journals but in d-vid on the news.

The tall dead trunks were already decaying, because several other bacteria, which had burgeoned naturally in the wake of the first, were eating them away. In the heavy tropical rain it looked like the forest was melting, as if it had been sprayed with acid.

She hadn't been able to stop the cancer that had killed her father. Faith healing wouldn't have worked. Nothing she could do would have saved him, no matter what her mother believed.

If she could do something to stop this corrosive cancer from spreading through the world, she had to try.

***

The flatlands before she reached the Sawtooths held grazing cattle, then turned to farmland. One of the farms she passed raised llamas, and the babies danced clumsily around their mothers like knitted puppets.

Kelsa stopped at a flash station and topped up her charge before heading up into the Sawtooths - more expensive than an overnight charge, but a lot less time-consuming than stopping to spread out the solar sheets if she ran out of juice. Solar sheets that wouldn't have done any good today, anyway, since clouds were gathering over the peaks.

The Sawtooths were beautiful: jagged volcanic crags with snowbanks on their highest slopes. It was spitting snow on Galena Pass, and Kelsa turned up the heat control in her biking jacket and pants. Those tempcontrols worked better than those in most of her coats because her father had paid for quality.

"You may not need good tempcontrol outerwear often," he'd said. "But when you need it, you need it."

Of course once she'd gone over the pass the