move on, since the person you talked to said he'd take care of it. You don't know who I am, or who he was, or how I got out, or where I went. The worst they can charge you with is being here without permission, and that's hardly a major crime."
"Improper entry, they call it." The horrifying prospect of ending up in prison began to look less likely, and Kelsa's pounding heart slowed. "I think in Canada they only deport you, though in the U.S. it's more serious."
"Well, we're in Canada," Raven pointed out. "So that doesn't matter."
"But they'll still get a complete description of my bike. And then they're going to ... Oh God. They're probably calling my mother right now."
***
After breakfast they took Kelsa's bike and rode it into the woods behind the service center. She rearranged the branches that concealed it three times.
"It will be perfectly safe tucked into these bushes," Raven told her tartly. "It's not going to starve without you."
He was packing some necessary supplies into one of the bike's saddlebags, which Kelsa had unstrapped. They didn't have enough food left to need the other.
"I don't want it stolen. Or damaged." If she'd still had her tent, Kelsa could have wrapped the bike to protect it against dust and weather. "I'll come back for it. It's just - "
Her com pod chirped. She'd been expecting it, but she still flinched.
"Don't answer," Raven said. "Didn't you tell me they can trace your location if those things are live?"
"Not if it's only for a few seconds. And I have to. She'll be worried about me."
Worried? Her mother would be frantic. Kelsa pulled out the pod, and her mother's white face appeared on the screen. "Kelsa! Where the hell are you? I just got a call from the Canadian police, and I called your aunt, and - "
Kelsa's mother never swore. "Mom," she broke in desperately. "Mom, I can't talk long, but I'm fine and I'm..." She couldn't say safe, not with Otter Woman and company on her heels. "I know what I'm doing," she finished. "I'll tell you all about it, I promise, as soon as I can, but for now you have to trust me. I know what I'm doing. I'm sorry and I love you. Bye."
"Kel - " She disconnected in the middle of her mother's shriek.
"I'm sorry." For once, Raven sounded as if he meant it. He reached out and wiped a tear from her cheek.
"So am I." Kelsa blew her nose, then turned and put the com pod into the bike's remaining pack. She knew it was much harder to trace a pod when it was turned off, but she wasn't certain it was impossible. And she couldn't endure hearing it chirp again and again as her mother desperately tried to reach her.
She drew a shaky breath and turned away from the two biggest links she still had to either of her parents.
"You said something about a truck?"
There were a lot of trucks in the lot, but most of them were closed and locked. Only a handful had open beds, their loads of pipe or machinery covered with plastic tarps or nothing at all. Not all of them had destination stickers.
Raven stopped beside one particularly lumpy load.
"This one is headed for Fairbanks. Perfect."
Kelsa peered through an open triangle at one end of the thick blue tarp. The twisted lumps of metal were so carefully crated that for a moment she wasn't sure what the contorted humps might be; then she recognized the upside-down shape of a clawed, scaly foot.
"It's a statue," she said. "A big statue, in sections, on its way to being reassembled.
"In Fairbanks." Raven cast a swift glance around the lot, tossed their pack onto the truck bed, then heaved himself up after it. "Which means it's going our way. With any luck, we could take this all the way to the border."
He'd crawled under the tarp by the time he finished speaking, leaving Kelsa to scramble up by herself, even though the truck's flat bed was shoulder height for her.
Muttering about alien manners, she pulled herself aboard and followed him into the blue world beneath the plastic tarp. The wooden bracing around the statue's pieces created a tangled maze. Kelsa climbed carefully over an upraised bronze arm holding a neatly cut piece of rope. She didn't dare brush up against the plastic, lest someone see the moving bulge and come to investigate. "I don't know if there are two statues,