The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,75
and coming here to be with me. With us.”
This was the amazing thing about Nox. Sure, he could tell I was too emotional for just doing errands, and he probably guessed that I was up to something important and terrifying, but he didn’t try to talk me out of it or take control of my decisions. He trusted me. Holies. He was going to be so hurt when he heard what I was really planning.
I rubbed my forehead against him before I pulled back. “I’ll see you soon.”
“You’d better. Torrin is bound and determined we’re all living in his quarters with him. He’s going to get really insistent soon.”
“Ha. And then it’s so long to your awesome bath,” I said, trying again to lighten the mood.
He played along, kissing my forehead as if he couldn’t help himself. “Well, it won’t be tonight or tomorrow, so we might get a reprieve before we have to give up the hot water.”
Not tonight or tomorrow, that would work. It was my hope Torrin—and Nox—didn’t realize they couldn’t find us until we were already back.
And I hoped I wasn’t fooling myself.
The masks we had to wear during very dry, dusty days like this one made it harder to talk, but I was okay with silence while we drove the transport away from the City-State and out into the contested wasteland beyond. Or maybe I was more than okay with silence. I needed to gather my thoughts.
I couldn’t be sure without looking at a map or something, but it felt like we went in a different direction from where I’d crashed. I saw a blur of green in the distance, through the haze of dust, and that might have been the pond where Torrin had taken me to fetch the healing herbs. Aha! I was right. We were headed in almost exactly the opposite direction from the crash, which meant the City-State was between the Reamer settlement and the crash site. And yet the Reamers had gotten to the wreckage first, grabbed their captive, and set the rest—me included—on fire. They must have been scouting nearer the City-State that day for other reasons. Had they been planning an attack? That would explain why Nox was out there watching them. And also why the Reamers had been ready to go with their attempted invasion yesterday.
That was the kind of plan—or invasion, whatever—Torrin would have devised. And yet Nox said Astor and I had been set to planning this rescue because we would do it differently. Well, we sure were doing it differently. I couldn’t handle an all-out assault with weapons and fire and blood and… The smells of it, the intensity and panic rushed through my mind, and I was glad I was sitting down as our vehicle trundled over the bare, undeveloped land.
Instead of that kind of attack, we were doing this. Sneaking.
And lying.
Yeah, the guilt lingered. I didn’t like keeping this excursion from Nox and Torrin and even Dreama. What if something happened to us out here and we made everything worse, even wound up needing rescue ourselves?
The guys, Mattis and Astor, didn’t talk a lot either, except for some points of navigation, and with my watch broken and the landscape sort of uniformly obscured by the dust, I had no idea how long we drove. I napped, just for a few minutes, but when Astor squeezed my arm to wake me, the bright blur of day had faded to twilight in the deep shadow of a mountain.
“We’re here,” he said gently. “Time to stash our transport, grab our packs, and get moving.”
“Yeah.” My voice was scratchy with sleep, and my eyes felt sticky, but I didn’t dare rub them for fear of grinding in the grit. I blinked a lot instead, pulling Astor into focus. Yep, still beautiful. “How long is our route through the tunnel?”
I had other questions—like, was this the same cave Torrin had used when he was wounded and Nox rescued him? Who all knew about these caves and tunnels? Were the Reamers likely to be in there, and would we have to maybe fight our way through? But I didn’t voice any of those things. The plan that had seemed perfect this morning now felt tenuous and maybe a little silly. We should have consulted with the other warriors. We should have planned more carefully and then presented that plan to Torrin, for him to enact with other people trained for this sort of thing.