earth of the desert. John picked up his pace. I’m thirsty already. How will I make it to the cave? And with that, his thoughts ran further away: That night under the floor in my mother’s apartment, I was thirsty like this. I was under there so long…
“Keep your mind here—on the run,” Maud admonished, as though reading his straying thoughts. “Only the run.”
He did as she said, pointing his head forward, his eyes, with the focus of the steady stare, always on the same spot fifteen feet ahead, watching dusty earth with occasional patches of dry grass or clawlike bushes. One step forward, then the next, over and over. His body was a machine.
Nothing else matters at this moment, just the run, he told himself. For Catherine, nothing mattered but bringing back our house. It was more important to her than love or death…
His mind continued this way, as it always did, bringing him images of his mother, his grandmother, Quin…He shook his head to rid himself of unwanted thoughts. Run! he commanded.
After two miles, the cave still didn’t appear any closer. He was sweating harder, his clothing sticking to him.
“Come, John!” the Young Dread called. Though she was running slightly ahead and hadn’t looked back, somehow she sensed that he’d slowed.
His body hurt. Like a reflex, he was thinking of Quin again. The way he’d pulled her behind the training barn that first time they’d kissed. Her eyes had been bright, her cheeks rosy from the cold. She’d loved him then. The idea that she hated him now gave him a physical ache.
It’s nothing, he told himself. Pain is nothing—in your heart or in your legs. Thirst is nothing. Heat is nothing. Catherine would call them small things. And Maggie showed—
He stopped his thoughts. He didn’t need Catherine or Maggie in his head just now. He needed only to run.
And he did.
An hour had passed before the hill was noticeably closer. By then John was moving across a land of hard-packed dirt and grass, weaving his way through the tiny skeletal bushes that were more numerous here. His feet pounded beneath him like pistons in an engine, tireless now even though he was drenched in sweat. I might run forever, he thought. I love this.
And then he fell. Before he’d realized it, his head hit the hard earth, dirt firm against his cheekbone.
Run! he told himself. But his body would not. He had used it up.
The Young Dread was there, kneeling next to him. She pulled him to a sitting position, held him against her, and poured water into his mouth from her canteen. John’s instinct was to gulp, but he restrained himself and drank slowly for a long time.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him quietly. Her light brown eyes were bright in the sun as she looked down into his face, and her smooth, even voice was comforting.
“I’m thinking…I want to run.”
“Good,” she said. “Your mind is empty.”
John handed back the canteen and understood that she was right. His mother’s death, his grandmother’s warnings, and even Quin were distant. His head, for once, was quiet.
“What do you wish to learn here, in this desert?” Maud asked him. She was holding the metal helmet, the focal, above his head.
“What my mother found in this place,” he answered at once. “And how it will lead me to the house of the bear.”
“Keep those thoughts in your mind.”
With that, she slipped the helmet onto his head and helped him to his feet. John nearly fell as the electric buzz of the focal passed through him. The landscape wheeled. He threw his arms out for balance. Then he steadied.
There was the cave, close enough now to discern details. Waves of heat rose off the desert all around him, and the scrub, for miles in every direction, was moving in a slow breeze. He could feel the pressure of the hot air as it rose up into the vast blue arch of the sky. He was connected to all these things, was part of them, and his thoughts were his own to command.
“Now run!” Maud ordered.
He did.
—
The sun was beginning to set when they scaled the red earth of the hill and arrived at the cave. The Young Dread reached it before John, and after he’d stooped down to enter beneath an overhang of rock, he found her standing inside the dark space, her cloak blending into the shadows. She looked as though she had not just run ten or fifteen