Slipping her arm through the makeshift sling, she headed out in the same direction the sun had set. Her reasoning was that if she walked to the west long enough, she would eventually run into the coastal cities of California. Assuming the kidnappers hadn’t been able to drive more than a few hours inland, she was no more than a hundred or so miles from the coast. It was a working theory at least, and better than just wandering aimlessly out here.

She remembered Griffin’s survival lectures back at Camp Jarvis. Move at night in hot environments. It saved strength and water and made a person harder to see when they were on the move.

Speaking of which, she gathered a handful of dried grass and used it to brush away her footprints as she moved away from the house. She made a point of hopping from rock to rock for a good hundred feet or so and then resumed sweeping her footsteps. It wasn’t the all-out sprint away from her prison that she wanted to do, but Griffin had stressed the importance of hiding one’s tracks over speed.

When the shack was no more than a speck behind her, though, she did take off running. Again, she had to restrain her impulse to flee madly, forcing herself into a steady, ground-eating jog she could sustain for hours.

Huh. After that all-night run with a heavy rucksack, jogging out here like this with nothing but a light cloth bundle slung across her body felt pretty darned good. Her muscles were far from recovered from Hell Week, and the enforced stillness of the chair and dehydration hadn’t helped with the kinks, but as she moved and her blood flowed more freely, the worst of the discomfort subsided. When she stopped to rest, she would do some yoga stretches to work out the residual stiffness.

She figured she could cover around four miles per hour jogging and maybe three miles per hour when she had to slow for rough terrain. Give it thirty hours of hard travel to get to civilization. She wouldn’t be able to do that continuously because of daylight and daytime heat. Say, four days of travel to be conservative.

She would need to find water and shelter before it got too hot each day. And she had to assume her captors would come after her, so stealth was called for. To that end, as she jogged, she stuck handfuls of dead grass in her hair and waistband.

Near morning, she got lucky and ran right into a small seep, landing on her behind as her boot skidded out from under her in slick mud.