“Girl, you cannot show up here and solve a problem I’ve been battling for years in one day. It’s not pos—” She stops, staring at the dirt.

“We make a lever like your tiller, but over the back axle. And if we build it like this”—I point to the drawing, which shows how beams can run beneath the wagon bed and make contact with the wheels when the lever is pushed—“the drag should slow the wheels.”

Harlie shakes her head, brow furrowed.

“It should work,” I insist.

“I know it should. I’m just mad I didn’t think of it first.”

“You did all the hard work, figured out all the ways it couldn’t be done. That made it easier for me to find the way it can.” I stand, smack my dirty fingers against my thighs. “Do you have any lumber left? Enough to make this?”

“A little. We can start tomorrow.”

But she’s looking at me . . . like maybe she doesn’t want to start, like finishing the wagon is a thing she’s only ever dreamed of accomplishing.

“Why do you want to cross that desert so badly?” she asks.

“Same as you. Just hoping to find a place worth living.”

“Delta, I’ve only got a few years left on this scorched, gods-forsaken earth. If there’s nothing out there, if I die with only the sun and the vultures there to witness it, I won’t be losing much. But you . . . you’re young. Go back to Powder Town, settle down with that boy, have a family the way they did in the Old World. Live.”

“I’ve seen the way of things in these wastes. It’s not a world to bring a kid into. And besides, I don’t need kids to live. I don’t need to settle down with Asher—or anybody—to have my life mean something.”

Harlie touches her lip, grimaces. “You’re right. I wasn’t being fair.”

“Besides, whatever you think there is between Asher and me, you’re wrong. He doesn’t want to be here with me; he just got stuck with me. Big difference.”

“Sometimes you’re too close to a thing to see it clearly. Like me with the wind wagon. You get what I’m saying?”

I know exactly what she’s implying, and I don’t like it.

She sighs and adds, “When you have a shot at making a home for yourself in a place like Powder Town with someone who cares about you, you don’t throw it away.”