I don’t know how to tell her that I’m not throwing anything away. That I’m doing all this for the life I already have, the people I already love. My pack, Bay . . . This is all for them. And when the Verdant becomes our home—when I’ve saved them and we live there together—all this will have been worthwhile. But if I share this with Harlie, she’ll have questions about why the General is holding them as leverage over me. She may consider traveling with me too much of a risk and turn me away. Above all, I think I’m scared she’ll try to convince me that Asher could be my family and home as much as my pack and the Verdant.

And maybe that’s true. Maybe if Asher and I stopped arguing long enough to apologize and forgive, we could be happy. We could start again, just the two of us. But I can’t dwell on that. As long as a single member of my pack lives and breathes in Bedrock, I am going to try to reach the Verdant. And I need to find it before the General does.

“I have to do this, Harlie,” I say firmly. “And I know it will work.”

“The braking system or the trip across the desert?”

“Both.”

A crooked smile stretches across her lips. “Spoken with the confidence of the gods.”

Chapter Thirty

We wake early the next morning and—after a meager meal of rubbery tubes and leftover pickings from the fowl—go straight to work on the wind wagon. Harlie drags out her tools and lumber and spreads them out beneath the baking sun. I’m sizing it all up, figuring where to make our first cuts, when a shadow flicks over the wood. I throw my head back, and my stomach sinks.

A falcon. Sandy in coloring, with dark wingtips and white on its throat.

The shadow tailing us yesterday. It wasn’t a vagrant, and they didn’t turn back.

I twist in a frantic circle, scanning the rocks that border Harlie’s Hope. There’s a whistle nearby, and there he is. Not a stone’s throw from Harlie’s ramshackle hut, crouched low in the rocks, binos in hand, watching us. Reed. The horns of his ram-skull mask scrape at the sky. His rifle, slung across his back, is visible over his shoulder, but his horse must be hidden on the other side of the rocks.

My stomach coils as I realize what happened. He never went back to Bedrock. He sent the others back, but he waited at a distance, watched. And when I was cast out of Powder Town, he followed.