She didn’t respond to my accusations. None of these problems bothered her. I could see that she’d rather wander alone in the desert for the rest of her life than go back to the life I’d had before. Even without the threat of the Seeker, this was preferable to her.

I leaned the seat back as far as it would go. It wasn’t close to far enough for comfort. I doubted that I would be able to sleep, but there were so many things I wasn’t allowing myself to think about that my mind was vacant and uninteresting. Melanie was silent, too.

I closed my eyes, finding little difference between my lids and the moonless night, and drifted into unconsciousness with unexpected ease.

CHAPTER 11: Dehydrated

CHAPTER 11

Dehydrated

Okay! You were right, you were right!” I said the words out loud. There was no one around to hear me.

Melanie wasn’t saying “I told you so.” Not in so many words. But I could feel the accusation in her silence.

I was still unwilling to leave the car, though it was useless to me now. When the gas ran out, I had let it roll forward with the remaining momentum until it took a nosedive into a shallow gorge—a thick rivulet cut by the last big rain. Now I stared out the windshield at the vast, vacant plain and felt my stomach twist with panic.

We have to move, Wanderer. It’s only going to get hotter.

If I hadn’t wasted more than a quarter of a tank of gas stubbornly pushing on to the very base of the second landmark—only to find that the third milestone was no longer visible from that vantage and to have to turn around and backtrack—we would have been so much farther down this sandy wash, so much closer to our next goal. Thanks to me, we were going to have to travel on foot now.

I loaded the water, one bottle at a time, into the pack, my motions unnecessarily deliberate; I added the remaining granola bars just as slowly. All the while, Melanie ached for me to hurry. Her impatience made it hard to think, hard to concentrate on anything. Like what was going to happen to us.

C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, she chanted until I lurched, stiff and awkward, out of the car. My back throbbed as I straightened up. It hurt from sleeping so contorted last night, not from the weight of the pack; the pack wasn’t that heavy when I used my shoulders to lift it.

Now cover the car, she instructed, picturing me ripping thorny branches from the nearby creosotes and palo verdes and draping them over the silver top of the car.

“Why?”

Her tone implied that I was quite stupid for not understanding. So no one finds us.