First came the morning wake-up, usually to the brightly beaming face of Dominic, the human rooster who apparently didn’t need sleep anymore. Next came the groggy blah of “getting up and at ’em,” as her dad used to say. The stretching, the yawning, the meager breakfast, the chit-chat, the breaking of camp, the dread of following Isaac and Sadina’s trail for yet another day lost within yet another week. Always close, never far, never there. It was like watching one snail chase another—the first scoots an inch, the second guy follows. No progress whatsoever.

But on they went, and on they’d go.

For Sadina. For Isaac.

Walk all day, make camp, sleep, start again the next morning, Dominic’s face like the rising sun. She’d lost track of how many times the daily cycle had begun and ended, but the current one seemed much like the others.

Except for the river. The river brought change, and the change brought hope, even though there wasn’t much of a reason for it. She happily accepted it all the same.

They’d been hiking for hours along the west bank of the wide, swift river they’d come across the night before, keeping close to its edge. The water was deep and the current imposing, the roar of its constant cascade a pleasant chorus that brought her peace. Enough rocks jutted from the surface to break the flow with white splashes and spray and foam, eddies and ripples and sideways flumes—the whole riot of movement had the bewildering effect of seeming frozen to her. Nothing changed even as the river did nothing but, the immeasurable immensity of the water passing by in a blur, each drop of it never to be seen again.

Such was her attention on this wonder of nature that she forgot the simple task of watching where she was going. A small depression in the ground caught her foot and two seconds later she had smacked her face on the ground. Spitting out dirt, she looked up and, to her mortification, every single person in the group had stopped to stare at her.

“You okay?” Miyoko asked, trying to hold in a laugh.

Jackie wiped her face and stood up, refusing to show any signs of the pain in her knees, skinned hands, and bruised face. “I’m glad my klutzy butt could entertain you all.”

“You’re welcome,” Dominic said.

This got everyone to take their eyes off of her and on to him—though they should’ve been used to his comments that almost, but didn’t, make sense. Oddly, as the others looked away, her own eyes focused on a spot far downriver, almost to the horizon. She didn’t know if the others had noticed it yet, but she sure hadn’t.

“Is that a bridge?” she asked, pointing.