Lynn nodded gravely. “And on a horse that’s better suited to the desert than our own, I imagine.”
“Any chance it’s Fletcher? Maybe he changed his mind about going north.”
“Don’t think so. Terra Cotta was the slowest of the three, plus he knows where we’re going. No reason to push his mount to catch us.”
Lucy turned back in the saddle. “So who is it then?”
“Nobody we know. And if we can see him, he can see us.”
The fear of the unknown swooped back in to trump the nothingness of the desert. Anything could be done to them in the emptiness, and their bones left to be buried in the dust with no one the wiser. “So what do we do?”
Lynn’s brows drew together, and Lucy understood she’d been thinking over their options long before starting the conversation, weighing the choices that could end in life or death while Lucy had been making fine braids in Spatter’s mane. “I’m sorry I didn’t see him,” she added quickly.
“Don’t be sorry you didn’t, just be glad I did.” She looked to the bleak landscape around them, devoid of even a tree for shelter. “As for what we do, we can try to outrun him, which’ll likely kill the horses and land us helter-skelter in the middle of nowhere with no idea where we’re going. . . .”
“Uh, there’s an ‘or’ coming, right?”
Lynn inclined her head toward Lucy. “Or we hide.”
“Hide?”
“We need to get off this main road. There’s been unpaved ways breaking off here and there, but a lot of ’em aren’t on this map. Don’t know if I’m more comfortable being lost than being followed.”
Lynn unfolded the map as she rode, looping Mister’s reins around the pommel. “If we split off to the south up ahead, we’ll come across some canyons before long. I know you don’t like the idea of the rocks hanging over your head, but if we got down in one of those little maze-like canyons, he’d be hard-pressed to ever find us.”
“And we might be hard-pressed to find a way out.”
“That’s where me asking you to start paying attention comes in.”
A flush crept up Lucy’s cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun. “All right.”
Lynn watched Lucy for a second before continuing. “I want to get over the next ridge, and then we’ll cut to the south. I can’t imagine it’d be easy to track us down in the rocks, ’specially if that cloud there graces us with a bit of rain.”
An unassuming storm cloud was rolling in from the west, and Lucy licked her parched lips as she glanced at it.
“Let’s hope so,” she said.
They broke away from their path once they crested the ridge. Without the baking road reflecting the heat back in their faces, the horses picked up the pace. But without the familiar black snake of blacktop, the sameness of the desert made the word lost seem too short to capture the enormity of their situation. The only hint of the road they were traveling was an old fence that ran parallel to it, remnants of a pasture devoid of animals.
“If someone kept their herds here, there must be a creek nearby,” Lucy offered, hoping perhaps the horses had sped up for more reason than one.
“Makes sense,” Lynn said, her lips pursed so tightly the words came out in a growl.
The road met up with the creek shortly, and the horses stumbled wearily into the cool water, Spatter wading in up to his knees. Lynn and Lucy slipped off their saddles as well, filling their near-empty bottles and thirsty mouths. Coaxing the horses out of the stream was tricky, and Lynn caved in to their mournful eyes.
“Our friend behind us won’t be able to track us in the stream, and it’ll lead us down into the canyon besides,” she said.
The shadows of the towering steeples of rock striped their path as they moved silently southward. Then the stripes disappeared as the rocks reached for one another, forming a sheer wall on either side.
“Just breathe easy,” Lynn said softly, though Lucy noticed she also looked to the bright-blue strip of sky above them as she said it. “This is mostly a straight shot. When the canyon dumps us out, we’ll be able to backtrack to the highway.”
Lucy nodded her assent, too spooked by the sound of Lynn’s voice bouncing off the nearby walls to answer. The innocent splashing of the creek rebounded as well, echoed and magnified. Spatter’s ears flicked backward, then forward in an effort to make sense of this new phenomenon. She scratched his neck, and he made a deep mutter she could only too well agree with.
“I don’t like it either, boy,” she leaned forward to whisper.