“She should.” Hawk pounced on the suggestion. When Tessa started to object, he shook his head. “You should, Tessa.”
They ate in silence, concentrating on the food and trying to ignore the heat. The rest of the caravan had stopped as well, strung out for more than a mile behind them, the vehicles halted, the children and their caregivers and the others who had come with them taking a small rest before continuing on. Hawk was thinking that Helen Rice was right, that if this heat continued they would have to think about traveling at night. It was too hard on the children to keep going like this during the day.
“Do you think we have much farther to go?” Owl asked him after she had finished her meal.
He hesitated before answering. She was trying to hide it, but he could hear the concern in her voice, a ragged, furtive thing. Normally, Owl was the steady, optimistic one. She was the center of their family; she held them all together. He didn’t like what he was thinking.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted finally.
No one said anything. The midday heat beat down on them, baking their bodies within the oven of clothes long since gone stiff with sweat and dirt, their minds as tired as their expectations. Hawk couldn’t remember his last real bath. None of them had done more than wash off a little dirt and cool down their faces at the end of each day’s trek since they had set out. Before that, things hadn’t been much better. Food was growing scarce, too.
Time was as thin as hope.
“Will the King of the Silver River help you?” she pressed.
He shook his head and shrugged.
“Has he spoken to you since we set out?”
He shook his head again.
“Then how do you . . . ?”
“Owl, I don’t know!” he snapped, silencing her. He regretted his anger at once. He gave her an apologetic smile. “I wish I did know. I wish I knew everything about what we are doing instead of nothing. I think about it every day, all day, and then at night I lie awake and I think about it some more. I hate it that so much depends on me. But I don’t know what else to do other than what I’m doing—to just keep going.”
“Faith has gotten us this far,” Tessa offered quietly.
“Faith is pretty much all we have,” Owl agreed.
He took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’ll tell you something. The truth? Faith isn’t what keeps me going. It isn’t what drives me. Fear does. I have faith, but it’s the fear that won’t let me give up. Fear that if I fail, everyone will die. I can’t deal with it. I’m running all the time. Not to the King of the Silver River so much as away from the fear.”
Owl reached over and touched his cheek. “I shouldn’t be asking you questions,” she told him. “I know better. I know you are doing the best you can. I can’t help myself. I’m afraid, too. I want our family to be safe. I want all of them to be safe.”
“We just have to keep going,” Tessa declared firmly. “We just have to remind ourselves not to lose hope.” She took Hawk’s hand and squeezed. “The King of the Silver River said you would find him, didn’t he? He said you would reach him if you followed your instincts, if you did what they told you. And that’s what you’ve done.”
“But I can’t help wondering how all this will end,” he replied, squeezing her hand in response. “Even if we find him, how will he protect us? If the world really is about to be destroyed, how can we be safe anywhere? Besides, what’s the point? The world’s destroyed—what’s left for us?”
“A new world,” Owl said at once. “Even if the old is gone, there will be a new one born of it. That’s the lesson of life. New replaces old. It will be like that here, too, don’t you think? We are staying alive so that new generations can be born. Like your baby.”
“Owl is right,” Tessa agreed. “Like our baby.”
Hawk nodded, pretended he was in accord, but inside he found himself fighting doubt and confusion. New worlds born of old sounded good. So how did that happen exactly? What did it take for people to survive a cataclysm of the sort that had been promised? Their world was already ravaged beyond repair. Even back in Pioneer Square in the city, they had been doing little more than surviving, living hand-to-mouth, day-to-day. How could it be any better when things got worse?
There were no answers to such questions, of course. Wouldn’t be until they got to where they were going—wherever that was—so that they could discover what was waiting.
A leap of faith was required. A huge leap.