This day’s journey was rougher and more protracted. They left Mount Hood behind early and moved into high desert country where the landscape was bleak and empty and the road frequently disappeared beneath sand and scrub. Flat stretches were interspersed with hummocks and ravines, with dry washes and ridges so rocky that they looked like dragon spines. The country was volcanic, dotted with cinder cones and awash in cinder dust and lava rock. Cactus littered the terrain in vast clumps; everything else that grew was stunted and wintry and edged with thorns or razor-sharp bark. He drove the AV around and over and through it all, letting Trim show him the way, keeping clear of places where the sand and grit looked uncertain, as if covering sinkholes and crevasses that might drop him into a black pit.
Sometimes, he found himself navigating through ravines so deep that he could not see beyond the rims save for where the sky domed overhead. He had to trust to Trim in those situations, unable to determine with any accuracy even which direction he was going. Everything took a long time, and the hours rolled by without any noticeable progress. One section of the land looked pretty much like another. Off to the west, distant and remote, the chain of the mountains stretched parallel to his drive, their dark barren peaks cutting sharply against the sky, their rock a wall that locked away whatever lay beyond. There was an alien quality to those mountains that reminded him of his encounter with the spirits of the dead in the Rockies, and he found himself hoping that he would not have to go into them in order to find the Elves.
Elves. He thought about them the way he thought about the spirits of the dead—as insubstantial as smoke, as ephemeral as mist. He could not put faces to them, could not give them features, could not imagine their place in the world. Memory of the dead faded with time; of Elves, there were no memories at all. He might try to believe in them, but it would take an encounter with one to make them come alive.
He stopped and ate once during the day’s long drive, pulling off into a barren flat where the horizon stretched away into tomorrow. The emptiness was depressing, a warning of the world’s future. He tried not to think about that future, about what the Lady had told him, but he might as well have been trying not to think about eating and drinking. It was an unavoidable presence in his life, a reality that rode on his shoulders like a weight.
He switched his thinking over to Hawk and the Ghosts, wondering how they were managing without him, left to make their way east to where the boy would become leader of a tribe of children and caregivers, of strays and castoffs, and of creatures once human but no longer so. The boy and his children, Owl would say. He couldn’t quite picture this, either. But he knew it would happen because that was the task that the gypsy morph had been given to do.
And he would go with them.
To someplace new and different, to a fresh beginning.
He shook his head. He was twenty-eight years old, and he had lived almost his entire life traveling a single path, engaged in a single struggle. He could not imagine the sort of change that lay ahead. He could not imagine his place in it.
Sunset came and went, and still Trim led him on. Stars brightened the night sky, and because there was no competing light from anywhere on ground level he was able to keep track of the owl’s flight and find his way. The terrain had flattened out in the last hour or so, the road winding through low hills, closing on the mountains west. Within an hour of darkness pushing the last of the light below the horizon, he had left the highway and was driving along a singletrack road that was rutted and grown thick with weeds and scrub. He was in the mountain chain by now, the peaks dark pinnacles against the night sky. The Ventra worked its way steadily ahead, climbing and descending by equal turns, following the road he had set it upon, an old logging road, he guessed. Complete concentration was required in order to avoid the larger obstacles that might cause trouble even for the Ventra, so he was unaware of time passing as he drove.
Eventually, he gained the far side of the mountains and found himself deep in forests thick with foliage and glistening with life. He stared around, not quite believing what he was seeing. He had never seen trees as lush and full as these; he didn’t think they existed. It was the way the old world might have been, before the poisons and the changes in climate ruined it. The road wound through its center for a long time, navigating streams not yet dried out and ravines in which ferns grew, undulating in a soft wind like waves on open water.
Unable to help himself, he stopped the AV and climbed out. Motionless, he stood looking out into the darkness, into the forest that surrounded him. He smelled the air, breathing it in. Fresh and clean. He tasted it and found it free of bitterness, of any metallic edge. He listened. Night birds called to each other or maybe just to be heard, their cries echoing through the trees.
Where was he? What place was this?
Trim flew back into view and settled on the roof of the Ventra, round eyes regarding him intently. Logan stared at the bird. “Why don’t you tell me what else you know that I don’t?” he said.