She reached the turnoff for Evangeline and kept driving, heading east toward the green allure of nearby Breaux Bridge’s loamy pastures. She drove twenty miles east and several more south. She didn’t stop until she no longer knew where she was. It was rural and quiet and no one would recognize her, and that was all she needed. She parked under an oak tree sheltering a family of doves. She changed in the car into the spare running clothes she always kept in the backseat.
She wasn’t warmed up when she slipped into the hushed woods behind the road. She zipped her sweatshirt and started jogging lightly. At first, her legs felt like they were running through swamp water. Without the motivation of the team, Eureka’s only competition was her imagination. So she pictured a cargo plane as big as Noah’s Ark landing right behind her, its house-sized engines sucking trees and tractors into whirring blades, while she alone raced past every piece of backward-zooming matter in the world.
She’d always disliked weather forecasts, preferred finding spontaneity in the atmosphere. The early morning had been bright, with dregs of former clouds sticking to the sky. Now those high clouds turned gold in the thinning light, and hairlike wisps of fog filtered through the oaks, giving the forest a dim incandescence. Eureka loved fog in the woods, the way the wind made the ferns along the oak branches reach for mist. The ferns were greedy for moisture that, if it turned to rain, would change their fronds from tawny red to emerald.
Diana was the only person Eureka had ever known who would also rather run in rain than in shine. Years of jogging with her mother had taught Eureka to appreciate how “bad” weather enchanted an ordinary run: rain pattering on leaves, storm scrubbing tree bark clean, tiny rainbows cast on crooked boughs. If that was bad weather, Diana and Eureka had agreed, they didn’t want to know good. So as the mist rolled over her shoulders, Eureka thought of it as the kind of shroud Diana would have liked to wear if she’d had her choice of funeral.
Before long, Eureka reached a white wooden marker some other runner must have nailed to an oak tree to mark his or her progress. She slapped the wood the way a runner does when she hits her halfway mark. She kept going.
Her feet pounded the worn path. Her arms pumped harder. The woods darkened as rain began to fall. Eureka ran on. She didn’t think about the classes she was missing, the whispers whirling around her empty seat in calculus or English. She was in the forest. There was no place she’d rather be.
Her clearing mind was like an ocean. Diana’s hair flowed weightlessly across it. Ander drifted by, reaching for that strange chain that seemed to have no beginning and no end. She wanted to ask why he’d saved her the other night—and what exactly he’d saved her from. She wanted to know more about the silver box and the green light it contained.
Life had become so convoluted. Eureka had always thought she loved to run because it was an escape. Now she realized that every time she went into the woods, she sought to find something, someone. Today she was chasing after nothing and no one because she didn’t have anyone left.
An old blues song she used to play on her radio show streamed into her mind:
Motherless children have a hard time when their mother’s dead.
She’d been running for miles when her calves began to burn and she realized she was desperate for water. It was raining harder, so she slowed her pace and opened her mouth to the sky. The world above was rich, dewy green.
“Your time is improving.”
The voice came from behind her. Eureka spun around.
Ander wore faded gray jeans, an Oxford shirt, and a navy vest that somehow looked spectacular. He gazed at her with a brazen confidence quickly belied by his fingers running nervously through his hair.