When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering. – George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

I wouldn’t say I was relieved at the time. I was less convinced of my destruction, which felt like relief. – Briel’s description of her ordeals to her friends.

Though she had inadvertently chosen an American make of car, Briel felt gratitude that it proved a standard rather than an automatic transmission. She greatly preferred the automatic for casual driving, but nothing beat the agility of a standard when she had to make sudden changes.

By the time she had inched out of the parking lot, lights unlit, she heard the strum of another engine's starting. Briel had never driven on French roads, but she had, as a child, both navigated for her father as he drove and explored the maze of streets on foot.

The ominous darkness had completely engulfed the two-lane road, and with the shops all closed up for the night, Briel had little to guide her. Still, she could just make out the beginning of the moon's glow on the horizon, and she knew that this would help her gain an advantage over Liam.

For a few kilometers, Briel maintained a steady course, heading due south, following the signs toward Le Mans. She had no definite destination, but she needed to ditch her car in a larger city where she could encounter some civilization that did not sleep.

The bright yellow stripes on the black road beat against her weary mind hypnotically, and her thoughts swam with confusion. Somewhere behind her, Liam tread the same path, but Briel would not focus on him. Rather, she forced her mind to consider the reasons she would fight to stay alive.

The moon broke over the tops of a nearby field and illuminated several acres of sunflowers in a silvery-blue glow. Though once gold, the flowers washed colorless in the moon's rays rather than shining radiant as they would in her sister sun's. A lone stone building interrupted the gently rolling countryside.

Though Briel only drove south a couple of miles, the uninterrupted time allowed her to derive a rudimentary plan. She could have turned east toward Paris and arrived in the obscurity of urbania in less than two hours. Such a plan would, however, have placed her into quicksand, struggling to remain hidden, unable to extract herself without revealing herself.

Because of her earlier escapade in the airport, she could not use the passport belonging to Francoise Palpant without alerting authorities of her presence. She could not enter the U.S. Embassy to request a new one because she did not want to enter herself in any computer lest Liam or Henry could track her.

Through the swirling possibilities, an idea pressed itself into her consciousness, a childhood memory that held promise of viability. When her father had flown for the military, he had trained and mentored a soldier ten years his junior. Briel's father had kept in contact with this man after the Revelles family's move to America, and as of seven years ago, the man ran an airport in Rennes, some three hundred kilometers west of Briel's current position.

Though she knew the improbability of her success, she gravitated toward the control allowed her in contacting this man rather than the uncertainty of an indefinite agenda in Paris. She would rather have wide open spaces to keep Liam visible even if she had to remain exposed as well. If she could reach the pilot, if he still owned the airport, if she could convince him to fly her out of the country without a passport, if...Briel did not like her chances, but she did not want to sink into the hole of Paris.

Is he even back there? Briel glanced behind her into the darkness, the monotony of her flight from Liam lulling her into a boredom. Turning right off of her southerly route, she glanced behind her and for the first time caught a glimpse of the glowing halo of Liam's hair illuminated from behind by another car's headlamps. The sight supplied a jolt of adrenaline to her lethargy, and she fixed her eyes tightly to the road before her lest she provide Liam a vulnerability that he could use.

Another hour passed the same as before, Liam a phantom behind her. She only had another hour to drive before she would reach the outskirts of Rennes, and then she would have to wait out the morning while avoiding Liam. Looking at the clock, Briel huffed in frustration. 1 a.m. She didn't realize where she had driven until she saw the massive battlements of Fougères rise on her left and the inky arch over the road before her.

All at once, Briel noticed the illusory shape of a car materialize from the obscurity behind her. With no headlights, the car only caught an occasional glimmer from the moon to reveal its presence. Still, Briel's eyes could see well enough as the car grew larger in her mirror. Liam had decided to engage her.

Briel knew that the town presented a hazardous maze of streets, and the arch that constricted the roadway ahead loomed large and black. From behind, Liam ran his car alongside Briel's, leaning his power into Briel's right side and trying to force her into the arch. For several seconds, the structure approached and Liam pushed, but as the stone mouth closed around her, she turned hard to the left, nosing Liam toward the other side of the arch.

He barely managed to slam on his breaks and turn with enough force to avoid the unforgiving wall of ancient stone. For one moment, Briel breathed in relief, but she pressed forward through the labyrinthine roads, unwilling to allow Liam an opportunity to entrap her. He recovered quickly and began the pursuit again, pushing to catch her within the confines of the claustrophobic and misshapen houses that surrounded them both.

Briel needed to head southwest out of the town, but with Liam continually pressing her from the left, she could not afford to give him an ounce of angle in her direction. When she had cleared the confusion of roads, she followed the northern path hoping to push forward by even a minuscule amount. If she could figure out how to put some space between herself and Liam, she could turn west at the first opportunity.

Of course, Liam did not follow her game plan and continued to batter her relentlessly. It seemed that even though he had lost his advantage, he had committed and would now continue to squeeze her until he crushed her. From such an attack, however, Briel did not shy. If she had any skill, it lay largely in rising to the occasion, and she knew that Liam would lapse at some point.

The moon, which had risen to its full height and begun its slumbering descent, suddenly eased behind a blanket of opaque black clouds, a portent of some storm that had arisen in the night. Underneath the clouds, the view obscured, a black shroud swallowing any light that could reveal the landscape. Briel could not yet tell whether the darkness emanated from a torrential rain or some more solid object which blocked the horizon.

Directly before her, a scattering of leaves spiraled skyward toward the black clouds, sent there by the presage winds before the tempest. Briel pushed the car faster, seeking to expand the gap between Liam and her before she added the hazards of driving through the storm. Still, she accomplished little with her efforts, and as the blackness engulfed her, she realized that she had entered a forest. Her eyes grew helpless under its Stygian oppression.

The trees towered overhead, encroaching on either side of the road and erasing the trace of light that had before allowed her to predict her course. With the trees, the line of clouds completed their progression toward Briel and began to deluge her with a blinding fury of rain. She pressed forward, intent on reaching the light at the other end of the corridor of trees.

All at once, the sound of an engine gunned from too far on her left. The nose of Liam's car pummeled directly into her door, crushing her left arm against her side and pinning her left foot to the clutch. Unable to steer clear, Briel's car careened madly toward a congregation of the brush that carpeted the forest floor on her right. With the violent motion of the car, Briel could only spin it until the back rested against the brush, and Briel's door faced the forest rather than the road.

For one moment, Briel gritted her teeth and controlled her breath, collecting herself in reaction to the pain in her arm. Her foot, gratefully, had not actually received an injury, and as she extracted it from its restriction, she looked up from the embankment to see a shadowed figure approaching the passenger side of her car.

Briel reached across with her uninjured arm and wrenched the driver's side door open, its bent metal protesting loudly as she pushed with both of her legs. The shrouded figure had descended upon her, but Briel did not wait for him to attack. Hindered by the pain in her left arm, Briel did not desire to fight Liam until she could assess the extent of her injury. She began a flat-out sprint through the trees, weaving rapidly from side to side to avoid collisions. Occasionally, she would jag to the left or the right in an attempt to surprise Liam and force him to adjust.

Though the trees and scattered boulders provided an opportunity for cover, Briel desired to run rather than hide, knowing that hiding would eventually prove futile. For a quarter mile she sprinted blindly through the fusillade of trees, the rain obscuring her vision even more. Her arm ached but did not hinder her running; if it had broken, it hadn't occurred in a major section and hadn't disabled her.

She could hear the pounding footsteps behind her, the sound waxing and waning as Liam lost ground or gained in his pursuit. Her lungs beat against her ribs, but she knew that she could run at least a couple of miles before she suffered any serious fatigue. Finally, the trees cleared before her, and she struck without hesitation toward a road that seemed to lead from the forest.

The slick road threatened to approximate clumsiness in her step, but Briel's muscles strained to maintain her aright. Finally bursting through the trees, Briel continued unceasingly upon the now-open road, sprinting north until she should find some avenue of escape.

The miles burned under her feet, and Liam could not gain an inch on the straight and even path. Because his advantage lay in physical strength, not stamina or agility, he could more easily utilize a jump or a lunge than a distance run. Since she had avoided him at the beginning of the run, she worried little that he would catch her now.

After a couple of miles, Briel spotted city lights, and a small but cosmopolitan town rose before her. Several gas stations and bars remained open despite the late hour, and Briel ducked down a narrow road behind one of the open bars. Now she would hide, strategically resting until she could engage Liam or find another car. Her arm throbbed, and she knew she needed to rest it.

She ducked under a narrow gate which led into a paved courtyard. Not wanting to strike the stones underfoot thus revealing her position, Briel pressed herself immediately against the stone fence, holding her breath against the gasps that rushed to escape. Her breathing struggled to erupt in a pant.

To her relief, she heard the thunder of Liam's step as he ran past and the crackling of the water that his shoes disturbed from its streaming progression.

Still, she did not move until she could do so stealthily. After about a minute, her breathing calmed, and she eased her head through the arched gate to assess the path that Liam had so recently trod. The only sight she could see clearly blared at her from the back of an open bar, the clamorous light of the neon signs inside.

Creeping from her courtyard refuge, Briel eased back in the direction of the street, toward the front of the bar. She did not reveal herself to the few patrons that fixed themselves in the front window, but inhabited the shadows along its side wall, taking in the various elements of her surroundings.

To her right, a row of stone-front houses lined the street, all unseeing in their slumber. Across the street and to her right, a massive stone church, one undoubtedly built centuries before, rose above all other man-made attempts at glory. Before it rose a twelve-foot cross, a monument to some long-forgotten religion that the enlightened denizens of the secular society had abandoned to embrace a new, more cosmopolitan religion.

Next to the bar, all windows yawned darkly toward the blackened sky, shuttered against the now drizzling rain. Beyond this, the road stretched into a vague greyness, and across the street a large hotel rested a hundred yards from the road, set at the back of a large paved lot littered with buses. Briel pointed her sights toward this parking lot, assuming she could pass the remaining hours until daylight

Though she did not know the exact time, Briel knew that she had driven at least a couple of hours since Alencon, and so she would only need to pass another two before the early morning vendors would begin their preparations for the day.

Briel also knew that her covert glances up and down the street would not suffice to ascertain whether Liam watched, but she had no doubt that he would have come back to search for her when he realized he had not seen any sign of her for a while. She probably had a matter of seconds.

Gathering her strength, she leaped across the span of the cobbled sidewalk and glided noiselessly across the asphalt to the maze of vehicles that she had decided on for her target. Just as she pressed herself against the side of a bus, she heard a sound that arrested her heart's beating for one moment.

She hadn't realized that she had felt relief, that she had considered her freedom within her grasp, until she heard the telltale burst of Liam's laughter.