At nightfall, the Aesir crew found the forest impassable, overwhelmed and overgrown by brush and trees whose trunks were too intertwined for the ship to pass. Facing a night of work, clearing their way to the road, they instead risked the river, letting it carry them through the trees and back into the open.

Enoa watched the sky through the driver’s side window and worried she’d see moving lights at the horizon. She imagined the Liberty Corps finding them again without their shields, without flight, without their best weapons. Enoa saw nothing but stars, wheeling colors of a universe grand almost beyond imagination.

When they reached the road, Orson left the headlights off. He drove without lights of any kind. He’d filled the windshield with scanner feeds and wore his visor, using both to follow the empty desert road. They headed west, then north.

Enoa kept watch on the sky, but soon stopped seeking the Liberty Corps. The sky was like light reflecting in deep water, countless pebbles winking up at the surface. She saw a vastness dwarfing even the desert that stretched from horizon to horizon.

The endless light reminded her of Shaping and the warmth she felt when wielding Sucora’s staff – a feeling stronger than nostalgia, almost déjà vu.

“Aunt Sucora used to take me to a spot outside Nimauk,” she said. “My hometown,” she added for Dr. Stan’s benefit. The scientist sat at the Aesir’s side terminal and had spent her evening perusing data. “There was somewhere she said didn’t have any light pollution. We would see the Milky Way, but that was nothing like this. There are so many more stars out here.”

“It’s the humidity,” Jaleel said. “Pennsylvania is pretty rainy, right? This place has like, no rain. There were probably clouds and vapors blocking your view.” Jaleel was sitting almost sideways, watching Orson’s screens.

“That’s partly true,” Dr. Stan said.

“Partly?” Jaleel asked.

“Humidity actually helps visibility in some circumstances,” Dr. Stan continued.

Enoa tried to follow their talk of radiational cooling and the effects of the moving universe, but her attention was drawn back to the sky. She struggled to find even the most basic constellations she usually recognized. The points she knew were too crowded by other stars, stars that had always been there, but invisible to her.

The ‘new’ stars reminded her of Shaping. Nothing in the world had changed. It was all still the same.

She had changed. She could see new depths and in new ways she’d never known. The sky was rich with stars. The world glittered with light. She could feel it. She could see it – as if she’d discovered new colors, entire spectrums of color that had filled the world, unknown to her, until now.

Wesley raced along the floor, chattering and rolling a balled pair of Jaleel’s socks he’d stolen from the laundry. The sock ball bounced off of Enoa’s foot as the aeropine chased it toward the front of the cabin.

“Does he still have my socks?” Jaleel turned around and waved at the aeropine.

“He better stay on the floor,” Orson said. “I don’t need him flying around my head right now.”

“Come here, sweetie.” Enoa held out her hand. Wesley turned around, still clutching the sock ball. She let him sniff her fingers and reached for the socks with her other hand. Before she could take them, Wesley grabbed the ball in his mouth. He flew back the way he came. “I guess I’m not as much fun as the laundry.”

“We need to get him some real toys,” Jaleel said.

“You do,” Orson said. “Something that will keep him entertained so he doesn’t fly around the driver.”

“When has he done that?” Jaleel asked.

“I’m waiting for it,” Orson said. “He’s clever, but how would he know what driving is?

“I imagine,” Dr. Stan said. “Having a flying pet is a lot trickier than caring for your standard landlocked animal companion.”

“I finally know how Aunt Sucora felt,” Enoa said. “I was always running around everywhere on my own. After everything fell apart, she’d get so scared trying to keep an eye on me.”

“Did you get in trouble a lot?” Jaleel asked.

“Not really,” Enoa said. “But she wouldn’t let me leave town ever, not without her around. I used to laugh at her. For years, I was taller than she was. But I really was safe with her. There was nothing out there that could threaten her.”

“If she could do what you can do, you were super safe,” Jaleel said.

“She was way better than me,” Enoa said. “I wish she started teaching me before… All of this would be so much easier. I haven’t touched the training films since Littlefield and I have so much training I need to do.”

The battles there and at the Crystal Dune lab had distorted time in her mind. Her thinking had been distorted by the months of adventures and danger and Shaping. Time was different because she was different. Remembering herself before her adventures was like remembering herself as a child. Enoa was not that person. She’d learned to see the hiding stars.

“You should have plenty of time to study at Teddy’s,” Orson said. “It’s going to take a few days, at least, just to figure out if the heist is possible. It might not be possible to get the right data to make this worth it. I have four or five contacts I’ll have to get ahold of.”

“So we’re going all this way and you’re not even totally sure we’re doing the heist?” Jaleel asked.

“We’re not going to start planning a heist with the Pacific Alliance looking over our shoulders,” Orson said. ‘This is better. We need some time off the map.”

Orson drove the rest of the night. Dr. Stan slipped away in the early morning and returned to her bunk. Jaleel fell asleep at his seat, refusing to leave and rest until he began to snore, and Orson insisted.

“I’m sorry.” He yawned and shuffled away to his bunk to join Wesley.

Once he’d gone, Enoa moved up to the front passenger’s seat. “How far are we going tonight?” she asked.

“We’re not far now from a good stopping place,” Orson said, “assuming it’s still there and open. It’s been a long time since I had to sneak to Teddy’s. But if it is still there and we get that far, we’ll be at Wayfarers Rest tomorrow.”

“Wayfarers Rest?” Enoa doubted how much farther Orson could safely take them. The faintest stars had already faded away. The sky had changed hue from black to a deep purple. The sun would soon rise and reveal them, alone in the flatlands.

“Yeah, like we’re Wayfarers,” Orson said. “And it’s a place for us to rest and hide. Teddy wanted a name for his house, like ones in old fairy tales, so that’s what we came up with. It fits.”

Enoa watched the rest of the stars fade as the sky changed color, shifting brighter and brighter until the first rays of sunlight rose above the horizon, almost behind them.

“How is the sun back there?” Enoa said. “I thought we were still going north. How far did we go?”

“Uh,” Orson said. “The road shifted west a while ago. We’re actually on old Route Sixty-Six, in one of the places it diverges from the interstate. I took us about five hundred miles tonight. I’m getting quicker at lining up the back roads, not that there are lots of options way out here. When my friends and I first started traveling, it took us weeks and weeks to get around without taking any interstate highways. We’d wake up on an old road in the middle of nowhere and go to sleep on an old road in the middle of nowhere. It’s like we weren’t even moving. I started having nightmares about getting stuck out in the ocean.”

He pointed at the windshield. “The interstate is over there. We’ll cross it tomorrow before we get into Nevada. I know exactly where we are now. You stayed up with me so you can help me find our parking place.”

“I stayed up because I thought I needed to take watch,” Enoa said.

“Unless we get really unlucky, you won’t have to.” Orson drove them another twenty minutes, until the world had brightened enough to draw Enoa’s attention from the sky. Orson switched off two of his radar screens, letting those sections of windshield reveal the world outside.

The small two-lane road they followed was surrounded by the flatlands. The elevation changed only in the distance, where towering mountains rose to the north.

Two roads they’d passed led off toward communities, but nothing stood close-by, nothing until they reached the fork in the road that would take them to meet the interstate. A row of seemingly vacant structures stood there, a warehouse, an industrial-sized garage with stucco walls, and the windowless shell of a mini-mart, missing its gas pumps.

“Here we are,” Orson said.

“Here?”

“The garage is the stopping point,” Orson said. “Like Jaleel would say, we get to save the game here. Is that still a term?”

Enoa nodded. “Who owns it?”

“Oh, forgot to tell you.” Orson parked the camper beside the farther of the two bays. “You’ll like this – this place is part of a Western Shoshone land expansion. They’ve been buying back their ancestral lands for the cheap. Most of their neighbors didn’t care for remote living after destabilization. But the Shoshone make decent money leasing some of the properties to the hermits and drifters who want to get away from somewhere, like us. This place is an Outcast Country safe house.”

“Would the Shoshone be in danger for letting us hide on their land?”

“No more than they are already.” Orson let the Aesir idle. He retrieved his sword and stepped from the ship. “They hide castaways for money, and they’ve been scavenging Hierarchia tech for years. And Helmont will see this whole area as Liberty Corps property. Something like half of the land out here was used by the Feds and a fair chunk of that was IHSA. From where we are, you could hit six or seven old Hierarchia operations in under seventy miles. I kid you not. They were everywhere. But anyway, I will pay the relevant Shoshone office for crashing in their garage.”

“We’ll definitely be safe in this garage?” Enoa followed him from the ship. He walked around the buildings, his goggle lenses glowing. They circled the structures.

“If nothing changed out here since the last time I visited, we’re done for the day,” Orson said. “If nobody saw us get here, nobody we don’t like will find us.”

“Uh-huh.” Enoa thought of Nimauk, a place where less than a percent of the residents shared any of the ancestry that gave the town its name.

“I don’t know anything about the Shoshone,” she said. “Aunt Sucora used to take me to some Native American cultural centers in Philadelphia, when I was really, really little, but most of my life… The only other Indigenous Americans I know are family friends. We’re all from the east.”

“I need to hire one of their reclamation crews,” Orson said. “They’d probably be happy to show you around a little bit… if that’s something you want.” They finished circling the garage and stopped beside the Aesir. Orson tapped at his visor. He scrutinized the area in silence, until she spoke again.

“I think so,” she said. “But I want to try to learn about them first. I’d feel so rude if I didn’t know anything about their culture before I met them.”

“You’ll have time for that.” He pulled his goggles down to his chest. “Okay, well, if Teddy’s code is still good, we both can get some rest.” Orson returned to the closed second bay’s door. He fiddled with a box at its side. The garage door rose.

When the sun climbed over the desert, the road was empty.