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By the tied that it was ready, Tally was ravenous

As she reached the end of the PadThai, she realized there was no longer any point in going hungry, and iht have been useful for getting off the cuffs and staying bubbly, but her cuff was gone, and Tally now had the whole of the wild, dangerous and cold, to keep her bubbly Notinto a pretty haze out here

After breakfast, the position-finder offered up its bad news Tally had to check her calculations twice before she believed the distance she’d traveled the night before The winds fro way east, in the opposite direction from the Rusty Ruins, and then the rivers current had carried her another long distance southward She was more than a week’s journey by foot to the ruins, if she went in a straight line And straight lines wouldn’t co way around the city, staying in the forest to hide herself fro the Specials would bother to keep looking for her Luckily, they didn’t know that her hoverboard had disappeared into the river, so they would assu on foot As far as they knew, Tally would have to stay near the river or soot away from the riverbank, the better

Tally packed up her pitiful cah food for the journey, and the hills would be full of ready water after the long rains, but she felt defeated already From what Sussy and Dex had said, the New Smokies hadn’t set up a perht leave any day now, and she was a week away

Her only hope was that Zane and Fausto would stay behind, waiting for her to show up Unless they thought that she had been captured, or killed by the fall, or had simply chickened out

No, she told herself, Zane wouldn’t think that last one of her He ht be worried, but Tally knew that he would wait for her, however long it took

She sighed as she tied the still-damp coat around her waist and hoisted her backpack onto her shoulders There was no point wondering about where the others were; her only choice was to hike toward the ruins and trust that so when she arrived

Tally had nowhere else to go

The way through the forest was rugged, every step a battle Back in the Smoke, Tally had mostly traveled by hoverboard When she had been forced to hike cross-country, it had been on paths hacked through the trees But this was nature in the raw, hostile and unrelenting The dense undergrowth tugged at her feet, trying to trip her, throwing up thick bushes and ankle-twisting roots and i the trees, the downpour still echoed Pine needles sparkled with frost, which the day’s heat was slowly changing to water, generating a constant rain of chill, sparkling nificent ice palace, with spears of sunlight shooting between the trees, visible in the h smoke But every tiht of freezing water onto her head

She reh the ancient forest that had been devastated by the Rusties’ biologically engineered weeds At least walking through that flattened landscape had been easier than this dense growth Sometimes, you could almost see why the Rusties had tried so hard to destroy nature

Nature could be a pain

As she walked, the struggle between the forest and Tally began to feelbra Tally the way they wanted her to go, no roould split open welco easy paths that wound pointlessly off her course Hiking in a straight line was ihway cutting through ard for the terrain

But as the afternoon progressed, Tally slowly beca an actual path, like the nature trails that the pre-Rusties had used a millennium before

She remembered what David had told her out in the Sinally been s didn’t want to fight their way through virgin growth Just like people, anieneration, forging tracks through the forest

Of course, Tally had always i that only David could see

Having grown up in the wild, he was practically a pre-Rusty hithened around her, Tally found her path becohter, as if she had stu feeling started in her stoan to play with her an to twitch, as if she was being watched

It was probably just her perfect new-pretty eyesight helping her spot the subtle e She must have picked up more skills than she knew out in the Smoke This was an animal path

Certainly, no people could live out here Not this close to the city, where they would have been detected by the Specials decades ago Even out in the S outside the cities Huo to leave nature alone

Alone, Tally kept reh, oddly, she couldn’t decide whether being the only person in the forest made it feel less creepy, or more