Chapter 10: Georgia

I slid down in the seat until my head was below the dashboard.

"Drive," I said.

The herbalist's cousin put the truck in gear without a word and rolled off the gravel shoulder.

I counted to sixty with my face pressed against the vinyl, and I did not look in the mirror.

When I finally sat up, the ridge was gone behind a bend.

The road ran down through the trees, empty.

Nobody followed us.

Nobody ran after the truck.

It took four days and three vehicles to get me out of the mountains.

I slept through most of it.

By the next full moon, I was standing at a steel sink in a river town in southern Georgia.

I was scrubbing silver burns off a stranger's arm.

The clinic had been a feed store once.

It still smelled faintly of grain and oil.

The old rogue woman who ran it had painted over the sign with a red cross and the word Free.

She was seventy or more, with a gray braid down to her belt.

Her hands were big and scarred from lifting a lot of people off a lot of floors.

"You're too thin for a doctor," she said, handing me gauze. "Doctors are supposed to be fat and happy."

"I'm an unlicensed doctor on the run."

"That's the best kind. Hold his arm still."

The man on the table was a young rogue.

A hundred small burn lines ran across his forearm, the mark of a silver chain.

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