“And you’re too proud for that,” I conclude.
Harlie smiles. Her lips are paper-thin and her face full of wrinkles, but her expression exudes youth.
“Where’d you learn all this?” I ask.
Her eyes twinkle. “My ma passed it to me through stories, and her ma did the same for her. Someone must have sailed in our family, eons ago, back in the Old World when the ocean wasn’t dry.”
“How’d they stop their vessels?”
“Combination of things. Turning into the wind and lowering sails, mainly. But my wagon’s not on water and can’t turn quickly. They also had anchors—big, heavy hooks you could throw overboard to drag along the ground and stop the boat, but that won’t work for us either. I had one on my first model. Flipped the whole wagon when I dropped it. Nearly killed myself. We gotta brake another way.”
She explains everything she’s tried. Mostly it involves the sails.
I stare at her plans, mind racing. Mule-drawn wagons stop because the power ceases. The beast stops moving, so the cart does as well, with the yoke and line bracing against the animal. But closing the sails hasn’t slowed Harlie’s wagon quickly enough. We need to slow the wheels, too, not just take away the wind. An anchor feels like the obvious solution, but Harlie says it’s unsafe. If we can’t use an anchor and we can’t use the sails, what can we use?
I sort through every wheeled contraption I’ve ever encountered. Wheelbarrows, rickshaws, rovers. I don’t know how the Old World rovers worked, but presumably they had an easy way to cut off the power, force the wheels to stop turning. Otherwise they’d slide down hills or slopes.
This makes me think of the time I extended the dock at Dead River, how my dragger holding supplies kept slipping down the bank. I propped rocks against it to hold it in place. I’ve seen traders do the same thing with their rickshaws after lowering them, positioning a rock behind the wheels so the cart can’t slide.
We can’t put a rock beneath the wind wagon wheels while moving—that would be disastrous—but we can press something against the wheels. And if we press hard enough, the wheels will turn slower and slower and eventually . . . stop.
I plop myself down right in the middle of Harlie’s hut and start drawing in the dirt.
* * *
At some point my eyes start to hurt and I realize it’s because the sun is setting. Asher lights a candle on the room’s lone table.
“Onto something?” he asks.
I nod.
“You should eat.”
I nod to that too.
“We have a fire going. Harlie’s sharing some fowl and a bit of moonblitz, too, to celebrate the solstice.”
“Maybe in a minute,” I say, but I know it will be far longer.
Later, when I can no longer hear the warm timbre of Asher’s voice or Harlie laughing at his stories, there is a creak behind me. “You should sleep,” the woman says. “Your friend is.”
“I think this might work,” I say, standing. After sketching and wiping the dirt clean and sketching again, I finally have something promising.
“Girl, you cannot show up here and solve a problem I’ve been battling for years in one day. It’s not pos—” She stops, staring at the dirt.
“We make a lever like your tiller, but over the back axle. And if we build it like this”—I point to the drawing, which shows how beams can run beneath the wagon bed and make contact with the wheels when the lever is pushed—“the drag should slow the wheels.”
Harlie shakes her head, brow furrowed.
“It should work,” I insist.
“I know it should. I’m just mad I didn’t think of it first.”
“You did all the hard work, figured out all the ways it couldn’t be done. That made it easier for me to find the way it can.” I stand, smack my dirty fingers against my thighs. “Do you have any lumber left? Enough to make this?”
“A little. We can start tomorrow.”
But she’s looking at me . . . like maybe she doesn’t want to start, like finishing the wagon is a thing she’s only ever dreamed of accomplishing.
“Why do you want to cross that desert so badly?” she asks.
“Same as you. Just hoping to find a place worth living.”
“Delta, I’ve only got a few years left on this scorched, gods-forsaken earth. If there’s nothing out there, if I die with only the sun and the vultures there to witness it, I won’t be losing much. But you . . . you’re young. Go back to Powder Town, settle down with that boy, have a family the way they did in the Old World. Live.”
“I’ve seen the way of things in these wastes. It’s not a world to bring a kid into. And besides, I don’t need kids to live. I don’t need to settle down with Asher—or anybody—to have my life mean something.”
Harlie touches her lip, grimaces. “You’re right. I wasn’t being fair.”
“Besides, whatever you think there is between Asher and me, you’re wrong. He doesn’t want to be here with me; he just got stuck with me. Big difference.”
“Sometimes you’re too close to a thing to see it clearly. Like me with the wind wagon. You get what I’m saying?”
I know exactly what she’s implying, and I don’t like it.
She sighs and adds, “When you have a shot at making a home for yourself in a place like Powder Town with someone who cares about you, you don’t throw it away.”
I don’t know how to tell her that I’m not throwing anything away. That I’m doing all this for the life I already have, the people I already love. My pack, Bay . . . This is all for them. And when the Verdant becomes our home—when I’ve saved them and we live there together—all this will have been worthwhile. But if I share this with Harlie, she’ll have questions about why the General is holding them as leverage over me. She may consider traveling with me too much of a risk and turn me away. Above all, I think I’m scared she’ll try to convince me that Asher could be my family and home as much as my pack and the Verdant.
And maybe that’s true. Maybe if Asher and I stopped arguing long enough to apologize and forgive, we could be happy. We could start again, just the two of us. But I can’t dwell on that. As long as a single member of my pack lives and breathes in Bedrock, I am going to try to reach the Verdant. And I need to find it before the General does.
“I have to do this, Harlie,” I say firmly. “And I know it will work.”
“The braking system or the trip across the desert?”
“Both.”
A crooked smile stretches across her lips. “Spoken with the confidence of the gods.”
Chapter Thirty
We wake early the next morning and—after a meager meal of rubbery tubes and leftover pickings from the fowl—go straight to work on the wind wagon. Harlie drags out her tools and lumber and spreads them out beneath the baking sun. I’m sizing it all up, figuring where to make our first cuts, when a shadow flicks over the wood. I throw my head back, and my stomach sinks.
A falcon. Sandy in coloring, with dark wingtips and white on its throat.
The shadow tailing us yesterday. It wasn’t a vagrant, and they didn’t turn back.