Mara was quiet. She knew exactly what that felt like. The thing you couldn't stop without making it worse for someone else. The thing you had to watch happen while calculating whether intervention would help or just expand the damage. She had made similar calculations.
She didn't always feel she'd gotten them right. C. Where are the Heartleys now? She asked, moved east. C.
I get a letter sometimes. He ate for a moment in silence. Margaret, the wife, she's better. The children are in school. Mara thought about that.
The specific shape of it. A family displaced by the same man who had displaced her. And they were all right now or all right enough. And Gideon knew because he'd kept track. Z had made sure to keep track even though he hadn't been able to prevent the thing that made tracking necessary.
She thought about what kind of person does that. Thank you, she said. Not for the food, not for the shelter, not for any specific thing. Just thank you for the general shape of him. Gideon looked up briefly.
Look back down. Eat, he said. The second day was harder. Not because anything happened, nothing happened, which was in its own way a form of tension. Because nothing happening meant Ror's men were still out there asking questions.
Which meant the clock was running without anyone being able to the face of it. Mara tried the ankle in the morning and managed three steps before the pain dropped her back onto the cot with a sound she immediately felt angry at herself for making. Three steps. The cabin was 40 ft long. She lay on her back staring at the ceiling and did arithmetic she didn't want to do.
Orson had said 3 days. Assume he got to Whitlock. Assume Whitlock was willing to act, which was not a certainty, was not even a probability she could calculate without more information. And then assume travel back. And then what?