Free Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series by Peter Dudley Page A

beside him. The aches subside a bit as we shuffle along behind the horses led by Patrick and Tom through snow that reaches halfway to my knees. In five minutes we’ve rounded the corner, and the lake slides out of view. I don’t look back. There is nothing to see there anymore.
    After a few more minutes, during which Dane continues to hold my hand, he leans closer to me and whispers, “You know, Darius could fail. Southshaw might live on.”
    I’ve searched my heart. I wish that could be true, but I don’t believe it. I smile at him anyway. It is a nice thing for him to say. “Perhaps.”
    We both walk on in silence, and I wonder if he’s also thinking that even if Darius does fail and we return to Southshaw, it will never be the same place we knew even just a year ago.
    In twenty minutes, we’ve ventured so far into the pass that the peaks on either side rise up sharply a hundred feet or more. Our descent begins, and in another half hour we are walking smartly through shallower snow, no higher than my ankles. With each step we get farther away from danger. The young parents behind us know it, and the chatter of their children indicates they sense their parents’ unease waning.
    Suddenly the clouds break open for real, and bright, sunny blue sky opens above us. The sun’s warmth fills us, and although our breath still fogs into the frozen air, the brightness feels lovely.
    After we’ve walked an hour, Dane calls another rest to examine the map. While he and Tom mumble to each other and point in different directions, I watch the children. Two duck and dodge behind trees, laughing as they throw snowballs at each other. Two have cleared a nearby boulder of snow and lie atop it, basking like lizards in the sunlight. Everyone has dropped their burdens wherever they stopped, and some have found dry patches under trees where they sit, heads resting on their knees. The horses stand motionless, as if carved of brown granite.
    Our narrow, tightly tamped trail snakes away behind us, disappearing among the trees that cover this side of the mountain. Have we really crossed over? I know we’ve been descending for an hour or more, and the peaks rise behind us. I’m not sure what I expected, but they look so... normal. Maybe I expected the back sides of the peaks to be like the rear of a house—or maybe like the back of a person. All these years I imagined the mountains were keeping watch over us, facing Southshaw with their backs turned against the desolate, charred world beyond. But they’re just mountains, and I’m embarrassed by the mild wonder I feel at how natural it all looks.
    “We turn north here,” Dane declares after a long consultation with Tom and then with Patrick. He points into the wilderness, indicating we will be walking along the backside of the mountain range rather than downhill. “This is the way to the meet-up.”
    The meet-up. It seemed inconceivable when we planned it out on Subterra’s faded, ancient maps. Lupay and Fobrasse would lead the Tawtrukkers and Subterrans over the ridge and south through the appropriately named Desolation Wilderness, to a friendly-sounding place called Aloha where a lake used to be. It was the strangest feeling, looking at those maps. No one in Southshaw had ever seen a map with markings from before the War. Cities, roads, bridges covering miles and miles and miles... all my life I had thought of it only as blackened, burned craters glowing with the Radiation.
    “Grab your stuff, everyone,” announces Patrick as he heads over to check on the horses. The two children in the trees throw one more snowball. The two on the boulder slip down to the snowy ground. All around, people retrieve their belongings to continue our trek.
    It’s a wonder that the land has healed so well, at least up here in the mountains. Has the whole world healed like this? Or has this land in particular been touched by divine grace?
    When we reach the meet-up, Dane and I will read Prophecies. No