I followed the wash at first, letting my body fall into its natural long-strided rhythm. It wasn’t the way I walked on the sidewalks to and from the university — it wasn’t my walk at all. But it fit the rugged terrain here and moved me smoothly forward with a speed that surprised me until I got used to it. “What if I hadn’t come this way?” I wondered as I walked farther into the desert waste. “What if Healer Fords were still in Chicago? What if my path hadn’t taken us so close to them?” It was that urgency, that lure — the thought that Jared and Jamie might be right here, somewhere in this
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