And yet they were the best days she’d passed in recent memory. She’d been keeping the sun to her right during the mornings and letting it glide down to her left in the afternoons and evenings. Just before dusk on both days, the orange light poured through the trees sideways, just as it had when she’d been a child and her parents had let her wander in the woods near their house. Larysa knew that the sun’s light took mere minutes to reach the earth, while the light from stars could take centuries. But she liked to imagine, as she kept to the cooler, darker parts of the forest, that this pre-dusk light was the exact same that had shone on her as a girl.It was almost Tuesday morning now. There had been no human sounds since she left Queesik, only the sounds of birds singing and squirrels scolding. Being cautious was her only option now, the only thing that was keeping her alive. By now, Bochko would be on her trail, but with any luck, he had no idea exactly where she was headed. Knowing him though, she wouldn’t be surprised if he could smell her from a hundred kilometres away.By the late morning, the forest had begun to thin out, and she was close to where the towns of the Lake District started.
