On the first day nothing particular happened. On the second, we struck the remains of a rail line that cut across the flat skin of the prairie like a scar. There was not much left of the actual line—the rails had long since been pulled out for salvage, and the wood ties and telephone poles rotted away—but the banks of it remained, and it was a smooth, quick ride. “Good news,” said Talis, surveying the distance behind us as we struck camp that evening. “We might just reach the Red Mountains before Francis Xavier exhausts his meager supply of verbs.” But what he really meant was, we might make it before I died. Something had happened at the refuge. Talis had been talking about the destruction of Calgary, he’d been poring through the maps and updates and . . . I knew what he’d learned. I’d lost none of the data. But something had happened, and Talis had sent a wicked pulse of ultrasound through my mind. It was the second time. If there was a third . . . I was walking along the cliff edge in the dark, careful with every breath, aware of the hollow spaces under my feet.
