Chapter 7

We broke camp just after first light, the fire smothered, our few belongings packed tight. Lena didn’t say much at first—she rarely did in the mornings—but there was something gentler in the way she moved beside me. Less wary. Less distant.

I noticed she didn’t walk quite so far ahead anymore.

We followed the sun, our shadows stretching long across the forest floor. The terrain was easier here—less dense, less punishing. The land rolled beneath our feet like a slow exhale, and the air smelled like wet pine and earth and something green I couldn’t name.

We talked a little, here and there. Nothing heavy. She asked what the stars looked like where I was from.

“Pretty much the same,” I said. “It’s the light that’s changed. There’s so much of it, you can barely see the stars at all in the cities. You have to go far out, away from everything, to find real darkness.”

She didn’t say anything at first. Then, she said, “Darkness don’t always mean bad.”

I looked over at her. “No. Sometimes it means peace.”

She gave a little nod, like she approved of that answer.

Around midmorning, we passed a small clearing, and I slowed to rest. Lena glanced back but didn’t say anything—just dropped her bundle and sat beside me.

We sat like that for a while. Listening to birds. Sharing silence.

Then she surprised me.

“I didn’t think you’d make it,” she said.

I blinked. “When?”

“When you got sick. I thought you were gonna die.”

Her voice was even, but I could tell the memory still lived close to the surface.

“I thought I was too,” I admitted. “But you stayed.”

“You didn’t give me a choice.”

I smiled. “That’s not true. You always had a choice.”

She didn’t respond. But after a few seconds, she reached into her bundle and pulled out a few wild onions she’d foraged earlier. She handed me one without a word. I peeled it and ate it raw. It burned in my mouth but it was food, and I was grateful.

She watched me as I chewed.

“You think I’m strong,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I know you are.”

Her eyes met mine. “Don’t get foolish on me.”

“Too late.”

She shook her head, but a small, reluctant smile tugged at her mouth—quick, like a flicker of light through leaves.

We didn’t speak of it again.

We just kept walking—two travelers moving through the woods, closer than we’d been before, even if neither of us dared say it out loud. Whatever was changing between us, it didn’t need words. Not yet. It just needed time.

We were talking about food—again.

Not because we were starving, for once, but because we were remembering. Lena had asked what kind of food I ate “in the future,” and I’d tried to explain pizza to her. She didn’t look impressed.

“So ... bread, with tomatoes and cheese?” she asked, skeptical.

“Basically, yeah. But the cheese melts. And you can put all kinds of toppings on it. Peppers, mushrooms, pepperoni...”

She wrinkled her nose. “What’s pepperoni?”

I started to explain, but just then we reached the creek.

It was wider than the others we’d crossed, but shallow. A wooden bridge once spanned it, but the middle had collapsed inward, splintered like a broken ribcage. What was left was a jumble of beams, half-sunk into the mud and water. It looked like it had come down years ago.

“Think we can cross it?” I asked.

Lena was already stepping into the creek.

“Not the first water I’ve walked through,” she said over her shoulder, boots splashing.

I followed her in, the cold biting at my calves. It was only knee deep, but it moved fast, tugging a little at my legs. The sun had started to break through the trees, glinting on the water’s surface like scattered coins. For a moment, it felt peaceful.

Then I heard it.

Hoofbeats. Sharp. Steady. Close.

Lena froze. “Back under,” she hissed, pointing at the tangle of bridge debris behind us.

We scrambled—half-crawling, half-wading—into the shadow of the downed bridge. The beams created just enough shelter to hide us from view if no one looked too closely. Water dripped steadily from above, dark and cold, but we didn’t move.

The hoofbeats grew louder.

Lena was pressed up beside me, so close I could feel her breath on my shoulder. Her hand, slick with creek water, found my arm and held it tight. I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath until I felt my lungs burning.

Two riders.

I could hear the creak of saddles, the clop of hooves, the murmur of low voices. Male. Confident. One of them coughed.

Then—chillingly—I heard one of them say, “Tracks end at the creek. Reckon they crossed here.”

A tense pause followed.

“They’d be fools to go upstream. Let’s ride on—see if we catch sight of ‘em farther along.”

The hoofbeats started again, fading away upstream. We didn’t move for another full minute.

Then Lena whispered, “They’re gone.”

I exhaled hard. My shirt was soaked. So was hers. We were huddled together under warped wood and moss, water trickling down through cracks. It should’ve felt miserable, but all I could feel was her grip loosening on my arm.

She looked at me. For a second, our eyes locked in the dim light.

“That was close,” I said.

She gave a small nod, her expression unreadable. Then she shifted away from me, careful and slow, crawling back out from under the bridge. I followed, cold and tense and strangely alive.

Once we were standing again, back in the daylight on the far bank, Lena wrung out her sleeve.

“We keep moving,” she said.

“Yeah.”

And we did.

But I kept thinking about how close her face had been to mine under the bridge. How tightly she’d held my arm. And how, for a few long seconds, we’d hidden from danger not just as companions—but as something more.

Something that scared me. And maybe scared her too.

We didn’t talk much for the rest of the afternoon. After the bridge, everything had taken on a sharper edge. Every rustle in the brush, every birdcall, every distant crack of a branch felt like it could be something worse. We moved cautiously. Quietly. Always listening.

When we stopped for the evening, we found a spot near a flat stretch of ground, ringed with mossy stones and sheltered by trees. Lena started gathering kindling without a word. I joined her.

We got the fire going with the lighter—she wanted to do it herself again, and this time, she lit the flame on the first try. She didn’t smile, not really, but I caught a hint of pride in the way she handed it back.

We cooked what we had—some wild greens and roots Lena had gathered earlier, bitter but filling. The sky above us darkened slowly, stars beginning to prick through the violet dusk.

She was sitting across from me, elbows on her knees, staring into the flames when she spoke.

“In your time,” she said slowly, “is it still a white man’s world?”

I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t.

She wasn’t looking at me. Her face was unreadable, but her voice had weight. Not just curiosity. Not just bitterness. A bone-deep weariness that had lived in her longer than I’d known her.

I poked at the fire with a stick. Sparks floated upward and disappeared into the night.

“Yeah,” I said. “It is. But ... it’s different in my time. Some things are better.”

“Like what?”

“There are no more slaves. That ended a long time ago. People of all races can vote. Own property. Go to school. Run businesses. There are Black doctors, judges, politicians ... even a president. A Black president.”