The Trek to Forever
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
Elias Hooper had a man he trusted for the first leg.
He didn’t give them the man’s real name. In the network nobody used real names because real names were weight you didn’t carry unless you had to and the less weight you carried the faster you moved and speed was frequently the difference between Iowa and a Georgia jail cell. He told them to call him Moses which was not subtle but was accurate in every way that mattered.
Moses was forty one years old and free born in Pennsylvania and had been moving people north along this particular stretch of road for eleven years without losing a single soul which was a record he intended to maintain. He was a compact man the color of good saddle leather with hands that looked like they’d been made for hard work and eyes that missed nothing. He arrived at Hooper’s mill before dawn on the fourth day leading three horses and carrying the specific unhurried energy of someone for whom urgency had become so constant it no longer registered as urgency.
He looked at Johnny and Naomi for a long moment without speaking.
Then he said, “You got the papers?”
Naomi produced the travel document from inside her dress. Moses examined it with the practiced eye of a man who had seen both the real and the counterfeit and knew the difference.
“Good work,” he said, handing it back. “Whose?”
“Don’t ask me that,” Naomi said.
Moses looked at her sharply. Then something shifted in his expression that might have been approval. “Fair enough,” he said. He looked at Johnny. “You know how to ride?”
“Since I was eight,” Johnny said.
“You know how to ride quiet? No showing off. No fast movement. No drawing attention.”
“Yes.”
Moses looked at Naomi. “You ride?”
“I can manage,” she said.
“You’ll do better than manage before this is over,” Moses said. Not unkindly. Just factually. He turned back to Hooper who was standing in the mill doorway with his arms folded and his red beard catching the first grey light of the morning. “We’re ready.”
Hooper nodded. He looked at Johnny and then at Naomi and then back at Johnny.
“James,” he said, using the name deliberately. “Ruth.” He paused. “God keep you both.”
“Thank you Elias,” Johnny said. “For everything.”
Hooper made a gesture that dismissed the gratitude without rejecting it. Then he stepped back into his mill and the door closed and that was that.
Moses was already moving toward the horses.
“We ride until an hour before full light,” he said over his shoulder. “Then we stop and rest through the day. We move at night. Always at night until we’re clear of Georgia. You sleep when I tell you to sleep and you ride when I tell you to ride and you do not speak to anyone we encounter unless I tell you to speak. If we meet anyone on the road I do the talking. Both of you understand?”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
“Yes,” Naomi said.
“One more thing.” Moses stopped and turned and looked at them both with those eyes that missed nothing. “Whatever you were to each other on that plantation — whatever names you had there, whatever history — it stays there. From this moment you are James and Ruth Carter. Free persons of color traveling north on legitimate business. You were born free. You have always been free. You believe that so completely that anyone who looks at you sees it immediately.” He paused. “Can you do that?”
Johnny looked at Naomi.
Naomi looked at Moses with a steadiness that Johnny had seen in her since the candlelit room and had never stopped being moved by.
“I have been practicing that my whole life,” she said quietly. “Believing I was free on the inside when everything outside said otherwise.” She paused. “The difference now is that it’s true.”
Moses looked at her for a moment. Then he turned and mounted his horse.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The road north in the dark was nothing like Johnny had imagined and exactly like he should have expected.
It was cold. It was slow. It was the particular grinding unglamorous work of moving through darkness on unfamiliar roads with a man who knew them and two people who didn’t, the horses picking their way carefully while the Georgia night pressed close on all sides and every sound that wasn’t their own hoofbeats required identification before Moses allowed them to relax again.
An owl. Wind in the pines. A dog somewhere far off that barked twice and stopped.
Moses identified each one without being asked, a quiet murmur in the dark, that’s nothing, keep moving, and Johnny found himself calibrating to the man’s stillness the way you calibrate to a compass. If Moses was still they were fine. If Moses went alert they went alert.
Naomi rode beside Johnny with her shoulder close to his and her eyes moving the way his weren’t yet trained to move, taking in the dark on all sides in steady sweeping intervals. She had spent six years learning to read a space for danger and that skill was running at full capacity now and Johnny watched her do it and understood that she was already better at this part than he was.
He let her be better at it. There was no version of this journey where pride served them.
They rode for four hours. When Moses finally raised his hand and turned off the road into a stand of pines Johnny’s back ached and his hands were stiff from the cold and he was hungrier than he’d admitted to himself.
Moses led them deep enough into the trees that the road was invisible and dismounted without a word. Johnny helped Naomi down and felt her lean against him briefly before she straightened and he understood that she was tired too and was choosing not to show it for the same reasons he was.
“Four hours rest,” Moses said. “No fire. Eat what you have.”
They ate from Maddy’s provisions in the dark under the pines. Cold biscuit and dried meat and something sweet she’d wrapped separately that turned out to be two pieces of the molasses cake she made at Christmas, which she’d included without comment and which hit Johnny somewhere behind his sternum with a force that had nothing to do with hunger.
Naomi unwrapped her piece and looked at it in the thin light filtering through the pines.
“Maddy,” she said softly.
“Maddy,” Johnny agreed.
They ate the cake slowly and didn’t talk about what it meant to have it and not be able to thank her for it.
Moses sat apart from them with his back against a pine trunk and his eyes on the road and gave them the privacy of the dark without making a point of it.
After a while Naomi put her head against Johnny’s shoulder and he put his arm around her and they sat like that in the cold under the Georgia pines while the night moved around them.
“Are you all right?” he murmured.
“Yes,” she said. Then after a moment, “Ask me again in a week.”
He almost smiled. “Deal.”
She settled more firmly against him. He felt her breathing slow and even out and understood she was asleep before he’d fully registered it was possible to sleep sitting up against a pine tree in the cold. But she’d been sleeping light and alert on a plantation for six years and her body knew how to take rest where rest was offered.
He stayed awake. Watched the dark. Listened the way Moses had shown him without knowing he was showing him — steady, patient, identifying each sound before filing it away.
An owl. Wind. The horses shifting their weight.
Nothing that wasn’t supposed to be there.
He thought about the Brighton plantation sleeping behind them fifty miles south. About his father’s ledgers and his bourbon and his loud voice and his short memory. About the root cellar in the woods and the hundreds of double eagles still sitting in the dark down there.
He thought about Maddy shaking out clean sheets in the morning light.
He thought about the kitchen garden in Spartanburg where a Quaker family was waiting for them without knowing their faces, willing to risk everything for two people they’d never met because the network asked it of them and they believed the network was doing God’s work.
He thought about Iowa.
About the deed with her name on it first.
About what he’d promised her.
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