The Trek to Forever
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9
Illinois was a state making up its mind.
Not about slavery. Illinois had settled that question on paper the way Ohio had settled it. But paper and practice lived in different houses in 1858 and Illinois knew it and you could feel that knowledge in the way people looked at you in the towns and at the depots and on the roads. A wariness that was not hostility exactly but was not welcome exactly either. A state watching itself to see what it would do when the moment required it to be what it claimed to be.
Rell moved them through it like a man who had read that particular quality of uncertainty before and knew how to navigate it. Not through the towns. Around them. Through the spaces between where the uncertainty didn’t have faces or voices and was just weather.
They were three days into Illinois when the hunters found them again.
Not close. Not immediately dangerous. But found.
Rell knew it the way he knew everything on this road. A feeling in the chess board. A piece that had moved when it shouldn’t have. He came back from a morning’s scouting with his face carrying the specific stillness of a man who has new information he is deciding how to use.
He sat down at the safe house table and looked at Johnny and Naomi and said, “They recalibrated faster than I expected.”
Johnny felt the cold iron weight settle back into his chest where it had been since Tennessee and had never entirely left. “How close?”
“A day behind. Maybe less.” Rell spread his hands on the table. “They gave up the grid. They’re not covering routes anymore. They’re following us specifically.”
“How?” Naomi said.
Rell looked at her. “Someone talked. Not intentionally. Not anyone in the network. But we’ve been moving through communities. People see things. Remember things. A boy and a girl. Young. Moving north in winter. That’s not invisible even when you’re trying to be.”
Johnny thought about Else Brauer and her cake and her dried flower and her German that sounded like of course. About Thomas Webb and Hannah Porter and Isaiah and every soul along this road who had opened their door in the dark and said come in quickly.
None of them had talked. He was certain of that.
But the world they moved through had eyes that didn’t belong to the network.
“What do we do?” he said.
Rell was quiet for a moment. Looking at the table. Moving pieces in his mind.
“We stop running,” he said.
Johnny looked at him.
“We’ve been reactive since Indiana,” Rell said. “Going west when they went north. Going around when they went through. Every move we make they factor into their next one.” He looked up. “We stop reacting and we do something they don’t expect.”
“What don’t they expect?” Naomi said.
“Speed,” Rell said. “They expect us to be careful. To move at night. To go to ground during the day. To use the network the way the network is designed to be used.” He paused. “What if we don’t?”
Johnny leaned forward. “Say it plain.”
“We move during the day,” Rell said. “Not on the back roads. On the main road. Fast. James and Ruth Carter traveling north in winter aren’t invisible but they’re not suspicious either. People travel in winter. Families move. It’s not comfortable but it’s not remarkable.” He looked at Johnny. “You’ve got the papers. You’ve got the story. You’ve been James Carter for two months now. You know who he is.”
Johnny thought about Briggs at the Tennessee checkpoint. About his father’s voice borrowed and hated and effective.
“And if we’re stopped?” he said.
“James Carter doesn’t get stopped,” Rell said. “James Carter stops for no one because James Carter has legitimate papers and legitimate business and legitimate impatience at being delayed.” He paused. “Can you be that man for two days?”
Johnny looked at Naomi.
She was looking at the road in her mind again. Reading it. Calculating.
She turned to him and he saw in her eyes what he needed to see.
Certainty.
“Yes,” he said.
They left before dawn.
Not the careful pre-dawn departure of the network. The practical early start of travelers with distance to cover. Rell rode with them but differently now. Not as conductor. As companion. Three people traveling north in winter on legitimate business with legitimate papers and legitimate impatience.
The main road was harder than the back roads in some ways. More exposure. More eyes. The towns they’d been going around they now went through, heads up, pace steady, James Carter’s absolute confidence radiating from Johnny’s spine and Naomi’s composed and unhurried presence beside him doing what it had always done. Making people see exactly what she chose for them to see.
Nothing suspicious here. Nothing worth a second look. Just travelers.
Move along.
The first town they passed through was a small Illinois settlement that had a general store and a church and a livery and three men standing outside the livery who looked at them with the uncertain eyes of Illinois making up its mind.
Johnny looked back at them with Robert Morgan Brighton’s certainty that the world was correctly arranged and rode on without adjusting his pace by a single step.
The men watched them go.
That was all.
Naomi rode beside him with her shoulder at his arm and said nothing until the town was behind them.
“You’re getting better at that,” she said quietly.
“At what?”
“Wearing it without it wearing you.”
He thought about that. About the difference between the checkpoint in Tennessee where he’d pulled off the trail a hundred yards around the bend and shaken. And now. Moving through a town at a walk in broad daylight and feeling the thing settle around him and lift away again cleanly when it was done.
She was right. He was getting better at it.
“I know what it is now,” he said. “Before it felt like becoming him. Now it feels like using a tool.”
“Because you know why you’re using it,” she said.
“Because I know why,” he agreed.
She looked at him for a moment with those eyes.
“Your mother would understand that distinction,” she said. “I think she’d be proud of it.”
He rode in silence for a moment with that.
“I think she would too,” he said.
They made thirty-five miles the first day.
More ground than any single day since Georgia. The main road was harder on the body than the back roads but easier on the nerves and the net effect was that they arrived at the second day’s safe house less depleted than they’d been arriving anywhere since Tennessee.
The safe house family fed them and asked no questions and in the morning Rell spread his hands on the table one more time and looked at the chess board in his mind.
“They’re behind us,” he said. “Not gaining.”
“How far behind?” Johnny asked.
“Far enough.” Rell looked up. “Iowa is two days north.”
The kitchen was quiet.
Two days.
Johnny looked at Naomi across the table.
She was looking at him with those eyes that saw everything and gave everything when she chose to give it and she was choosing now. He could see Iowa in her face. Not the word. The place. The eighty acres and the log house and the well and the east facing windows and the kitchen garden she was going to put in come spring.
He could see it as clearly as if it were already real.
It was already real.
It had been real since a candlelit room in Georgia. It had just taken this long to catch up with the two people who had always known it was coming.
“Two days,” he said.
“Two days,” she said back.
Rell watched them look at each other across the safe house table and felt something move through him that had no name in any language but was the reason he’d been doing this work for eleven years and intended to keep doing it.
This. This exact thing. This moment.
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