Chapter Thirty-Three Westbound
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Westbound
The caravan left Reservoir Three before sunrise.
Seven vehicles.
Twenty-three people.
One route nobody had driven in nine years.
Eden rode in the lead truck with Caro's drafting film spread across her knees and a new blank sheet clipped over the dashboard board.
Rhett sat beside her.
He had not touched the steering wheel once.
She noticed because he kept looking at it.
"You can drive later."
"I didn't say anything."
"Your right hand keeps opening."
He looked at it.
"Occupational memory."
"Control problem."
"You say that like it's news."
Behind them, Pax drove the machine truck. Two Dustline families followed in patched utility rigs. The last three vehicles carried food, spare fuel, water, and enough tools to turn a road problem into an argument about metal.
No children had joined this run.
No one under eighteen.
That had been Mina's condition for the first western survey.
Find the road before asking families to trust it.
Eden agreed.
The west line began easy.
Old Route Eighty ran over high ground for nineteen miles. Wind had stripped the asphalt clean in places. In others, sand climbed halfway up abandoned cars.
Eden marked every obstruction.
Bridge deck cracked at Mile Eleven.
Drainage cut safe for light vehicle only at Fifteen.
Old service station well dry at Seventeen.
At Mile Nineteen, the pavement ended.
Not gradually.
A landslide had taken the entire road and half the hillside with it.
Rhett climbed out.
"That seems inconvenient."
Eden studied Caro's film.
The orange west line continued straight through empty air.
A blue pencil mark curved north.
No label.
No date.
Caro had added it later.
Eden's pulse changed.
Pax came up behind them.
"That's a road?"
"Maybe."
He groaned.
"I've learned to fear that word."
Rhett smiled.
Eden ignored both men and climbed the ridge.
The blue line pointed toward a narrow saddle between two black hills.
From ground level, it looked impassable.
From the ridge, she saw the old cut.
A maintenance road.
Pre-Burn power crews had carved switchbacks into the north face, probably to reach transmission towers long gone.
Caro had found it.
Eden looked at the film again.
No note.
Just blue.
Rhett reached her.
"What do you see?"
"A road she didn't finish recording."
"Safe?"
"Unknown."
He waited.
Eden studied the grade.
Too steep for the fuel truck if the surface had washed.
Possible if they unloaded part of the weight.
There was another option thirty miles south, according to the old highway atlas.
Thirty miles meant fuel they did not have to waste.
"We scout on foot," she said.
Rhett nodded.
No challenge.
No claim that he could tell from here.
They climbed with Pax and a woman named Lio from Dustline who had driven freight before the Burn.
Halfway up, they found tire tracks.
Recent.
Eden crouched.
Not Dustline tread.
Not Tollhouse.
Narrow wheels.
Three vehicles, maybe four.
Heading west.
"Someone uses it," Lio said.
"Used it," Eden corrected.
The tracks were at least a month old.
Wind had softened the edges.
At the top, the road narrowed between rock walls.
The remains of a power tower lay across one lane.
Passable with cutting.
Beyond, the road dropped gently toward a valley Eden had never seen.
Green showed in the distance.
Not much.
Enough.
Rhett saw it too.
"Trees?"
"Probably salt cedar."
"Still trees."
Pax whistled.
Eden looked farther west.
A pale ribbon crossed the valley floor.
Could be road.
Could be dry river.
Caro's film ended there.
Literally.
The drafting sheet had been cut along a straight edge just beyond the valley.
Eden had spent three years treating that edge like an unfinished sentence.
Now she stood where Caro's map stopped.
There was no revelation.
No hidden message.
The world simply continued.
Rhett leaned on the rock beside her.
"You all right?"
"Yes."
He looked unconvinced.
"I'm standing at the end of her work."
"Looks more like the beginning of yours."
Eden almost told him that was sentimental nonsense.
Instead she looked at the blank sheet clipped under her arm.
Then west.
"We clear the tower," she said.
Pax grinned.
"That means yes?"
"It means work."
They returned to the convoy.
For three hours, they cut rusted tower steel and moved it with winches.
The first truck climbed at noon.
The second at one.
By two, all seven vehicles were over the saddle.
Eden drove down first.
The blue line ended beneath her tires.
She took out a pencil.
And drew beyond it.