“What’s that?” I ask.
“Do we head north or south from here?”
Sash moves her eyes from person to person while we try to come up with a logical response. Larn turns his head to the north, studies the distant Barrens, and then looks to the south.
“I would say south,” he says.
“Are you basing that on anything?” Sash asks.
“I think she’d want to stay as far away from the Delta as possible,” he answers. “If she traveled too far north from where she and Chase were, she’d risk crossing the paths we use to the Expanse. I think she’d stay in the southern part of the Barrens.”
Sash directs her attention to me. “And you?”
“I agree with Larn, but my reasoning is a little different. The Murkovin were still looking for us and trying to cut off our path to the Delta. Tela suggested that we go far north of the Delta and then back down to avoid them. She knows that I know that, so I think she’d do the opposite.”
“You and Tela were about forty thousand miles south of here,” she says. “Do you think we should start there?”
“I don’t know. We’re here now and a lot of the morrow is gone. I think Larn was correct when he said that we shouldn’t be random in our search. Starting here is as good a place as any. If she doesn’t want to be found, I don’t think she’d stay close to where we were.”
Sash nods to me and then looks at Maya. “What do you think?”
“I don’t think I should have a say,” she answers.
“I disagree,” Sash says in a soothing tone. “If you’re brave enough to be out here with us, you should have a say in what we do.”
Maya glances at me and then looks at Sash again. “I think what Larn and Chase said makes sense. I say south from here. What do you think?”
“It’s unanimous,” Sash answers. “I think she’d want to stay close to the Expanse with the least amount of risk of being seen by anyone else.”
“Let’s hope Tela’s thinking that rationally,” I say.
Once Maya is on my back again, we travel a few hundred miles due west. On top of the highest hill in the area, Larn helps Maya off my back. She kneels to the ground, places both palms on the dirt, and closes her eyes. The rest of us scour the Barrens in every direction looking for movement that might be a Murkovin. A few minutes pass with Maya in deep concentration before she utters a sound.
“I don’t sense anything,” Maya says.
“It’s not very likely that we’d find her on the first stop,” I tell her. “Even the first hundred or so.”
In less than five minutes, we cover the eight hundred miles to our second stop. We spend another few minutes with Maya on the ground trying to sense something from Tela. We repeat the process over and over, snaking back and forth across the Barrens to the south. As the morrow wears on, the routine becomes increasingly monotonous, but at least we’re covering a much larger area than if we tried to search by eye.
At our twentieth stop, we see a lone Murkovin standing on a hilltop less than a mile away. With her eyes magnetized to the beast, Maya nervously fidgets with the dirt at her sides. The creature disappears behind the hill but soon climbs back to the crest with another Murkovin at his side.
“Can you try to focus on where they are?” I ask Maya.
“I’ll try,” she says quietly. “This is the first time I’ve seen a Murkovin.”
Sash kneels by her side. “Don’t be afraid, Maya. We won’t go near them and I won’t let them anywhere near you.”
The confidence in Sash’s tone seems to ease Maya’s fear. She closes her eyes and pushes her hands firmly to the ground. After a few moments, she shakes her head and looks up at me with a frown on her face.
“Nothing.”
“We should head back now,” Larn says. “It’s almost time for sleep. We have a long return trip ahead of us and can’t keep Maya out any longer.”
Maya lowers her eyes to the dirt. “I’m sorry I didn’t find her.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I say. “I didn’t think there was much chance of us finding her on the first morrow.”
During the trip back to the Delta, I realize what an enormous undertaking lies ahead of us. It took so much time just getting to where we started that we were only left with a few hours of actual searching. With Maya’s range, each stop we made took care of roughly an eight hundred mile diameter circle with us in the center. We went through twenty of those, which totals over ten million square miles, an unfathomable amount of space by Earth standards.
I try several times to calculate how many morrows it will take if we have to search the entire edge of the Expanse. On a stop for sap, I even ask Sash to confirm my math. The number we both come up with—a very rough estimate—is two hundred.
As we near the Delta, one of Maya’s cheeks falls to the particles of my shoulder. After it remains dormant there for a few minutes, I assume she’s dozed off. My head suddenly aches from all the “what ifs” running through my mind.
What if I’d just insisted that I carry Tela back to the Delta when she seemed better? What if I’d gone to refill the canisters with sap while she was in the waterfall? What if I’d had the decency
