Outskirts

They came down off the rise before dawn and into the ragged outer streets of the town where the houses stood dark and open-doored, and she hid the cart the way she hid everything now, the way Papa had taught her to hide what mattered, so that losing yourself did not have to mean losing all of it at once. Spread your risk, he used to say. Never carry the whole of anything into a place you might not walk out of.

She found a place for the cart in a collapsed garage two streets in from the edge, under a fallen sheet of roofing that she wrestled down over the steel bed so that a person would have to know it was there to find it. And then she did the thing that mattered most, the thing she had decided on the road. She took the atlas and her mother's note out of the cart and she dug down with the folding knife into the dirt floor of the garage in the corner where the light did not reach, and she put them in an empty coffee can she found on a shelf and pressed the lid on and buried the can and smoothed the dirt over it and set a broken cinderblock on the spot. Because those two things she could not have anyone find. Everything else in the cart was only survival, was food and tools, was replaceable in the sense that its loss would only maybe kill her. But the atlas held the circle and the note held the words, and if Carla's people ever got a look at those, they would have not just her but the whole of where she was going, her mother, the last thing left, and she would rather come back to a robbed and empty cache than come back to find the direction of her life in another person's hands. She would rather come back to nothing than come back to that.