Pursuit

She had known they would come. She had killed Carla's scouts and cost her a night's fuel and taken one of her guards over to the dead, and a girl like Carla did not let a ledger like that stand open. The only question was how long the fire in the fuel dump would hold her, and the answer came on the second afternoon, out of the north, the far mechanical worrying at the edge of the wind that she had learned in her body on the road up.

She was ready for it because she had been getting ready for it since the ditch outside town, running Papa's telling of the Run through her head, not the part in the store now but the part on the way home, the part she had not understood was the real lesson until she needed it. He had not tried to outrun the boy on the four-wheeler. You could not outrun a machine. He had made the machine run out of the thing that fed it, and he had used the country to do it, and he had never once let it see the straight line home.