Chapter 7: The Wanderer

Three hundred dollars disappears faster than I ever imagined it could.

It goes on gas, first, because the car — I have started thinking of it as stolen, though technically it was mine to drive for three years, a distinction that feels increasingly meaningless the further we get from Ironclaw — drinks fuel at a rate I never had to think about when someone else always filled the tank without my asking. It goes on food, small and careful purchases from gas station shelves because I don't yet trust myself in a real grocery store, in a real town, where someone might recognize the Luna of Ironclaw traveling alone with a small child and no explanation. It goes on a single night in a motel just inside the neutral territories, a room that smells faintly of bleach and old cigarette smoke, because Lyra needs a real bed and a real bath more than I need to preserve what little money I have left.

By the fourth day, we are somewhere in the wide gray stretch of the neutral border towns — lawless in-between country where pack law loosens its grip and the people who end up here are, by and large, the people who couldn't survive within it. Rogues. Runaways. Wolves with no pack and no particular desire to find one again. I understand, driving through the cracked streets of a town whose name I don't bother to learn, that I have joined their ranks now, whether I intended to or not.

Lyra gets sick on the fourth night.

It starts as a low fever I notice while tucking her into the lumpy motel bed, her forehead warmer than it should be under my palm, her cheeks flushed in a way that sends a spike of pure animal panic through me before I can even fully process what I'm looking at. By midnight she's crying, inconsolable, complaining that her throat hurts, that her head hurts, curling into herself in a way that makes her look smaller and more fragile than I have ever let myself see her.

I have no healer to call. No pack resources, no household staff to fetch remedies, none of the quiet infrastructure of care I took entirely for granted for three years without ever once appreciating what it actually meant to have it.

I do what any desperate mother would do. I go to the front desk of the motel at one in the morning, Lyra whimpering against my shoulder, and I ask the tired-looking clerk if there's a pharmacy nearby, a clinic, anything.

"Pharmacy's four blocks down. Closed till eight." He looks at Lyra with something that might be sympathy, might just be professional weariness. "There's a twenty-four-hour place two towns over if it's bad enough to need a doctor tonight."

Two towns over. I have perhaps forty dollars left to my name and a car with a quarter tank of gas, and the particular, cold arithmetic of survival I never had to learn until four days ago tells me immediately that a doctor's visit tonight might mean we don't eat again until I find some way to make money, and making money is a problem I haven't even begun to solve yet.

I go back to the room. I hold Lyra through the worst of the fever, cool washcloths against her forehead, my own voice hoarse from singing every lullaby I can remember to keep her calm, and somewhere around four in the morning the fever finally breaks, sweat-soaked and exhausted, and she sleeps.

I don't sleep at all.

I sit on the edge of that lumpy bed and watch my daughter breathe, and I let myself, for the first time since I walked out of the Great Hall five days ago, genuinely wonder if I've made a catastrophic mistake.

At Ironclaw, she would have had a healer at her bedside within minutes. She would have had a warm house, clean sheets, a father who — whatever his failures toward me — has never once been anything but doting toward her. I took all of that away from her because I couldn't bear one more day of my own invisibility, and now she's sick in a motel room in a lawless border town because her mother chose pride over safety.

I almost turn the car around that morning. I sit in the driver's seat with the key in the ignition and Lyra buckled sleepily into the back, and I think about Dorian's words — he believes you'll return within the week — and something in me revolts so violently at the thought of proving Killian right that I put the car in drive instead and keep going, deeper into the neutral territories, though I couldn't say, if pressed, exactly where I'm going or why.

By the sixth day, we're down to eleven dollars. I've found a cheaper motel, if such a thing is possible, in a border town that seems to exist mainly as a waypoint for people passing through toward somewhere else — a scattering of bars, a pawn shop, a diner that closes at nine, all of it soaked in the particular exhausted grime of a place nobody chooses to stay in on purpose.

That night, after I've fed Lyra the last of our food — I tell her I already ate, and she's young enough to believe me without question, and I hate myself a little for how easily the lie comes — I wait until she's asleep, and then I sit on the floor of the bathroom with the fan running so she won't hear me, and I finally let myself fall apart completely.

I cry until my chest hurts, until my throat is raw, until I have nothing left to give the grief except silence and exhaustion. I think about my parents, who sold me for political favor and called it love. I think about Killian, who married what my blood might become and never once cared about who I actually was. I think about three years of my life spent making myself small enough to fit into a marriage that was never built with room for me in it, and I think, with a bitterness that frightens me, that perhaps I deserve exactly this — eleven dollars, a sick child, a bathroom floor in a town I'll never remember the name of — for having been foolish enough to believe I mattered to any of them.

I don't believe that for long. Some stubborn, exhausted part of me refuses to let the thought take root, refuses to let this be the story I tell myself about who I am.

I wipe my face at the sink, splash cold water against skin gone raw from crying, and look at myself in a mirror clouded with old water spots, and I make myself a promise instead.

I am not going back.

Whatever happens next — however hard it gets, however many nights I have to cry on bathroom floors while my daughter sleeps unaware in the next room — I am not going back to a house where I was never anything more than a placeholder for someone else's love.

I don't know it yet, standing in that grimy motel bathroom with eleven dollars and a child's future resting entirely on my exhausted shoulders, but tomorrow night I am going to walk into a bar three blocks from here to drown a sorrow I've been carrying for three years, and a stranger with storm-gray eyes is about to remind me, however briefly, however impossibly, what it feels like to be truly seen.

I have no idea yet how much that single night is about to cost me.

Or how much, in the end, it's going to save me.