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footsteps behind me, my sweat and fear, I find room for annoyance. I know right is upstream. Still no time to say anything. My feet leave the lava gravel and find soft sand.
    I splash into the tepid, slow moving water and immediately turn right. Both arms up, left hand holding my stick. The River Mar’s channel is notoriously narrow. My stick finds the opposite side almost immediately. I splash ahead.
    “Come back here!” I hear a hoarse yell from behind, startlingly close. I almost laugh. Make me , I think. I shake my head; it must be the excitement. I’m laughing, but I want to cry. I hear a splash and a yowl. “Left,” gurgles Tig. I almost laugh again. I wish I could see. Tig has only been wet twice in his life, and he hated both times.
    My stick feels a wall in front of us. I’m confused. “Left!” yells Tig again, and my stick finds open air to the left. I never stop moving, almost trotting, against the now knee-high water. I find the deepest part of the river, just above my waist, and use my right hand to help push me through the water. I’m slow—anything to help me go quicker.
    I hear whoever was chasing us stop at the river. No splash.
    “Keep moving,” says Tig, but in a much quieter voice. I wonder what’s going on. The thug must be only a few steps behind us.
    “We turned a bend,” says Tig. “He can’t see us.”
    I finally slow so that I can be quieter, but I continue moving. I hear more boots scrabbling in the gravel, how many I can’t tell. The crevice we’re in starts to throw weird echoes.
    A man’s flat voice bounces into the gorge. “She went in there?”
    “Yes, sir,” gasps another man. Must be the one who was chasing me so hard. Someone else growls a word I’ve never heard before, but I’m pretty sure I know what it means. I jump at the anger in the voice, but keep moving, swishing the air softly with my stick, letting my legs guide me through the deepest water.
    “Let her rot,” echoes weirdly around the rocks.
    “Outcrop from the left, move right,” whispers Tig. I hear him squishing along what must be a tiny sandbar off to my left. Tig splashes back into the water as I move around the outcrop.
    “Just leave her?” I hear something like relief in the question from outside. It is fainter now, so I slow even more. I want to hear what they decide.

    “We kill her or the rock basilisks kill her, doesn’t matter spit to me.”
    I stop. I hear boots tromping away. The voices are muffled now.
    “You stay here. Make sure she doesn’t come back out.”
    “I’ll watch from down there?” I hear in reply.  It sounds like a question, he sounds worried.
    More swearing. I’ve heard that one at the valley market. “Both of you, right there, at the mouth of the river, till she comes out or you know she’s dead.”
    I shudder at the venom in the words.
    Tig whispers, “Come on.” We walk on. The sun is starting to cast deep, cool shadows in the river canyon. Now that I’m not being chased by some heavy creep I realize it’s incredibly hot in this crevice. I can’t imagine being here during the middle of the day. We walk in silence for several long minutes.
    “It’s nice the sun is going down,” I say, trying to sound normal, but my voice is still shaking.
    Tig doesn’t respond. The sun is going down, I think. My mind starts taunting me. You’ll be trapped in the Valley of Fire at night .
    “Tig . . .” good, my voice is no higher than it should be, “where are we going?”
    There is more. Why are we here? We’re going to die in the lava flows! But I don’t say it. Not yet.
    “If they’d caught us we’d be dead already,” says Tig bluntly. That silences my rebellious thoughts for a minute.
    “What now?” I ask as we wade through the tepid water. I feel the shadows more often, the shafts of sunlight piercing the canyon growing further between.
    “I don’t know,” says Tig.
    I don’t feel like laughing now. The initial rush and excitement has disappeared,