about and they both stopped.
“You two are a pair of idiots,” said Milo, and he pulled out on to the road and drove.
They took the interstate west for a few hours, then slipped off on to the back roads. They drove through Sigourney, then Delta, and passed a sign for a town called What Cheer. Farmland and electricity pylons flashing by almost hypnotically. Amber started taking a mental note of the populations listed on each sign, testing her dreadful maths skills by adding them up in her head – 2,059, 328, 646… By the time they were in sight of Knoxville, Iowa, she was going to tell Milo that in the last hour they had passed 15,568 people, then she decided not to. It just wasn’t that interesting.
They had breakfast at the Downtown Diner, then slept for a bit in the car. Exhaustion pulled Amber down deep into a dreamless sleep. Even her subconscious was too tired to play.
When she awoke, she cracked one eye open. Milo sat behind the wheel, looking through the windshield, unmoving. He wasn’t blinking. His face was slack. She wondered if he slept with his eyes open, like a shark. She moved slightly and he turned to her, and that blank expression was wiped away like it had never really been there. He nodded to her, and started the car, and Glen sat up suddenly in the back.
“What?” He blinked. “Oh. Sorry. We’re off again, then.” When neither Amber nor Milo answered, he nodded to himself. “Another few hours closer to my death.”
“Glen—”
“No, Amber. No. Don’t try to comfort me. I’m beyond comfort. There’s nothing you can do, nothing you can say, which would ease the weight I feel on my soul. It’s heavy. It’s so heavy. How much does a life weigh? Can you answer me that? No, I don’t think you can. So thank you for your effort, Amber, and I truly mean that. But you won’t see a smile from me today.”
Amber felt bad. She had been about to tell him to shut up.
“You’re not going to die,” said Milo.
“Death is tapping me on the shoulder as I sit here.”
“Nothing’s tapping you anywhere. You’re not going to die because we’re going to stop off at The Dark Stair and you can deliver the Deathmark to this Abigail, whoever she may be, and then you can leave us alone.”
Amber frowned. “You know where it is?”
Glen shoved his head between them. “You know where The Dark Stair is? You knew where it was all this time and you didn’t tell me?”
Milo pulled out on to the road and started driving. “I wasn’t sure if it’d be on our way. As it turns out, it is.”
“Where is it?” asked Amber.
“Salt Lake City,” said Milo. “It’s a bar for people like … well, like us, I guess. People on the blackroads.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Glen. “If it wasn’t in the direction you happen to be heading, would you have told me? Or would you have just let me die?”
“I’d have told you.”
Glen gaped. “You’d have let me die!”
“I’d have told you,” Milo said again. “I couldn’t tell you before now because Amber’s parents might have found you if you went off alone.”
“I have less than four days to live, Milo! What if Shanks had told us that Gregory Buxton lived east instead of west? What then?”
“Then I’d have put you on a Greyhound.”
Glen glanced at Amber. “A dog?”
“A bus.”
He turned to Milo again. “And what if that Greyhound got a flat tyre? Or was in an accident? Or I got delayed somehow? I get lost very easily, I’ll have you know! If you’d told me where The Dark Stair was at the very beginning, I’d have already delivered the Deathmark and I wouldn’t be dying right now! Admit it! You don’t care if I live or die, do you?”
Milo thought about it for a few seconds. “Not really,” he said.
Glen gasped again.
They drove for another ten minutes without anyone saying a word, but Amber had to ask. She just had to.
“This isn’t going to throw us off schedule too much, is it?”
“Ohh!” cried Glen, and Amber winced. “Oh, I’m sorry if my impending doom is throwing you off schedule, Amber! I’m sorry if my imminent demise is inconveniencing you! Tell you what, you let me out here. I’ll roll over by the side of the road and die quietly without causing anyone too much bother!”
Milo waited until he had finished, then answered. “It shouldn’t,” he said.
“Are you still talking about this?” Glen cried.
“Salt Lake City is that weird place, isn’t it?” said Amber. “Run by the Amish, or something.”
“Founded by Mormons,” said Milo. “And yeah, they’re pretty strict with their liquor laws and they don’t look too kindly on public profanity, but we’re going to be well-behaved and we’re not going to drink, now are we? Besides, The Dark Stair isn’t exactly typical of Salt Lake City. It isn’t typical of anywhere, for that matter.”
“Do you know it well?”
Milo shook his head. “Been in there twice, for no more than half an hour apiece. There’s a lot of kids running around. I remember thinking how weird that was. We’ll spend tonight in Nebraska somewhere, get to Salt Lake City tomorrow afternoon or thereabouts. From there it’s another eight hundred miles to Buxton’s home town. It’s Tuesday now – we’re still on track to get to Cascade Falls by Saturday.”
Amber nodded. “Okay. Yeah, okay.”
“Bet if I died back here you wouldn’t even notice,” Glen muttered, but they ignored him.
They drove on flat roads through flat lands. A few trees here and there, though paltry things, and lonesome. Telegraph poles linked hands over green fields and brown, and carried on into the wide, never-ending distance. A train on the tracks, its carriages the colour of rust and wine, names and slogans painted on the side in indecipherable graffiti.
They stopped at an Amoco gas station outside of a town called McCook, and Amber and Glen went in to use the restrooms and get sandwiches while Milo waited in the Charger. It was just after two and it was warm. The smell of gasoline was on the air.
“How much do you know about Milo?” Glen asked while they were waiting to pay for the food. The old man in front of them was having trouble pulling his wallet from his sagging pants.
Amber shrugged. “I know I’m paying him a lot of money to get me where I need to go.”
“So you don’t know anything about him?”
She sighed. “No, Glen, I don’t.”
The old man got his wallet halfway out before it snagged
