The Long Middle

The tobacco barn had been flooded at some point in the past season, the water table rising far enough to leave a tideline on the interior walls at knee height, and the straw on the floor had gone to a kind of matted grey felt that smelled of mold and old wet wood. I spread my ground pad in the driest corner I could find, which was the northeast section where the wall met the foundation at a slight upward angle, and ate cold and listened to the rain on the corrugated roof and thought about the twenty-two miles I'd covered in weather that had started at a drizzle and ended at something I wouldn't have chosen to be outside in. Poppy stood near the barn's sliding door in the dark, autopilot running, the duplicate motionless in the way it was motionless when there was nothing to process. Through Poppy's sight line: the field, the road, the rain moving in curtains under the cloud cover that had killed the moonlight an hour after nightfall.

The tobacco barn was in Virginia somewhere south of the Shenandoah. I'd lost the exact county line in the fog of the ridge crossing, which hadn't mattered while I was moving and didn't matter now. The map notation put me at roughly day nine of the post-Halbrook leg, and the terrain confirmed that — not the Blue Ridge proper yet, but close enough that the ridges had the particular denseness I associated with that transition, the way the geology stacked up and the hollows got narrower and the road started working harder to find passage south.

The rain came down on the roof with the uncomplicated persistence of weather that had no opinion about anything below it, and I adjusted the ground pad angle to account for the slight uphill lean of the floor and went to sleep.

By day eleven I'd developed a working theory about which kinds of farmhouses had people in them and which didn't, based on window light patterns and chimney output and the particular quality of the yards around them. The occupied ones had a kind of metabolic evidence that the empty ones lacked — recent track marks in the soft ground at gates, a barn door that swung instead of having its hinges seized, the smell of something organic being managed rather than abandoned. I walked past all of them in the middle of the road, not eyeing them long enough to invite attention, Poppy at the default spacing. Two of them I sent Poppy ahead past in autopilot while my own body went wide through the woodlot and reconverged further south.

The encounter that made an impression was brief and small and came at a crossroads that had a hand-lettered sign nailed to the junction post listing what roads went where, which someone had put up with careful capital letters and approximate distances. A man was standing at the crossroads when I came through, sixties, with the thin-soled shoes of someone who hadn't thought about walking until walking became his only option. He asked where I'd come from. I said north. He asked about road conditions north of the valley, specifically whether a particular junction was passable. I'd come through the junction he meant, though I'd taken the back route around the worst of it. I told him the direct road was questionable after the last rain but the parallel route was clear and described the turn-off by reference to a burnt-out equipment shed on the east side that he'd know when he saw it. He nodded once.

"Anything for it?" he said. He was holding two cans — one was soup of some kind, one was corn, both label-stripped in a way that had the quality of accident rather than intent, the paper worn off by moisture at some point rather than removed.

"No," I said.

He held the cans slightly forward anyway. An instinct toward reciprocity, old enough that he hadn't questioned it against the new math of what food meant now. I looked at the cans and thought about the caloric situation in his shoes and said, "Keep them," and moved through the junction and down the south road, and after a minute I looked back through Poppy's rearward line and the man was still standing at the junction looking at the turn-off note I'd given him as though he was memorizing it, which he probably was.

The System counter had been at eighty-one percent for two days and then moved to eighty-six in a stretch of active dual-body routing through a section of road that had been partially blocked by a tree fall and required me to split the bodies, one going east through the field and one managing the gap between the fallen sections, navigating the pile from two sides simultaneously to find the clearable route. Not a significant operation by the standard of what I'd done at the toll point or the road clearance for Halbrook. But the System registered cognitive complexity, not drama.

Eighty-six. Close enough that I noted it every morning.

Day thirteen I lost Poppy for three seconds.

There was no better way to describe it. I was cresting a ridge in the mid-morning, my own body on the road and Poppy running a quarter mile ahead in the parallel field track I'd designated, the dual awareness carrying both signals the way it had carried them since the second week of travel — not quite sound, not quite sight, but something that had the informational quality of both. And then the Poppy channel went dark. Not dimmed, not weak, not the thin-signal feeling I'd mapped at the outer edge of range. Dark, completely, the way a room went dark when the source of light was removed rather than reduced.

I stopped walking.

The three seconds felt longer than three seconds. My own body was on the road, the ridge clear on both sides, the morning light flat and gray, and the half of my awareness that had been tracking Poppy's sight line was gone and in its absence was a specific texture of nothing that I hadn't experienced before and didn't have a name for.

Then it came back.

The signal returned the way a radio signal returned when you cleared the interfering terrain — abruptly, full-strength, no transition state. Through Poppy's sight line: the field, the grass, the ridge ahead, the road visible where the field track rejoined the shoulder fifty yards further on. Poppy was standing in the middle of the field in the posture of mid-stride interrupted, weight distributed as though the next step had been queued and never executed.

I held the dual awareness without moving for another ten seconds, running checks I didn't have better names for than checks — the signal quality, the responsiveness of the duplicate's motor function, the accuracy of the visual feed. Everything within normal parameters. The three seconds left no residue in the system that I could identify.

The System had no notification for it. No explanation box, no warning, no acknowledgment that anything had occurred. The counter still read eighty-six percent and had the same texture it had had before.

I filed it in the part of my thinking that held things I couldn't resolve yet and started walking again.

Poppy rejoined the road ahead of me and fell into the standard formation and I watched the duplicate's gait for the next half mile for anything that would tell me what had happened. The gait was normal. The responsiveness was normal. The signal maintained at full strength through the rest of the day.

I did not find an explanation. I kept moving and held the unresolved thing at the edge of attention where it would stay until it became relevant or until I had something to apply to it. The second option felt less likely than I would have preferred.

The Virginia-Tennessee line came up on day fifteen, though I only knew it from the map rather than any posted marker — whatever signs had marked it had been there for the convenience of drivers and drivers were no longer relevant to the roads. The terrain told me anyway. The ridges had the specific shape of the ones I'd looked at from car windows as a child, riding south with my mother past the point where the Virginia geology started giving way to the Tennessee character of the same mountains, a quality I couldn't name as a child and couldn't name now but could recognize in the same way you recognized a smell associated with a specific time — not thinking about it, just knowing.

I stopped at a rock outcrop at a ridge crest and looked south.

The Clinch Mountain line was visible from here, or I thought it was — the light was wrong for certainty, the afternoon getting low enough that the southern ridges had gone to shadow while the western faces still caught the last direct sun, creating the optical effect of depth that this country specialized in. Past Clinch Mountain was the Powell Valley, and past the Powell was the ridge line above the farm's county, and below that ridge line was the road I'd driven a hundred times and the gravel lane that turned off it and the farmhouse visible from the turn, white paint, the tin roof that my mother had been asking about replacing for the last three summers.

The farm was there. I didn't know for certain that it was there but it was there in the sense that I had not received any information suggesting it wasn't, and the farm was my mother's and my mother was not someone who lost things.

Through Poppy's sight line from the lower position: the road south, the tree line, the shadow coming up fast on the east face of the ridge.

I'd come through this country before with a pack, years before the System, years before Harpers Ferry. A summer traverse that had covered thirty miles of this terrain in three days, the kind of trip you did when you were young enough not to calculate the cost accurately. I'd camped at a spot below Clinch Mountain where a stream crossed the trail and the water was cold enough that it felt like something to accomplish to drink from it, and in the morning there'd been a fog in the valley that the sun burned off slowly over two hours, the ridge lines appearing through it in sequence, the way they were appearing now from the outcrop in the other direction.

I knew where the spring was. I knew where the road condition went bad past the Powell Valley crossing and which shoulder held firm and which didn't. I knew which farms along the ridge road had been there for sixty years and which were newer, and I knew which of the old ones would have cisterns and which would have wells and what the water table behavior was in this part of the county in a dry year versus a wet one. Not because I'd studied it, just because it had accumulated in the background of a childhood spent in this geography, the particular low-level knowledge that came from being somewhere repeatedly without paying deliberate attention.

That knowledge had a different weight now.

I looked at the Clinch Mountain line until the light went, and then I shouldered the pack and went down the south face and didn't elaborate on the looking.

The descent into familiar territory took two more days, the terrain slower than it looked from height. I found the spring below Clinch Mountain where I'd camped twenty years before and the water was still cold enough to count as an achievement to drink from, and I refilled and moved south and the System counter climbed from eighty-six to ninety-one in the course of a particularly complex dual-body route through a section of old logging road that required real-time split navigation — my body on the switchback, Poppy finding the direct grade, both feeding information about the terrain that neither alone would have had.

Ninety-one. The weight of the near-completion was different from the weight of a number — it had a physical quality now, the sense of something about to shift, the same pressure I'd felt before the Rank II resolution at the rail-trail community but heavier in proportion to the gap between the ranks.

I noted it and pushed south.

The Powell Valley crossing was a ford; the bridge marked on the map had been a wooden vehicle bridge and had been taken out, recently by the look of the debris downstream, probably by the same high water that had flooded the tobacco barn. The ford was knee-deep and moving fast and I crossed it carrying the pack on my head with the particular cold-focus of moving water requiring total attention, and Poppy crossed immediately after using the same line I'd used, the duplicate's weight distribution accurate enough that the footing held the same way.

On the far bank I stood in the cold for a moment with the water draining out of my boots and looked south.

The ridge above the farm's county was close enough now that I could pick out the individual trees on the crest line. A specific long-needled pine stand at the east end that I'd been able to see from the farm's upper pasture on clear days. It was there. The stand was there and I was looking at it from the wrong side, the north face instead of the south, and the farm was below it on the south face in the particular protected hollow that had made it a good farm site before there was ever anything to put there.

I turned south and followed the road and told myself the remaining miles were a resource to manage and not a specific weight and that was approximately true.

The smoke came up in the late afternoon of day sixteen.

I saw it from the road rather than from height, which meant it was significant enough that it didn't need elevation to read. A column, not a wisp — something with a fuel source behind it, a sustained burn rather than the brief signature of a cookfire. It was in the southern direction, the general direction of the farm's county, and it was thick enough and dark enough at the base to suggest petroleum or synthetic material rather than pure wood.

I stood in the road and looked at the column and did not immediately continue south.

Through Poppy's sight line from thirty yards further on: the same column, the same fuel-quality signature, roughly the same bearing.

The farm was below the ridge. The smoke was above it or beyond it or from somewhere in the valley — the parallax from this distance didn't give me enough to resolve the source location against the terrain. It could be from the farm. It could be from any of the five other farms I knew of in the same county sector. It could be from the county seat itself, which was eight miles east of the farm's road and had a propane depot at the feed store that I'd never thought about before and was now thinking about with the focused attention of someone trying to produce alternative explanations.

The column was thick. It had the character of something that had been burning for at least an hour.

I looked at the map. I looked at the column. I thought about the seventeen days it had taken me to get here and the two hundred miles they represented and the fixed point at the southern end of them that was the farm and my mother's presence on it, and I did not do the thing that the scenario wanted me to do, which was to stop thinking and run.

Instead I sent Poppy ahead at the best pace the duplicate could sustain on the road's grade while my own body moved at maximum sustainable effort behind, and I ate a ration bar while walking and did not waste time on fear, which was not the absence of fear but the particular form of management that had developed over deployments and the trail and three weeks on a post-collapse road, and which required active maintenance rather than arriving naturally, and which I maintained now while the smoke column rose and the road climbed toward the ridge above the farm's county and the distance reduced.

The ridge came up with the last of the daylight, and below it the valley opened.