Sara grew more concerned as Cute Guy and his wagon continued farther from Purity Town. The farther away Sara was from the restaurant when she recovered Cherise, the harder it would be to get back to safety. It was bad enough that she and Cherise would need to take a wide detour around the area where the residents, presumably, were even now being alerted to the presence of a runaway slavegirl disguised in clothes, who had physically attacked and injured two farmers. As long as they could stay away from that problem, it may not matter that Sara had no clothes to give Cherise -- Cherise could play the role of Sara's slave, though, again, the pretense would only work when they were seen from a distance.

Walking through the woods near the edge of the road, still holding her vest closed with her left hand, keeping the wagon in sight, Sara almost stumbled over a discarded wooden box, lying on its side with a pile of rotten-looking peaches spilled out of it. She supposed it had been there a long time, but decided it was more likely it had been pushed off a wagon recently, by a disgusted trader who had discovered the condition of the peaches belatedly and realized they were worthless to him.

The peaches reminded Sara that she was getting hungry again, though these particular peaches weren't an attractive solution to the problem.

She located a peach tree quickly, and as she ate she tried to not to think about the mountains looming ahead. Not really mountains, exactly -- the terminology seemed a little grandiose for a land feature that barely rose above the five hundred foot level, but the rocky, jagged, barren ridge that ran along the island's center line in the long direction didn't fit what "hills" normally looked like. It hadn't occurred to Sara, when she set out after Cute Guy, that he might be from the west side of the island, beyond the central mountain ridge, and might be going to take Cherise there. But he'd now traveled most of the distance to those mountains, and most of the east side's farms lay behind him. The odds were steadily growing that his destination was beyond the central ridge. If Cherise did end up beyond the ridge, it added still another layer of difficulty to getting her back home safely.

About ten minutes later, Sara seemed to have her answer. She groaned internally.

Why no vegetation grows along the central ridge of Purity Island is a question geologists haven't answered, handicapped as they are by not being allowed to go there. The common wisdom in the university's geology department, as to why they couldn't get permission to send a team to the island, holds that the Onderman Corporation, protecting their exclusive trade rights with the island, knew something about the island's soil that they didn't wish generally known. The corporation went so far as to make quiet checks of the background of people wishing to visit the island, and it was believed that the reason was that they didn't want trained geological experts poking around there. In any case, scientists had to be satisfied to make judgments of the island's makeup and history based on satellite views and educated guesswork.

The island itself had been formed, current theories ran, by an earthquake occurring at least several millennia ago -- it had to have been strong enough that it would have been recorded in written records or legends if it had occurred during human history -- which had pushed the forty-mile-long land mass above the surface of the ocean, with the high ridge along a line in the center, the rest of the land gently sloping downward from there on either side. The latest theory on the ridge held that the ridge had risen higher than the surrounding land surface because it was made of a different, perhaps lighter type of rock, one that perhaps, among its chemical constituents, contained something that discouraged plant growth. The earthquake theory was supported by the fact that the ridge was skirted, along both sides, by a flat horizontal shelf of similar barren rock, varying in width from thirty to a hundred feet, edged by a vertical dropoff of several feet in height down to the surrounding forest, the discontinuity obviously the result of separate land masses displaced along an earthquake fault line.

What Sara saw rising before her was a forbidding barrier that did fit the common image of "mountain range" very well, other than the fact of going up only hundreds of feet rather than thousands. Just ahead of her, the road she had been traveling ended where the flat shelf along the base of the mountains began, with a man-made earthen ramp allowing wagons and carts to roll up from the end of the road to the shelf. And Cute Guy's slavegirls had just pushed his wagon up that ramp and turned right along the shelf.

As she reached the end of the road herself, Sara saw that a short distance away along the shelf lay the beginning of an artificial trail that zigzagged from the foot of the ridge to the top. Sara had read about the trail in her studies of the island. It was no doubt the result of many decades of backbreaking labor by slavegirls, and was the only realistic means of crossing the mountains. The trail's first zig took it, at a walkable slope, to a point about halfway up, where there was a level place to rest before continuing on the zag to the summit. Near the top, Sara could see a wagon larger than Cute Guy's coming down, full of trade goods, pulled, or at the moment held back from rolling down the trail on its own at breakneck speed, by six slavegirls, attended by two doggirls circling the wagon like buzzing gnats, on the lookout for any slavegirl misbehavior. Sara moaned, silently, and shook her head as Cute Guy steered the wagon carrying Cherise to the foot of the trail and began the ascent.

Sara stood staring out from among the trees hiding her from view. What, she asked herself, do I do now?

As worried as she had already been about following the wagon over the ridge, she hadn't really had a clear enough picture of what her pursuit would entail.

The mountain ridge was, indeed, impossible to climb other than by walking the trail. The ridge itself was a jumble of huge, randomly placed rocks, with nothing obvious in the way of handholds or footholds that would make the ascent possible. The trail would be an easy climb, as intended, but it was impossibly exposed. Sara had no way to avoid coming unacceptably close to travelers navigating the trail in the opposite direction. If she were to start climbing it now, for example, she'd eventually run into that wagon coming down, and the men piloting it would easily see the female hiding behind her male disguise, even if her vest had been whole.

Sara gasped suddenly and sank to her knees, her face in her hands. She had just been overwhelmed by a sense of how very alone Cherise must feel. Cherise would know the wagon had begun climbing a steep slope, and would figure out what it was. She would know that she was being taken to the western side of the island. Though she must have felt sure for hours that she was beyond any chance of rescue, the mountains would serve as a symbolic exclamation point on Cherise's permanent separation from the life she had known, a gateway to a terrifying future.

Sara stood still, her jaw clenched, looking at the trail, trying to think of a way over. Cherise is on that wagon, she thought. I'm going to follow her. I don't know how yet, but it's going to be done, she told herself forcefully. In a few minutes, I'll know how. I just need to think.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and pushed away the tumult in her mind, reaching for calm.

On the blank slate of her mind, she saw an image of the discarded box of rotten peaches she had passed fifteen minutes earlier.

She turned and began weaving her way through the trees, back to the point where she had seen the box.

It worked perfectly. Holding the box, with its cargo of rotten peaches restored to give her something to carry in it, against her chest, Sara found that it both held her vest closed and also hid the bulge of her breasts, flattening them against her chest. She carried the box that way towards the end of the Purity Town road, staying just off the road in the woods.

Taking the next step was perhaps, she thought, the most dangerous thing she'd done so far. Since she'd dressed herself back in Purity Town, she hadn't intentionally exposed herself to potential close-up scrutiny. She would have to do that now: she needed to emerge, here at the end of the Purity Town road, onto the shelf along the foot of the mountains and walk towards the mountain trail out in the open, plainly visible to anyone watching. It would be a mistake to emerge suddenly from the woods opposite the foot of the trail. She knew it would look suspicious to the two groups currently on the trail, both Cute Guy's wagon and the larger wagon coming down. She had to approach the trail the way anyone else would -- openly.

Closing her eyes and breathing deeply for several seconds, she worked yet again to calm herself, and to steel herself. Cherise needs me, she told herself, and the longer I put this off, the farther away she is getting.

Sara exhaled one more deep breath in a sigh, walked up the dirt ramp and stepped out onto the shelf.

She concentrated on simply putting one foot ahead of the other. Almost entirely on autopilot, she angled towards the foot of the trail when she came to it, and began trudging upward.

About halfway up the first segment of the trail, Sara approached the wagon traveling downward -- this wagon and Cute Guy's wagon had been able to pass each other at the flat halfway point of the trail. Her heart, as it had so many times today, pounded out a wild, uncontrollable rhythm, her lungs bringing in rapid, shallow breaths that left her feeling faint. She reminded herself that if any of the men on the wagon saw through her disguise, she could run and outdistance them easily, but she knew the horrible, unacceptable downside to that -- that in blowing her cover, she might be throwing away her opportunity to make any use of the trail at all, leaving her with no way to keep up with Cute Guy and see where, on the entire western half of the island, he had ended up taking Cherise. Sara told herself firmly that if it came to that, she would give herself a crash course in rock climbing, and that once she had scaled the mountains, she would search all of the western half, for as long as required. She would recognize Cute Guy, Crushed Hat, and any of the slavegirls with them if she ran across any of them. Eventually she would find where Cherise was.

Sara bit her lip at the thought of what would happen to Cherise in the time required to find her, if Sara failed to get up the trail and over the mountains in time to keep up with Cute Guy. This better work, she thought helplessly.

The man driving the wagon was holding a whip, for use on any of the slavegirls who made the mistake of holding up the others. Sara dubbed him Pinched Face, for the features below his scraggly blond hair. As she made to march past him, Sara kept a neutral expression on her face, having no idea what the appropriate behavior would be.

Pinched Face broke into a sudden grin, gesturing at her with the whip. "Yor pa mad at yo, Sonny?"

Yes! thought Sara. That works! Pinched Face obviously assumed that this boy's father was punishing him, sending him off on a tedious errand with no slavegirl to help.

She couldn't possibly respond vocally, even if she'd had the ability. She knew her smooth face, to anyone assuming she was male, suggested adolescence, but her height would make anyone think that her voice should have changed by now. And even if she could somehow have sounded male, she knew she could never have imitated the accent. So she simply did her best to smile ruefully at Pinched Face, to support his own theory of what was going on.

Pinched Face broke into a laugh, and saluted her with the whip. "Wal, yo won't make that mistake again, har?"

Sara smiled again and shrugged. The two doggirls gave her a curious look, then went back to minding the slavegirls, ignoring Sara. She wasn't of concern to them, since she was wearing clothes.

And she was past! Everything had worked in her favor, including the tendency of all people to see things in a way that meets their expectations.

Breathing deeply in relief, Sara moved on, up the trail, watching Cute Guy approach the summit up ahead.

Sara met another wagon, smaller than the first, on the way down. She was still recovering from the view from the top of the ridge, which had given her a daunting sense of how large the island was, and how very far she was from the mainland, invisibly distant across miles and miles of ocean. She had taken a look behind her, towards Purity Town, where the only people were who could take Cherise off the island once Sara had rescued her. Sara still intended that she would be barbecued on the island... when was it? Ten days from now. That shouldn't be a problem. Time wouldn't really be an issue.

Sara cleared the future barbecue from her mind, along with all thoughts of the staff and the interns back at the restaurant. Getting Cherise back was the only important thing. That had to happen first, before anything else.

At the base of the trail, Cute Guy made a sharp turn, in the direction opposite the last leg of his descent down the trail. He was traveling, now, on the shelf along the foot of the mountains, a mirror image of the one on the east side.

Sara walked across the shelf towards the woods, and hopped down the three foot drop into the forest. No one, she decided, would be on this side of the island if it wasn't their home, and she would simply appear to be taking a shortcut to her own farm. She followed Cute Guy's wagon from behind the cover of the edge of the woods.

She didn't have to follow him for long. She saw, within a few minutes, what his destination had been, and blinked in surprise. She hadn't expected to see something like this. She had doubts that anyone on the mainland knew about it.