Page 96 of South of Nowhere

Lavelle had loved what one of her professors had told the class: Ernest Hemingway said there were no great writers, only great rewriters.

While she didn’t care much for the American novelist, she knew that was true, though she also guessed that some people didn’t have to revise quite as much as others.

The way she had to.

The wind bathing skin?

How can wind bathe anything?

And:Gripping a sword hilt?

No.

You know better. The hilt is the handle plus the guard plus any ornamentation.

You grip thehandle.

And you have therainspeaking.

If you get it wrong, you’re going to hear about it!

Then her thoughts slipped from her fantasy world to return to the present.

Arana Braveblade could, with the right spells, and the right tweaking of her plot, resurrect the Blue Strayer.

But could she save Big Blue, her beloved Camaro?

She guessed that was impossible, with damage that bad, lying in the bottom of a gulley filled with torrenting water.

She guessed her set of wheels was—to use a very un-Braveblade word—toast.

A burial by river.

Then she perked up. Hm, interesting idea. Like the Viking’s burial by sea. She jotted the words in herIdeanotebook. Someone would be honored in a burial by river. Arana would lead the group in a heartfold she herself would write.

She now lifted her coldtorch—a Braveblade term, which translated here and now into a reading halogen attached to a USB battery pack—and shone it around her new home. It was a dingy cave that had once been the entrance to the shaft of the Good Luck and Fortune Mine, which closed in 1875. By then, according to the Olechu County website, it had been shut down after producing “untold” tons of silver and a slight bit of gold, though the big gold veins were farther south. The Good Luck was one of a dozen mines in and around Copper Peak. There had been some talk of turning them into tourist attractions but in reality this had no appeal whatsoever. It was nothing more than a thirty-by-thirty-foot damp chamber with a black and spooky shaft disappearing down into the heart of the earth. The shaft was grated off with chain-link.

Beside Fiona were two gym bags and a backpack, containing dry clothing and quick-mart provisions of the sort that Arana Braveblade, who lived in in the year 2243A.E.in EverWorld, could not have imagined: jerky, cheese sticks, salt-and-vinegar potato chips, dried salami, saltines, Coke, Sprite.

Oh, and Hershey bars.

Some beer too. Which Arana did partake in, though it was forbidden by Thamann Hotaks for women to drink alcohol (even though he plied female visitors to his wing of the castle with tea he had secretly laced with Willing Nectar).

She had some first aid equipment too and she now sprayed some more Dermoplast on the cut on her forearm. The bleeding had stopped but the wound was open enough so that there was a brief sear of pain before the anesthetic part of the spray took hold.

She gasped briefly.

Feeling a chill, she opened one of the gym bags and pulled on another sweatshirt. UCLA.

This was not a school that meant anything to her—the institution itself, the team. But at the thought that she might just jump on an airplane and go visit the place—to attend a lecture or enroll in a course—she began to cry.

Possibility…

And then she froze.

A sound.

Which might be the grit of a footfall. She quickly extinguished the reading lamp, plunging the entire front of the mine into near darkness.

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