The closer we got to Hamilton the more tense Alex got. I didn’t need to see him to know, because I could feel it coming off him in waves, and I had to do my best to ignore it, because worrying about things that might not happen didn’t do either of us any good. Most of the time he didn’t let anything get to him, but we were walking into a town that had recently been hit by a group of mercenaries and we had no idea whether they were still there or not.
Hamilton was one of the more important towns, as it was close to Third City. There was a much higher chance the mercenaries would have stayed. When they hit Jacksonville it was very different, although Jacksonville was important to us for other reasons.
One of the things I’d become very good at was not thinking too much about the past. It was all written down in my journal, so I didn’t need to dwell, yet there are some things that never leave you. Jacksonville was one of them. We’d been traveling for three very long months when we smelt the smoke. Even though we weren’t certain we could guess what it meant. Neither of us really wanted to keep walking, yet we couldn’t bring ourselves to stop either. Before we left Fairview they’d warned us that mercenaries did, sometimes, attack the towns, but if we were to come across one of them the best thing we could do was hit the caches to keep us going until we reached the next place. Lucky for us it was only a three day journey.
Going into the deep wastes wasn’t going to be a three day journey. Finding Mare’s brother would take however long it took and I admit that it wasn’t something that I was particularly looking forward to. I knew that it was going to happen eventually - I’d been with Alex for too long not to understand how tempting the deep wastes would become, but I had hoped we’d be more prepared before we made the journey. Now all we could do was hit the caches in Hamilton and hope that we could find what we needed. In Jacksonville they had burnt everything to the ground, leaving bodies laying around all over the place, so I didn’t doubt they had done the same thing in Hamilton. Luckily, though, we never stayed in one place long enough to get attached to anyone.
Nothing made it easy. Mare and Jake were going to understand that soon enough. I wished they weren’t with us, I wished we hadn’t come across them, because going to Hamilton would be much simpler then. We wouldn’t be planning on going into the deep wastes. We’d be going on to the next city, the way we had in Jacksonville, and that made more sense. The more I thought about what we were doing the harder it became to accept that we were really stupid enough to do that, for two people that we didn’t know. Yet, if I was in the same position as them I would have be so grateful to have someone by my side…