Just that half a glass gave me enough energy to keep on going, as if I had slept a full night. It seemed to allow me to use every bit of the power around me to keep us above the road and speeding toward the treasure.
At sunrise the cows stopped watching again, going back to gra2ing as if we didn’t matter at all. For a while I felt almost insulted, before I realized what I was thinking. How could a cow not wanting to watch me fly past ever insult me? Made no sense.
About halfway through the morning, still a long distance from Donner, we came on a small town. It couldn’t have been half the size of Evade, and not more than a dot on the map. The juice I had drunk in the middle of the night had long ago worn off and I was so tired that I was just about falling down.
As I had hoped when I saw the little town, right in the middle was a place that looked a lot like Audry’s. It was empty and we went in, taking what I was starting to think of as our normal table. I slouched in a chair in front of the window, glad to still be alive.
There was only one thing bad about the carrot juice. When you came down off of it, you came down hard. Right now, if we were going to get to Donner by the middle of the night, I needed another fix or two of the golden liquor.
This place didn’t just look like Audry’s; it could have been Audry’s. And when the guy with the white apron and dirty rag came out of the back room, I wasn’t surprised in the slightest.
“What can I get for you, strangers?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” I said before either Tanda or Aahz could speak, “could I trouble you for three glasses of your best?”