The road home felt different from any journey Aria had taken before. It was not the nervous anticipation of their first travels, nor the focused purpose of the trip to the Assembly. This was something else entirely. A sense of carrying weight that was both burden and privilege.
They traveled more slowly than on the outward journey. Partly because Kaelan's journals had multiplied significantly, the documentation from the Assembly adding substantial weight to their packs. But mostly because word had spread along the trade routes, and people kept seeking them out.
On their third day, they encountered a small family camping beside the road. A woman perhaps in her thirties, a man slightly older, and a teenage girl who sat apart from her parents with the particular isolation Aria had come to recognize. An extraction victim.
