There was a town called Walton in this direction, she knew. She was the twelfth of Gideon’s twelve women-servants, so she didn’t have the privilege of being driven to the store to do the food shopping, but she’d asked Marigold, Azalea and Posy about their trips out of the compound and she knew that the town was about forty-five minutes away by car, pretty much a straight shot down the road. She figured that she could walk it – keeping to the trees and with the slight obstacles of snow and some hilly mountain terrain – in three hours at most.
Walton had a bus station that ran buses all through the night and this was the part that gave her the most pause and worry: once her absence was discovered, Gideon and his Guardians would head straight to town, straight to the bus station, straight t
