Chapter 172: She Was Keeping the Useless Little Thing

Dove asked Nolan to mark the narrow turns before agreeing to the campground route. A line on a map was useful. A line that came with the words the road probably still exists was how she ended up yelling beside a hole again.

He showed her the section his men had checked that week and the stretch they had not driven since the rain. Their pickup could turn around near the campground office if the lower road looked wrong. The freight truck could not make the tight corner beside the laundry shed, which was why its crew still needed the road team.

"We’ll check as we go," Dove said. "I’m not becoming attached to a shortcut just because it has shopping opportunities."

Edrik looked at the circles she had drawn around the buildings. Thorne wisely took another bite of breakfast instead of commenting.

Before leaving, Dove washed with her retrieved pond water, dressed for the heat, and checked their drinking supply separately from the water she had used on herself. Good food had not made clean drinking water something they could waste. They packed full meals and enough for a delay, then confirmed that the hotel trade and the recovered carriers were recorded with the right owners.

Dove chose household goods and reopened beside the dining-room wall. The cabinet offered concentrated laundry soap, four sales for fifty-two normal coins. Residents bought the bottles while her husbands loaded. The rest sold too. Dove packed the storefront and separately stored the goods customers had paid with.

"See?" she told Sprout. "People enjoy feeling clean. We should keep remembering that instead of offering me another romantic suggestion when I’m trying to count socks."

"The previous sock stock sold successfully."

"You are extremely good at answering the part I wasn’t arguing about."

She thanked the cook, said goodbye to Nolan, and climbed into the passenger seat. Their own cooling unit sat secured in the pickup bed beside the smaller cart. The two recovered carriers waited at the hotel with the freight crew. The other two were still on the stranded truck, for the road team to recover. They were not secretly becoming part of her household because the road had interrupted their trip.

The service route passed the hotel laundry shed before entering the campground. Thorne checked the shed’s entrance with Nolan’s permission while Edrik parked clear of the narrow road. Dove waited until they knew the floor was sound, then searched the dry shelves instead of wandering toward the damaged rear wall.

They found laundry baskets, a folding rack, and wrapped cleaning samples still above the water marks. The larger pieces traveled on the cart to the truck. Dove stored smaller finds by touch, taking breaks instead of forcing the heaviest objects through her space.

Sprout confirmed the third recovered item while Dove was already checking the next shelf. She asked Thorne to take down the dry box above it; they still had room in the truck.

At the campground office, they checked the ground before taking the turn. The building stood on a raised pad with an open porch, a little service window, and a door hanging loose beside it. Empty campsites spread between trees behind it. Picnic tables leaned at odd angles where thawing ground had shifted under their legs.

Dove could picture the place before the freeze: someone paying for a site, somebody complaining about bugs, a family deciding whether to swim before dinner. Nothing grand enough to remember as an important day. That was what caught her.

Inside, she found sealed insect repellent and intact basic supplies in a closed cabinet. Thorne carried a sound rack toward the truck while Edrik checked a back room from its doorway. Dove stayed beside the counter, looking at a faded photograph pinned above an old campground map.

People sat in folding chairs around a grill. A woman held a paper plate and laughed at someone outside the picture. They had come here expecting to go home afterward. They had probably worried about traffic, laundry, and forgetting something in the cooler.

Dove wanted to complain about those things again. Not instead of her husbands, not because the life she had built meant nothing, but because she missed the kind of safety that let a person be bored by it.

Thorne came back quietly and stood beside her. He looked at the photograph, then at her face, and did not try to make the feeling smaller.

"I used to think camping sounded uncomfortable," she said. "Turns out I had a very generous idea of uncomfortable."

He touched her hand. She let him hold it until she could look away without feeling as though she had left something behind.

A rack beside the register held old postcards. She chose one showing the lake in summer, bright and ordinary, and almost put it back because it was useless.

Edrik caught the edge before it slid behind the others. "You picked it for a reason."

"I can’t eat it, sell it, or make it charge the fan."

"Then it can have a day off."

She laughed softly and took it from him. He handled the flimsy little card more carefully than she had seen him handle a weapon, and the contrast made her chest ache in a way she did not want to joke away.

They ate lunch under the trees before continuing. Proper sandwiches, fruit, and the last of the sour candy shared only after Dove complained about the size of her husbands’ handfuls. Sprout waited while she enjoyed it. The road ahead would still need checking when they finished.

The lower section proved passable after Edrik and Thorne inspected it on foot. They drove slowly to the main road, then returned through Base B’s western checkpoint with their receipt and load available for inspection.

Their second cart waited in the yard. Their rented shop was where they had left it, ordinary and precious enough that Dove stood in the doorway for a moment before carrying anything inside.

She put the postcard above the bed and the wooden fox beside it. Only then did she open Sprout’s new offer.

The expanded merchant range promised larger useful stock at a price of 850 normal coins and 160 Favor. Her balances stood at 1,702 and 142.

Dove stared at the eighteen-coin gap. She had finally found the shelf she wanted, and Sprout had chosen the exact moment when she could almost afford it.