[For once, Dixon doesn't jump in and say anything, doesn't spout off at the nearest person with the first half-thought idea he can scrounge up, doesn't pick a fight. He just listens and watches.
The reality of what they're going to have to do is starting to get much clearer, and the low trill of anxiety thrumming around in his veins is turning into a near panic. Fighting Wheelers was easy in comparison; it only needed a few minutes of commitment, only needed tapping into a split-second reserve of energy and impulse.
This is a quest that's going to take weeks, maybe months. Fifty miles in the foreseeable future, God only knows how far before they save the Green, if they even manage that. It's going to be hard, and Dixon's greatest real skill so far in life has been avoiding difficult things like a stream working around stone. And whenever hard things couldn't be avoided, whenever people died or other things forced themselves into his world, he's cracked and tailspun and gone completely off the rails.
Fifty miles on foot. He knows he can't keep up. Everyone else knows it too, but that's almost secondary to his own sense of failure and of feeling trapped, like the whole universe pulled a stair out from under him and left him scrambling and coming up empty-handed. He's not just going to let everyone down; he already has. It's an inevitability bearing down on him like a train and he's tied to the tracks.
He puts the mirror down on the ground, glass side down, and sits in the grass with his head in his hands, shaking.]
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The reality of what they're going to have to do is starting to get much clearer, and the low trill of anxiety thrumming around in his veins is turning into a near panic. Fighting Wheelers was easy in comparison; it only needed a few minutes of commitment, only needed tapping into a split-second reserve of energy and impulse.
This is a quest that's going to take weeks, maybe months. Fifty miles in the foreseeable future, God only knows how far before they save the Green, if they even manage that. It's going to be hard, and Dixon's greatest real skill so far in life has been avoiding difficult things like a stream working around stone. And whenever hard things couldn't be avoided, whenever people died or other things forced themselves into his world, he's cracked and tailspun and gone completely off the rails.
Fifty miles on foot. He knows he can't keep up. Everyone else knows it too, but that's almost secondary to his own sense of failure and of feeling trapped, like the whole universe pulled a stair out from under him and left him scrambling and coming up empty-handed. He's not just going to let everyone down; he already has. It's an inevitability bearing down on him like a train and he's tied to the tracks.
He puts the mirror down on the ground, glass side down, and sits in the grass with his head in his hands, shaking.]