Panic!

Thickly, painfully: “What ... what is it?”

“Cactus pulp. Open your mouth.”

Obediently she parted her lips and he pressed out the juice carefully, trying not to waste any. When the pulp yielded no more, he tossed it aside and helped her into a sitting position. She swallowed and coughed dryly. “More,” she said.

“Can you stand up? Can you walk?”

“I ... don’t know.”

He drew her to her feet and supported her to the decapitated barrel cactus; she moved gracelessly, jerkily, like a wooden-jointed marionette, but she remained upright. Lennox cooped free another double handful of pulp and squeezed the juice into her mouth—a third and a fourth. She was better now, he could see that; there was an alertness to her eyes once more, and she could stand without assistance, without swaying.

He retrieved the granite knife and returned it to his belt. Then he and Jana each took handfuls of the pulp back into the shade and sat down cross-legged in the sand and drank. When there was no more moisture, they used the pith to rub some of the caked dust and sweat from their faces.

At length Lennox said, “How do you feel?”

“Light-headed,” she answered.

“Can you go on?”

“Do we have any choice?”

“No.”

“Then I can go on.”

He touched her hand, fleetingly, with the tips of his fingers. “You’ve got a lot of courage,” he said softly.

“Sure.” She did not look at him. “Can we get juice from all the cactus like that one?”

“I think so.”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“It’s something.”

“How did you think of it?”

“One of those scraps of knowledge you hear somewhere and file away and forget about. When the time is right, you remember it again.”

“Do you know of some way to get food, too?”

“No—unless we could catch a squirrel or a jackrabbit or something. But we’d have to eat the meat raw if we did.”

Jana shuddered faintly.

“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Lennox said. “We’ll be out of here before too much longer. Maybe by nightfall.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“I believe it.”

“No,” Jana said, and she was looking at him now. “No, you don’t.”

“Jana ...”

“Do you know where we are? Do you have any idea at all where we are? Tell me the truth.”

He wanted to lie to her, to reassure her, but he could not seem to do it; it was as if honesty was a vital thing between them now, as if their kinship had become so strong that lying was completely unnecessary. “No,” he said, “I don’t know where we are. And I don’t think we’ll get out of here by nightfall. I don’t know if we’ll ever get out of here.”

She continued to look at him, and he saw a kind of confusion flickering across her features, as if a small, incomprehensible battle were being waged inside her. He wanted desperately to know what she was thinking in that moment; and as if a certain telepathic communion had been established between them, she put words to her thoughts, she said, “What’s your real name? It’s not Delaney, is it?”

And before he could consider consequences, before he could think anything at all, he answered, “No. No, it’s Lennox, Jack Lennox ...”

Seven

Seen through the substation’s long front window, the main street of Cuenca Seco was dusty and quiet; the elongated shadows cast by buildings on both sides of the thoroughfare met in the exact center, touching one another and then merging like lovers unable to wait for darkness, finding magic in the golden stillness of late afternoon. But Brackeen, standing just beyond the front counter, listening intently to a crackling voice that originated in the state capital, was not in the least interested in what lay outside the window; he had far more important things on his mind than the capriciousness of shadows.

He had made his decision.

He was in it now, he was in it all the way.

The crackling voice stopped talking, finally, and Brackeen muttered a thanks and dropped the phone back into its cradle. He turned to look at the tall, rangy figure of Cuenca Seco’s night deputy, Cal Demeter. “I’ll take any calls that come in myself—for a while anyway. I’ll be in my office.”