Otherwise, it was hard to think. The Warden's ears were ringing and his head ached. There was a fuzziness to his vision he suspected would take hours to go away. And in front of him was a wall of unstable rock, sealing the fugitives' exit route. Men could climb over it or dig through it, he knew, but none had the stomach for it at the moment. Least of all him. The bastards were gone, escaped into the desert, and to follow them he'd have to organize a party with proper food and water to hunt them down. It was maddening.
Despite this fiasco, Rugard knew the others would look to him for answers. People were dung, expendable and cheap, and they'd follow a strong man as far as he'd lead them. The Warden felt not a thing for the men who had just been blown to bits by the explosion. They were fools to be in the front rank.
He limped back down the canyon past his groaning, stunned men. Explosives! How? Had that bitch Raven brought them with her? There was something odd about her, some lack of ordinary fear and confusion. He hadn't liked her arrogance from the start. She'd scorned his advances, was condescending to his authority, and was probably laughing at him right now. Clearly she knew too much. And she'd go on laughing until he hunted her down and had her in a different way. And then turned her whole being into a bloody locus of pain.
"We can't let them go."
Rugard turned. It was the weasel. He held men like that in contempt, but they were necessary. This little pissant might know where the others were going.
"We've got to get it back, so we can get back," Ico mumbled, as dazed by the explosion as the others. "The activator is useless until we get the transmitter to hook it to."
"Obviously," Rugard growled. "And you're going to help get it for me. You're going to help me hunt them down in the desert by telling me which way they'll go. They can't get back either, not without us. Right?"
Ico winced. "Not exactly." He looked down in wonder at his bloody arm. Welcome to real life, he thought drolly. It ached like hell. "I know where they're going, I think."
"Where?"
"The coast. Raven thinks the transmitter alone will work there."
"What!"
"If we don't catch them before they reach it, she'll be gone." Ico looked around morosely. He'd thought he'd be leaving these cretins in hours, or days. Now he might be stuck with them for weeks or months.
"We'll catch them then." They'd follow the thieves to wherever they might run, Rugard thought. Use them to assuage his own humiliation. Get the transmitter to unite with its activator. And then take proper vengeance on the whole damnable world.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The fugitives strode toward the rising sun with a grim, anxious pace, always looking backward: for a miraculous reappearance of Tucker, for pursuit, for a last glimpse of human settlement and community. They saw none of these. Just burnished domes of rock beginning to slip down the horizon as they hurried, and ahead shrub-shrouded desert and the undulating swell of red sand dunes.
There was no conversation. Their narrow escape, continued peril, and Daniel's loss of the activator had shocked them all into a tense silence. Raven's fury and fear at being trapped in Australia had left her speechless. Ethan looked at the pair with an accusatory stare, as if their tangled emotions had doomed him as well as themselves. Amaya was morose at the loss of Tucker and Ico and the continued presence of Raven. Their little family had become dysfunctional.
"We need to talk," Amaya ventured once.
There was no answer.
The fugitives would be easy enough to track if pursued immediately, Daniel knew. Their feet left a scuffed trail in the sand like the frozen wake of a passing boat. The question was whether Rugard would bother to follow and, if he did, how quickly he could organize a posse. Given time, wind or rain would eventually erase their footsteps, and then surely the fugitives could elude pursuit in the immensity of the continent. They would pick their way slowly east to the sea, signal for a rescue craft… and after that? The possibility was so impossibly distant that it wasn't worth thinking about.
It was more important, Daniel knew, to think about the here and now. To stop focusing on the world of United Corporations and start focusing on Australia. It was this obsession about getting back that was causing so much trouble.
By weary agreement they didn't take a midday break but pushed on, the sand giving way to hardpan and dry, dead-looking vegetation. The land was ugly but easier to walk across. The day grew hot but not as oppressive as the punishing furnace of their first arrival. The desert winter was slowly approaching. Daniel also noticed the group's steady endurance after a sleepless night. His own body had acquired a wiry stamina far different from the calculated strengths of his health club regimen. He could push on with a dogged tirelessness that allowed him to keep going even when reason called for collapse and sleep.
They were close enough to Erehwon that Raven and Ethan knew of a dependable seep. It was a risk making for it because any pursuers could guess at their decision, but it was a greater risk to push into the unknown without as much water as possible. They threw themselves down at the puddle at mid-afternoon to drink to satiation, and then slowly, impatient at the delay, topped off every container they had.
"I still don't see him," Amaya said quietly, looking back the way they had come.
"No," Daniel said. "We won't."
And then they pushed on.
The sun set behind their backs, the monoliths black stubs in the distance now, and they marched on into dusk. There was no question of stopping. They walked as the moon came up, the desert lit like an old black-and-white movie, and held their direction by keeping the Southern Cross on their right hand. It was so quiet they could hear the squeak of sand under their feet. At midnight they came to the bank of a dry wash where ghost gums overhung the sandy channel like adults leaning over a cradle.
And there they collapsed and slept, fallen carelessly to the ground like leaves. The four of them slept in a cluster, huddling instinctively for warmth and reassurance, and were unconscious from exhaustion before anyone had a chance to comment on their geometry.
Ethan roused them shortly before dawn. They wordlessly wolfed down a few mouthfuls of cold food, drank, and pushed on. They didn't dare light a fire yet. A rhythm came into their flight. They walked hard for about an hour, rested five minutes, and then pushed hard again. They began to cross a series of flat pans of featureless clay. "Dry lakes," Raven guessed. "They probably flood in the rains." White salt glittered on the cracked mud.
At midday they crawled wordlessly into the shade of a cluster of ironwood trees to nap restlessly for two hours. Then they hiked on, walking again until midnight, their conversation mostly monosyllabic. The rocks of Erehwon had slipped permanently below the horizon. They saw no one, heard nothing. They were alone again, four adventurers in a desert wilderness, with no idea where they were or precisely where they were going, except east. It didn't matter. Walking was a substitute for talk.
When they stopped that night their weariness was so complete that it kept them from immediately falling asleep. They were brittle with tension. Ethan refused to sit after he dropped his pack and simply looked out over the dark desert, his shoulders hunched, his face gloomy, his body shivering slightly from the long hours of exertion. Raven sat slumped forward and pressed into the pack on her lap, her hair falling around her face like a cowl. Daniel's muscles were so tired that he watched his thighs tremble, tendons jumping under his skin like snakes.