It was Amaya who again broke the traumatized silence. "I think we should talk about Tucker," she said.
No one answered again.
"If we don't, we aren't going to make it."
Ethan turned, his arms around himself. "What about Tucker?"
"Our guilt."
"What guilt?"
"That we're alive and he's dead."
"We don't know for sure that he's dead. And it was his decision to be the rear guard."
"Not guilt," Raven interrupted. "Fear." She hadn't looked up and the voice seemed to come from deep inside her, as if issuing from a cave. "That we'll all end up like him."
"You mean dead," Ethan said.
She didn't reply.
"We know we shouldn't have let him stay behind alone," Amaya persisted. "We shouldn't…" She stopped, sighing hopelessly.
"Have built a bomb?" Daniel guessed.
Amaya looked away.
"If you hadn't we'd all be dead or worse," he said. "You didn't take Tucker's life, you saved ours. We were in a pretty desperate situation. We still are."
"Because we threw away our means of escape," Raven amended hollowly, still not looking up, her voice exhausted. "Used it like a rock, to hit someone."
The rebuke irritated him. "Your means of escape." He said it bitterly. "After you let me be lowered into a trap you knew was about to be sprung."
"That's not fair," Ethan told Daniel sullenly. "She didn't know what this little irate friend of yours would do until it was too late. We'd met as a group and agreed as a group that she and I would go. And it's no secret why you might prefer to leave the activator behind. You threw it all away because…" He stopped in frustration.
"Because we've never been a group and never truly agreed. Raven has been setting us up from the beginning and so have you, never telling us our true situation until the last minute and using us like game pieces to get you back home. You turned us against each other. You turned Ico. Tucker's almost certainly dead. You've made a goddamned mess of the whole situation and now you can just sit in the middle of it like we have to. We walk to the coast, or stay in Australia, together."
"That's unfair!" Ethan shouted. "You'd already be dead without us!"
"Daniel, I was trying to help you," Raven added with a groan. "Help you get back, where you could do some good."
"Why?" he challenged her.
"Why what?" Her reply was weary.
"Why get back? Why are you trying to achieve what United Corporations obviously doesn't encourage: our return? What if your bosses are right, Raven? What if I really belong here? What if you belong here?"
"Don't be absurd. Rugard belongs here. Not me. Not… us."
"Why are you even here, Raven?"
"I had a mission. I wanted to see."
"No you didn't."
"It's for the best, Daniel. It's always for the best: I believe in them. It's all I have to believe in. I was going soft and getting confused, and so by checking the pilot's fate and getting the electronics I'd prove myself and either be confirmed in my mission or abandon it. I'm being tested, just like you. The problem is, you've turned a test into torture. We're more than a thousand miles from where we need to be."
"Are we?"
Raven looked at him with exasperation. "Yes. It's a long walk to the beach."
"What if this is where we need to be?"
"What do you mean?" Amaya asked.
"What if we don't get back, ever? Could we make a life here? Find meaning here?"
"In that lunatic's prison?" Raven scoffed.
"No, not there. Not even here, exactly. But in Australia. There have to be more habitable places than this on the continent, if people truly lived here. What if we could find one of them and start over?"
"Haven't you had enough privation and savagery yet?"
"There have to be ruins we could use for salvage. New adventurers arriving with needed skills. Maybe we could turn the tables on United Corporations and stay by choice, creating a new colony as radical as America was, or the old Australia. It could be the utopia they pretended they were sending us to. We'd start over, but we wouldn't make the mistakes they made. Lives would have more meaning. We'd always be asking why, instead of how much."
"Stay in this wilderness?"
"Stay for what I came for. To truly live life."
She looked at him in wonder. "You've gone insane, haven't you? You didn't throw the activator away, you thrust it away. You've burned our ships so we can't turn back, like Cortes in Mexico. You haven't learned a thing by coming here."
"I've learned to keep asking why. You're the one who taught me that."
Raven looked hopelessly out across the desert. "I don't think I see what you seem to see out here."
"Now you'll have time to."
She took that as a challenge. "No I won't. And by the time we get to the coast you'll be begging to come back with me."
"Great," Ethan muttered, watching the two of them.
"I said he'll be begging, Ethan. I didn't say I'd take him." For the first time she allowed a slight smile. "He's unreliable."
"Unpredictable." He looked at her wryly. He was mad as hell, but he still wanted her. The talking had helped, somehow.
"Co-dependent," Amaya corrected.
It was true. As frustrated as they were with each other, they were forcibly linked and shared a simple goaclass="underline" to get to the coast. Everything else could be set aside, perhaps.
"Beg you to take me back?" Now Daniel grinned. "And give up this?" He gestured toward their bed of sand. "I don't think so."
They slept.
At the end of the third day they came to the road.
It was a ribbon of broken asphalt, vegetation erupting from its cracked surface like green pimples. Its course was broken entirely in places by washouts or drifting dunes. Such disrepair meant the highway was impassable to any vehicle short of a tractor, but it was still a startling piece of linear regularity, running north and south as far as they could see. The Australians had come this way! In roaring trailer trucks or whispering solar cars. There would be towns on such a road- empty and ghostly, yes, but still the ruins of communitiesand maybe water. There might be faded signs, rusted wrecks, fallen ropes of copper wire and fiber optic cable sheathed in rubber: a junkyard of delights. It was funny how fabulous and yet foreign such detritus sounded after weeks in the wilderness. The technological litter of a lost world! The fugitives paused a minute, dazed by the familiar paved firmness beneath their boots, a goanna lizard lazily sunning itself on the radiant macadam a hundred yards away. Here was a path to somewhere.
"We'd better not use it," Raven said.
"Why not?" Ethan asked. After stone and sand, the highway looked marvelously easy. And the idea of looking for useful scraps of technology appealed to him.
"Because if they come after the transmitter this road would be the most obvious place to look."
"We'd make better time on the road."
"They'd make better time too."
"Besides, it goes the wrong way," Amaya said. "North and south. If an edge to the Cone exists, it should be east. The country is supposed to get better that way."
"It's gotten worse," Ethan said.
"Maybe that's because we haven't really come that far," she countered. "A few hundred miles, at best. It takes a while to see a difference on foot."
Ethan looked morosely out at the desert. "I hope you're right."
"At least we can use the road like a river to throw off pursuit," said Daniel. "Water erases scents a bloodhound can follow and pavement erases footprints. Let's follow it a ways until we find a rocky area and then strike east. That should discourage anyone from following."
They did as he suggested, walking north two miles until they came to a stony ridge that led east. They left the road there, taking care not to make any mark. After three miles on the ridge they dropped into an adjacent gully and dug successfully for water, then pushed on. Within hours the road had faded in memory like a mirage.