Raven was crafty as well, or at least had a core of hard practicality. Ico looked over at her beauty, cold and remote when directed at him. He didn't like her, never had. But he admired her realism. He saw now what she'd been trying to protect: order, against anarchy. She'd always done what she had to do, just as his own alliance with Rugard had been necessary: both had acted in order to get back. They were no different, morally speaking. Somebody had to get back, if there was to be any hope for the others. Not everybody could get back. So it came down to the most logical people. Her, the United Corporations minion. He, the only one who had really seen things clearly. And Rugard… Rugard to cow the pilot into taking them where they needed to go.
It should have been this way from the very beginning.
Ico didn't feel pity for the ones being left behind. After spending so much enforced time with them, he wasn't at all sure United Corporations didn't have the right idea about Australia. There was an advantage to stability, after all, to having a society safe from disruption from cretins like these. An advantage to a pressure-relief valve. When you had unruly children, you sent them to a time-out corner. Was this continent any different? Even sending him here, he realized, had opened his eyes. There was a method to their madness.
But it rankled Ico that Raven didn't trust him. Like Dyson hadn't trusted him. When they stopped at a stream to water their horses he approached her.
"Raven, I didn't want to go to Rugard," he tried to justify. "I didn't want to leave you behind. I just wanted to go too. I needed to go, as the one best able to understand the political situation back home. If the rest of you hadn't run away from the compound we could have worked something out, I know it. I tried to reason with Tucker, but he wouldn't listen either. None of this violence was necessary."
"Yes it was," she replied.
He looked at her in frustration.
"Because I was going to leave you behind. I'm not your friend, Ico. You're just a means to an end."
"To get away."
"To save Daniel. Rugard would have killed him easily and he would have died for nothing."
"You did it to get away."
She didn't answer. Didn't want to. Because in the end her loyalty was stronger to United Corporations than to the man who'd fallen for her. Dyson was a fool. She wasn't that beautiful.
The disappearance of Raven and Rugard hit the warring groups hard. All that blood and then they'd been abandoned in Australia after all! Daniel had been prepared to die to end the fighting, but in the cool ruins of the morning's dawn he found he'd been condemned to a worse fate: abandonment by the woman he loved.
"She's trying to save you," Amaya reasoned. "That's the only way she would've gone with Rugard and Ico. You know that."
"I don't know it." His reply was hollow. He didn't know anything anymore. "That's what's so hard to accept. Why would she steal off like that without a word? I mean I felt I'd finally broken through to her. To leave me with no way to know…"
Amaya looked at him sadly. She didn't know why either. To slip away without a word or a message seemed a betrayal worse than taking the transmitter. Didn't Raven love at all? In the tumult of the last few months, Amaya's own life had changed profoundly. She'd found herself- a confidence in herself as a resourceful, valuable human being- and once she'd done that she'd found a man named Ethan she was beginning to love deeply. Would she leave him with no explanation? It would kill her if he left that way.
As for the transmitter, she was relieved it was finally gone, and with it all the trouble it had caused. She didn't need to get back. Not anymore.
Daniel's group came out of the office tower at mid-morning, their hands empty. Rugard's demoralized army met them the same way. With the transmitter gone, there was nothing to fight about. They gathered in the plaza.
"We're not getting back, are we?" one of the convicts asked plaintively.
"You've gotten back as far as you're going to go."
"Maybe we can catch them," Wrench said darkly. "Together."
"No," Daniel said. "They took horses, right? And I told you the truth. Only two can go on any rescue plane. Rugard misled you. You'd never have gotten out of Australia anyway."
The convict studied the office tower gloomily. "We've been fighting over nothing?"
"It always seems like something at the time. Now listen. We're marooned here, unless a miracle happens, but this is good country. My group is going to keep heading east until we reach the ocean. That's what we trekkers set out to do, and it's a kind of closure for us. It won't get us back anymore, but we'll have gotten… someplace."
They looked pained and confused.
"Or we've always been there," said Amaya. "From the very beginning."
He nodded. "So now you have to decide. I don't care what your past was. I don't care what we did to each other last night. You can join us, if you care to. If you behave. I expect we'll try to settle down somewhere and make a new community better than the ones we came from. We don't want anything from you, and we don't have anything for you. But if you're done fighting, so are we."
In the end about a dozen of Rugard's followers joined Daniel, as well as the frightened women of the Cohort of Joy. The others drifted off, many of them dazed by their sudden freedom. Possibility! It was the most frightening thing about the wilderness.
Wrench took him aside. "Look," he confessed, "I don't know much except fighting. Can I come with you anyway?"
Daniel looked him up and down. "To do what?"
"I'm strong. I can work."
Daniel sighed, debating. This man looked like an animal, and he remembered him from the dam. "If you come with us, Wrench, you have to be civilized. You have to follow the rules. Can you do that?"
"What rules?"
"I don't know. We'll have to make some." He winced at his own words.
The trio stopped at a grassy ridge about thirty miles east of Gleneden. In the distance was the glimmer of the sea.
Rugard pointed at Raven. "Can you make it work from here?"
"I hope."
"Then get to it. I'm late for my appointment with a soaking tub, two Asian whores, and a bottle of scotch."
"You're quite the man of refinement, Warden," Ico remarked.
"I'm quite the man of fucking appetites." Lord, he was tired of having to be polite to these two! Just a few more hours. If the bitch thought he'd forgotten her treachery then she had quite the education coming. She'd be getting off the hover with him, at a place of his choosing. And then he'd begin to teach her how to beg.
The weasel he'd simply destroy.
It was late afternoon by now, the light golden. She took the two pieces of the transmitter and united them swiftly this time, using the electronic supplies that Ico had safeguarded across the breadth of Australia. Then they sat regarding it for a moment, all their hopes on two linked boxes of battered metal. Would the batteries still work? Would anyone even listen?
She switched it on.
It pulsed as before, but this time its digital readout displayed their geographic coordinates. It could read the Global Positioning System satellites overhead. The electronic fog had lifted!
"It's penetrating the Cone," she reported. "It can send and receive. If I had the right equipment I could phone my parents. I could receive some news. We're back, in a way."
Rugard looked sourly out from the ridge to the hills along the coast. In the distance were the ruins of another town, glimmering and decayed. "Not yet. We're still in a fucking graveyard."