There was the threat again, but still she did not feel any malice behind it. Instead, Steven gave her a smile of great sweetness and wisdom, and then rose and walked away. She watched him go, watched him shrink into the distance and finally leave the road and disappear behind a building. Then she herself rose, turned and walked out into the desert.
She was gone for seven hours, long enough for people to notice her absence and approach Steven about it. She walked out into the scrub, down into the dry wash and out again before she turned up to the hills that lay a few miles off, and there she sat and thought and came to some uneasy decisions.
Ana rarely outstepped the bounds of her role during the course of her investigations. Her success depended on blending in, on being who she appeared to be and acting strictly as that person was expected to act, at all times, until she even thought as that person would. Her means of gathering information was more along the lines of passive receptivity than picking locks in the dead of night. Not only did illicit snooping scare her shitless, it was too dangerous to her investigation. From the very beginning, Glen positively forbade it (even as he taught her the rudimentary skills) not only because it was a threat both to her personally and to the continuation of the case, but because anything she discovered was apt to be contaminated or otherwise rendered useless as evidence: The FBI took its rules of evidence very seriously indeed.
However, this case didn't seem to be going like any of the others, and Ana did not know what to make of that. Anne Waverly kept intruding into her thought processes at the most inconvenient times, and this seemed to be one of them: Anne badly wanted to know what was behind Change.
During the course of that long day in the dry hills, Ana gradually shed her reluctance. She needed to know what Steven had up his sleeve; she had somehow to shortcut the lengthy initiation process involved in any esoteric teaching; she itched to see what he was hiding; but mostly she wanted to convince herself that Steven did actually believe that he had made gold, and was not using the pendant he wore as a subtle joke along the lines of the claim he had made to levitate up to the red rock viewing platform.
Also, she admitted to the flock of small gray birds that had settled around her, Steven's superiority grated on her. Ana liked to win as much as the next person, and during these investigations it pleased her, tickled some deep part of her nature, to know that she held the upper hand—even if her opponent never found out about it and the only person to appreciate her was Glen. Steven was a prig and it would be a pleasure to undermine him; that alone would be justification enough.
Most important, though, was the niggling suspicion that there was something funny about Change. She caught the thought and it made her laugh aloud, startling a small desert iguana that had settled down near her boot. Come on, Ana: what could possibly be funny about a community whose belief system was based on the manipulation of atomic structure to transmute material? Sure, medieval alchemists had believed in the possibility of creating gold from lead, but they had no means of testing, no analytical apparatus capable of distinguishing true gold from sulphurous mercury. To find seventeenth-century ideas coexisting with silicon chips, electron microscopes, and the robotic exploration of Mars said a great deal about man's deep need to believe that he had some control over his environment. Witchcraft, magic, and alchemy. No funnier than a belief in a personal God, was it?
Still, there was something she didn't understand yet about Change, some group dynamic she didn't have her finger on. Something told her that it was represented by Steven's necklace. Something also told her that she would not find out by simply waiting to be told.
She got to her feet and slapped the dust from her rear end. She wanted to know what was literally underlying the Change community, and tonight she would see if she could find out. Nothing dramatic, no blackened face and silken rappelling rope, just some judicious nosing about where she was not supposed to be. Ana Wakefield, after all, seemed to be the kind of pushy female who might well do that. If she was caught—well, she would tell them that she was nosy. Steven would believe that.
But she would try very hard not to be caught.
When she got back to the compound, she went straight to her room, where she drank about half a gallon of water and stood under the shower for twenty minutes, feeling like one of those desert plants that unfurl from a state of desiccated hibernation with the rains. It was stupid to go out in the desert without water. A few weeks later in the year the consequences might have been serious, but the day had been cool and overcast and she emerged from the shower only slightly sunburned and a little trembly.
She put on clean clothes and went over to the dining hall, making straight for the serving line, where she filled a plate, put two large glasses of fruit juice onto her tray, and got to work on it. She did not look up from her dinner until half of the food was inside her, when she paused for a breath and a long drink of juice. She glanced distractedly around the room over the rim of the glass, still more interested in nourishment than in her surroundings, but she put the empty glass down slowly, and when she resumed her fork, she did so with the air of a person who is not really tasting her food.
At first she thought that her conversation with Steven had made the rounds and her precipitous introduction to the community's secrets had set her apart. When she caught two of the members who wore silver chains around their necks staring at her, only to have them shift their eyes and pointedly resume their conversations, she felt certain of it.
However, the other twenty or so other early diners neither wore necklaces nor seemed to find her worthy of attention, yet they, too, seemed subdued, even troubled. She appeared to be the only person in the room with an appetite.
She finished her food and cleared her dishes, but instead of leaving them in the trays she took them on through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. Suellen and another woman were there already up to their elbows in soapsuds, and Amelia (who shot her the same speculative look that she had received from the two initiates outside) was spooning the last of the food into the serving trays. Ana put her plate among the stack on Suellen's right, and then reached for a single rubber glove to help out, pulling it onto her good hand with her teeth.
"Man," she said, "it's so quiet out there, I thought I was too late for supper. Did something happen?"
"You didn't hear?" Suellen asked.
"I was gone most of the day."
"Some of the children in England have been taken away." Her voice was both genuinely troubled and secretly cherishing being the bearer of bad news, which Ana had counted on.
"Taken away?" Ana exclaimed. "Do you mean they've been kidnapped?"
"By the government."
"What?"
"What Suellen means," said Amelia's disapproving English accent from behind them, "is that Social Services has got involved in a custody dispute between one of the members and her ex-husband and has temporarily removed the two children while the accusations of the father are being investigated. It has happened before." And, her voice clearly said, it would happen again.
"Still," said Ana, "it sounds unpleasant for the mother."
"Unpleasant, yes, but hardly the end of the world," Amelia said repressively. They had to wait until Amelia left the kitchen, but when she did, Suellen was happy to fill Ana in. The chief trouble, it appeared, came about because although the mother was British, the father who was trying to pry his children free from the hold of the "cult" was an American. The dual citizenship of the boy and girl confused matters no end and, being a disgruntled ex-member of Change himself, the father was more than willing to drag in every authority he could, from Social Services and the American embassy to the tabloids. Not, Ana agreed, a pretty picture, but she had to agree with Amelia that it would probably quiet down in a few days, particularly if the British authorities had the sense to play it low key.