“Hit it between the eyes!” Chapel shouted back.
Nadia twisted around until she was sitting on the windowsill. She held the pistol by its barrel and brought its grip down hard on top of the monitor’s head.
It was enough to make the monitor blink its nictitating membranes, but nothing more. Its grip didn’t loosen at all.
Chapel cursed and shouted at the monitor, but that didn’t help either. The truck crested another dune at speed and nearly threw him, his legs flying out wide from the body of the cab. One foot got tangled with the monitor’s front leg.
Maybe, he thought — just maybe—
Chapel lifted his feet and planted his boots on the monitor’s shoulders. The reptile thrashed but there was nowhere for it to go to get away from him. Chapel braced himself as best he could and then pushed down with his feet, shoving the monitor’s body away from him, using every bit of strength he had.
The alpha responded by tightening its grip still further. Its teeth tore deep into the silicone flesh of Chapel’s artificial arm and then, with a sickening slowness, tore right through it. The flesh came away in one big chunk, no longer attached to the arm at all.
For a moment the monitor seemed to float in midair, its jaw already chewing at the chunk of prosthetic arm, but then it disappeared as it fell away from the truck, rolling over and over along the sand. Chapel just had time to see it spit out a mouthful of silicone before it fell away behind them.
He looked down at his artificial arm. The silicone sleeve was just a ragged mess, still brown at the edges with venom. He tried flexing the arm and it worked — apparently the reptile hadn’t damaged any of the actuators under the skin.
Using both hands, he climbed up and through the window of the truck, landing in Nadia’s lap.
“Are they after us still?” Bogdan asked. He was hunched over the steering wheel, his eyes wide and staring.
“Just drive,” Chapel told him.
In the backseat, Chapel poured water over the torn flesh of his arm to try to wash away the last of the venom.
“One of those little sticky bandages you carry isn’t going to be enough,” Nadia said, prodding the torn skin with a pen. The motors and pistons underneath whined a little as his arm moved, even though he was trying to hold it still. “This saved your life, did it not?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Chapel reached one-handed for the truck’s bulky medical kit and flipped its catch. Supplies spilled out onto the seat beside him — suture kits, antihistamine tablets, a thin plastic splint. He picked up a roll of gauze and brought it toward his mouth to unspool it.
“Let me,” Nadia said. She spun out a long length of fabric and started wrapping it tightly around Chapel’s arm. The damage was all confined to the forearm and the wrist and it didn’t take long for her to wrap it all up.
He looked into the kit and found a small pair of scissors secured to the lid of the case with a nylon loop. He handed them over and she cut the gauze, then tucked the end neatly inside the wrapping and used white tape to keep it in place. She looked up at him with questioning eyes. “In America, do mothers kiss their children’s scrapes to make them better?”
“Better not,” he told her. “There might still be some venom on there.”
She shook her head and laughed. “You are infuriating, Mr. Chapel. But I will let you run hot and cold a while longer before I simply attack you out of unbearable desire. Otherwise you might think me too aggressive. I am told this is unattractive to American men.”
He knew she was fishing for a compliment, so he said nothing. There was a perverse kind of pleasure to torturing her like that, as if he could get back at Julia for all the pain she’d caused him by being cruel to Nadia. Even as he realized that he felt like a jerk, but not enough to give in to her charms.
She shrugged dramatically and then climbed back into the front passenger seat. He didn’t seem to have broken the buoyant mood that had come over her in the last few hours. Nothing could — they were getting close to Perimeter, and she could barely sit still. Ignoring him, she chattered amiably with Bogdan in Romanian. Chapel couldn’t follow the language so he didn’t bother to try.
Instead he lay back in the seat, trying to ignore the way Bogdan’s inexpert driving tossed him up and down every time they passed over a dune. Even as the night darkened, he could see the landscape beyond the windows was changing, getting rougher. Instead of an unbroken sea of sand, now when he looked outside what he often saw was rocks, big rocks — more than boulders. Small hills, then the start of big ones.
He realized with some surprise they were coming to the edge of the desert.
How long had it been since they’d left Uzbekistan? It felt like no time at all — or forever, he couldn’t decide. Maybe it was more like they’d left Earth altogether, that they’d been driving across the face of the moon. What he’d seen of Kazakhstan had been just as desolate, as uninhabited. The Kyzyl Kum seemed to belong more to the desert monitors than to people.
For Chapel, who had grown up in the suburban sprawl of Florida where he’d never been more than a mile from the nearest town, it was unimaginable that you could have all this land, this huge expanse, and not fill it up with strip malls and housing developments. Sure, it was a desert, ridiculously hot during the day and freezing cold at night — but that hadn’t stopped western expansion back in the States. Then again, the Soviet Union had been a lot bigger than America — a whole empire, with room enough for tracts of land that just went unused, like this place, like Nadia’s Siberia.
In the distance, ahead of them, part of the night sky was obscured. Above it spread a wealth of stars, a glittering abundance of the kind you never saw in America, a night sky paved with light. Below the dividing line was only darkness. It took Chapel a while to realize those were mountains ahead of them, blocking out the sky.
Nadia glanced back over her seat to look at him. “There,” she said, pointing at the shadow. “That is where we are going. That is where we find Perimeter.”
Even in the dark cab of the truck, her eyes shone.
“It will not be much longer,” she said. “The northern shore of the Aral Sea is over there,” she said, pointing west. “The coordinates I have for Perimeter suggest it is some fifty kilometers inland from there.”
Chapel moved to look between the seats and out the windshield. Bogdan’s driving was erratic, and he couldn’t seem to keep a steady speed, but it wasn’t like he was going to crash into anything — even as the landscape grew rockier and less sandy, there was still plenty of room to maneuver. The mountains ahead looked just as far away as they ever had, still off in some impossible distance.
“How will we know when we arrive?” he asked. “I doubt there’s going to be a big neon sign announcing the location.”
“Hardly,” Nadia said. “I do not actually know if we will see anything. The installation will be all underground, dug out of bedrock deep enough that it can survive a direct hit from an atomic weapon. There will be some way to enter, a cover as if for a manhole or the like, perhaps. Even that will be camouflaged, though. Perimeter was designed never to be found by the wrong people.”
Chapel nodded. “And how accurate are your map references? Are we going to have to hunt for this entrance when we get there?”
“They are accurate to one-tenth of one second of a degree,” Nadia claimed. “Do not worry. I did not come so far just to miss it now.”
As they got closer, the low hills gave way to looming pinnacles of rock, towers of limestone carved into incredible shapes by ancient oceans. They rose up ahead and blocked out the stars, and Chapel couldn’t help but see them as silent guardians, soldiers standing watch to make sure no one ever discovered the secret buried here.