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By Root 1619 0

made steady progress. They rode in loose single file, with Ariel following Delfino, and Marcos bringing up the rear with a ginger-colored packhorse on hemp braids trotting behind. They rode at an unhurried pace, so as not to attract attention should anyone happen to notice them. The highway had fallen behind, but there was always a chance that they’d encounter another rider or some kid four-wheeling the outward flats for a lark. Delfino still contemplated ditching his young companions. If he could make a break and lose them, he figured they’d be forced to retrace their tracks back to the main road. But the basin was all long vistas through these first miles until they reached the lava field, thus the likelihood of his being able to escape them was small. So he kept his eye on the path ahead, more or less accepting their presence here. Besides, he had to admit, part of him welcomed the company. Would have been better if it’d been Kip, but it was what it was.

He had seen all this grandeur before. Had seen the primordial sundown, the mountain ranges on either side of the hardpowder basin. Seen the birds jolting to their nests in a cactus trunk or some hidden place on the ground. He’d seen the walking rainstorm and afterglow at their backs to the east, where the sun would rise tomorrow, as always hot and rounding. And yes, he’d seen the flashing telemetry hardware on the southern flats. He knew there was a range center down there, west of Rim Rock. If that idiot Calder hadn’t absconded with his map, he could have pinpointed the location. As it was, he had to rely on memory. What the hell—it wasn’t like they allow the Bureau of Land Management to publish more than the most obvious unclassified sites in geological survey maps of the area, anyway. Gravel pits, radio towers. As if that were all there was out here. Once they crossed bearing R8E at T8S, from public to military reservation lands, the map Kip had taken probably was outdated, aside from topo contours and distances above sea level.

Between the three riders and the mountains lay the malpais, a badlands of ropy, blistered black lavastone all but impossible to cross, and in the nearer reaches were nasty clutters of mesquite and creosote and yucca whose pods chattered with dried seeds hard as teeth when skittish winds passed through. The cream light shone now like burned butter, collecting in lakes on the desert floor, and as it did, their faces were bathed in deeper dusk. Beyond this malpais, in a stone alley at the foot of those mountains, was the abandoned ranch at Dripping Spring, which they meant to reach before tomorrow’s sun.

Kip was on his way in, too, having ditched Delf’s truck, and as he walked he hoped that Delfino understood what he himself already fathomed. That Dripping Spring was, at this late stage of the so-called game, nothing more or less than an idea, a point of controversy. Not a human habitat, and certainly not home. Once upon a time, but no more. Maybe Delfino would realize there was no ranch up ahead, finally, to take back. Just petrifying timber, tumbled stone, adumbrations of fences. Whether Kip had overstepped his bounds by hiding from Delfino some necessities for the journey, or whether it’d been a childish act or even a selfish one, barely mattered now. He had enough juice in him to make his benighted way in, hell if he didn’t. He knew this was his berserk terminus, just as he knew it was the flagrant fountainhead of the nuclear highway. Why not finish things up in this godforsaken Eden, tasting the desert air like the methodical chameleon does on its noonday rock before it nods off into the nil?

“Wherth Ariah?”

Mornings were easier than afternoons, when fatigue toyed with her tongue and robbed her of sibilants and other sounds. Yet no matter what time of day, it was baffling which words mutinied and which fell amiably into place. Frustrating, too, to be forced to relearn what so recently was easy as breathing. Try again, try again.

“Where ith Ariel.”

Better. Once more, with soul.

“Ariel. Where is she?”

Bonnie Jean, as ever these