Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [123]
Silver above, black below. Never had she been devoured so fully by moonlight. The near world swarmed with sounds. Horseshoe iron scraped and hammered the tuff. Eerie deep whimpers surged from her unsteady horse. The music of a coyote, sharp bluesy bark. Her own breathing gnarled by the taste of sulfur and roses in her mouth.
Deadened by the porous terrain, Delfino’s voice up ahead called out, “You with me?”
“Right here,” Ariel answered, and a few lengths behind her came Marcos’s voice, “With you.” Audio guide ropes.
Her back ached, her shoulders were stiff, the insides of her thighs chafed against the saddle. She’d learned to ride as a girl in the upstate mountains along the Delaware—toy hills compared with the colossi here—but this was no bridle path, nor her mount the serene saddle horse she’d grown up with. Under her, instead, was a heavy ranch horse of impulsive spirit who kept her working hard with its sidelong tugs against the bridle and sudden shifts.
They faltered up short and long terraces, down pleats and hollows, stumbling across the valley of extinct firestone. Only a thousand years ago Little Black Peak erupted, flooding this plain, burying Indian fields with blistering magma that eventually cooled into this petrified lode. She wondered how many humans had ever traversed it. Not many. A few traders, settlers. Some lunatics, outlaws, maybe an escapee.
And what was she? Another lunatic escapee? Maybe so. An outlaw? By morning, yes, she’d be considered by some an outlaw.
All she could do was press forward, no turning back. She was reminded of Alice’s free fall down, down, down the rabbit hole. How Alice, plummeting through the pitch-black shaft, tried to glimpse where she was going but could see nothing in the impenetrable dark. Ariel in Wonderland.
A freight train, bound from El Paso up past Vaughn and beyond, moaned behind them on the flats. The clacking of many wheels on the rails played distinct rhythms, and she listened with a detachment that made her realize just how otherworldly her own fall had become. She shook her head. Closed then opened her eyes, closed them again. That was curious, or curioser. What she saw when she closed her eyes was much the same as when they were open. Centipedes of light, pale white phosphenes, flickered like shooting stars.
It was frightening to think of Kip out here alone. Although he’d taken one of Delfino’s guns, he neglected to bring along any ammunition. And what in the world had made him think Delfino Montoya would follow his advice to stay home? Kip was, as far as she could make out his pattern, drawn away from others toward an ultimate solitude, a final absence. No compelling argument could contradict this assessment. When all was said and done, despite Kip’s confessing yet promising letter in the ledger she carried in her pack, wasn’t Ariel just one more of the various others he’d left behind in the course of his continual wandering?
When the last reaches of the harsh malpais had given way to soft desert loam, they dismounted.
“That was the toughest patch,” Delfino said. “Smooth as peach fuzz from here on.”
“Why is it I don’t believe him?” Ariel asked Marcos.
“Because he’s lying.”
“Swear to god,” the man said with a laugh, pouring coffee from a thermos and handing out sandwiches in wax paper, which they unwrapped under a flashlight beam. “Was I lying when I told you I had a good idea about how to ditch them back—”
“Look at that,” Ariel interrupted.
“Man,” whispered Marcos.
Clusters of tiny topaz lights, not moving like those Hummer headlamps had been, but in stationary twinkling arrays, way down past the farthest edge of the lava field, on the plain between it and the black mountains. Installations, bunkers, maybe enclosed within electric fences or embraced by razor wire—hard to tell from this distance, even with the binoculars. Launching sites, it seemed, and domes housing cameras that recorded high-speed projectiles