William Dietrich - Getting back

"Something like that." His look became serious. "How about the supplies?"

"Enough to get us started. We'll be living off the land again."

"Can we do it?"

"We have to. Wasn't that the point from the beginning?"

He nodded and then frowned, gathering his thoughts for what he was about to say. "Amaya, before we make our move tonight I want you to think about your options. I admire your courage for being willing to stay in Australia but I want you to reconsider. I think Ethan would step aside if you wanted to leave on the rescue plane with Raven. Australia is pretty tough, and I don't know how this Rugard is going to react when we steal his means of escape. He might try to run us down in the desert."

"I know."

"It's just going to be hard. And dangerous."

She nodded. "I know. But I'm really not all that anxious to get back, Daniel, despite all the bad luck. Something is happening in my life."

"I worry about you with all these men."

She laughed. "What a ratio! I should be looking forward to all these men!"

"You know what I mean. These guys are convicts, most of them. The shrinks couldn't straighten them out. All I'm saying is… this may be your last chance."

"To escape, you mean, despite what Raven promises."

"Yes."

She nodded, more serious. "I know. But I've thought about it. I've been thinking about it ever since we woke up in Australia, not just since Raven told us about the transmitter. Sometimes I feel I belong, and sometimes it scares me to death. But to go back now would be to give up on myself. I'm feeling new things here, seeing new things, thinking new thoughts. Back home it's just… noise. So thank you, I'm staying."

"All right. I thought that's what you'd say." He looked at her with a tilt to his head. "You're what Raven pretended to be, I think."

"I think Raven pretended to be what she wants to be. She's just not there yet."

He shook his head. "I don't understand her."

"She doesn't understand herself."

He looked at her quizzically. "Are we going to stay friends?"

"I hope so."

"I mean after Raven's gone. You're a special woman, Amaya. A good woman."

"And you're a good man. But I've seen how you look at her. It's not the way you look at me."

His expression was guilty.

She smiled. "Not yet, anyway." And then his eyes followed her as she walked jauntily away.

If Rugard Sloan thought he was about to leave Australia, he gave no hint of it in his meandering harangue to the crowd of two hundred that gathered in the clearing that night. He introduced the latest arrivals, crowed about the community's achievements, and gave dire warnings about the consequences of insubordination or shirking. "The sons of bitches in the real world sent us here to rot!" he shouted in hoarse reminder to the assembly. "Every day we survive here, every day we prevail here, we're spitting in their faces!" They roared their approval at that, and he grinned viciously. "We spit at them! And someday we'll pay them back! But meantime I love you people, and what we've built here! So it's time to take a night off and… party!" The crowd whooped.

A makeshift band of drummers and wooden flutists started a pounding, hooting beat, and some of the assembly began to awkwardly dance in the sand. Fermented plant juice was passed out, forgivably awful because it was so fiery. A bonfire roared in the night. Daniel studied the cliff face above Rugard's cabin. It was dark, a slab against the stars.

The Warden worked the crowd and then came up to Raven. "Why isn't it working yet?" he growled quietly.

"I'm almost there."

He grasped her hand that held a cup and tipped it forcefully toward the sand. His grip was like a vise. "I don't want you drinking tonight. I want you up at the cabin later, with me, getting that transmitter to work. The compound will be hungover and half-conscious tomorrow. We can't take all of them, so it would be a good time to slip away without saying goodbye. Understand?"

"You're willing to leave these people you love?"

"I'm willing to leave my own mother to get out of this dung hole."

"I'll come to you later."

"You'd better. I'm watching you, bitch. Don't think about leaving without me."

"Relax, Warden." She smiled tightly, her wrist twisted. "We're working together, remember?"

He looked at her intently, his gray eyes like hollows. "Don't fuck with me." Then he dropped her arm and moved away.

Her group danced, to be seen. Except for Raven, they pretended to drink, to be seen. And then Daniel, Tucker, and Ethan slipped quietly away into the dark, one by one, even as the noise of the celebration grew. Sparks wafted up to dance amid the stars. Raven and Amaya drifted through the crowd, laughingly fending off advances and keeping an eye on the hill to Rugard's cabin.

Sometime after midnight the women met in the shadows, wary and tense. "I can't find Ico," Raven reported. "I haven't seen him for an hour."

"I don't think he's one for parties," Amaya said. "He told me he was getting more supplies before going to watch Rugard's door. You should have seen his pack when we started. He brought everything."

"I haven't seen the Warden, either."

"He's hanging on a new concubine. Drina looked furious."

Raven looked out into the dark, feeling her sore wrist. "Ico wants to get back very badly, doesn't he?"

"I think he's angry. He wants revenge."

"I hope he's not so angry he does something foolish. Did you move the supplies away from the boulder cluster, like I told you?"

"Yes, but I don't understand why."

"And try making what I suggested?"

"Yes. I don't know if it will work."

"Good. Hopefully none of it is necessary. I'm going to get the activator. We'll meet the men with the transmitter and slip away."

"Then why the precautions?"

"Because it may be more difficult to get out of Erehwon than I would like."

The monolith that formed the sheer cliff at the rear of Rugard's cabin was more a steep slope on its opposite side, its rock the texture of sandpaper. A watercourse that funneled periodic thundershowers down the face of the rock had made enough of a crease in the formation to give Daniel, Ethan, and Tucker a desperate chance of scaling it. They shouldered the ropes that Raven had liberated from a compound warehouse and then started their climb at a dead run, sprinting up the rock's lowest slope with a momentum that took them to a pool in a fold of rock thirty feet above the surrounding sand. They clung to its rim.

"You okay?" Daniel asked the others.

Tucker looked around at the bare stone. "No snakes so far."

"I don't think a flea could cling to this dildo," Ethan said, looking upward at the pale formation rising like a horn. "How the hell are we going to get up this, Daniel?"

"Friction."

The watercourse gave them just enough of a dent to brace themselves as they wedged upward, and the rough texture provided a tenuous grip. None dared look down. Daniel's sweat left a trail of dark droplets and Ethan breathed in short gasps, his muscles trembling from the tension. Tucker grunted with the effort to keep his bulk from sliding back downhill. There was enough slope to give them purchase, but it was like climbing a funnel, gravity trying to pull them toward a dark drain. The night was cool, the stars cold, and yet Daniel was hot from the exertion.

At least the view was extraordinary, he noticed when he glanced up. Other monoliths in the cluster of rocks gleamed gray in the dark like the domes of a religious sanctuary, their canyons and valleys lakes of shadow. The sky vaulted down and the desert horizon climbed up to tie into one vast sphere of ghostly luminescence, the rock he clung to at the center of this spectral universe. It was as if he was climbing the crest of a floating asteroid, he thought. His goal, the summit ahead, seemed to lead to space itself. The effect was dizzying.