Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 49 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

“When I’ve killed you,” E’Var called evenly, “I’m going to take your ichuta’a. I’m going to fuck her until she bleeds out before I crush her skull and turn her into Vahst. She’ll probably die screaming your name.”

E’Var moved, flashing black from one booth to another, and Tagen blasted futilely at his shadow. Hot plasma took out a half-circle of his new hiding place, but there was no cry of pain to indicate a hit. Moreover, Tagen realized that the prisoner’s flight had brought him closer, not further away. He was not fleeing, but angling for…what? A better line of attack? Tagen’s gun remained aimed and ready; his empty hand found Daria’s side and moved her toward the cover of some empty booths.

“I hear something, don’t I?” E’Var asked from his new, nearer cover.

Tagen cocked his head. He heard only human chatter and it took a second or two to decipher.

“—there’s like, dozens of dead people!” “—at the Fair!” “Some crazy guy—” “Terrorist!”

Tagen frowned.

“I hope you have friends in Earth’s police force,” E’Var called. “It isn’t me they’ll be coming for.”

Tagen glanced behind him and saw several humans speaking into transmitters. A scraping sound brought his gaze around fast, in time to see E’Var dragging his purple-haired female behind the booth by her ankle. Tagen aimed without thinking, but had no shot for E’Var and hesitated to kill the human. The unconscious female was swept out of sight and Tagen heard E’Var growling at her in tones anyone might mistake for concern.

“You have but one chance, prisoner,” Tagen warned, and steeled himself resolutely. “I am prepared to kill your hostage.”

Anger entered E’Var’s voice for the first time. “The fuck you say!”

There was a flat snapping sound and Daria suddenly grunted and fell into a drop-sitting position. She looked up at him, her eyes round with surprise, and then down at her lap, where blood bloomed over her thigh.

“Shit,” E’Var snarled, and a human’s gun skittered away from the booth where he hid. “Do you hear that?”

Sirens.

“You can still come and get me,” E’Var invited. “I’m not even armed any more. Easy pickings, as the humans say. Leave your ichuta’a and take me. She’ll be arrested, of course. We’re surrounded by humans who saw her stand by you after you dropped these people. She’ll be imprisoned before the day is out. They kill prisoners here.”

“I’ll be okay,” Daria said. Both her hands were pressed to her thigh and blood welled between her fingers. “Get him, Tagen!”

“Yes, Tagen, get me. Or shoot me. Or something. Like they say here, shit or get off the pot.”

Tagen could hear the engines of the police now. He had only seconds to act.

Tagen holstered his weapons and grabbed Daria, pulling her into his arms. He sensed movement at the corner of his eyes and spun around. He watched E’Var run for the woods, knocking humans aside with his claws in sprays of blood. The purple-haired human was over his shoulder, her arms swaying limply.

“Stay where you are! This is a citizen’s arrest!”

Tagen turned furiously into the voice and punched, sending the human who had dared to confront him into a booth and over the counter with his teeth spilling down the front of his shirt.

“That’s police brutality,” Daria remarked. She sounded strained.

Tagen moved her to his shoulder and drew his stunner. He sent another pulse out through the closing crowd, and Daria slumped, suddenly heavy. Tagen stepped forward through the fallen, seized the blonde female who had been walking with E’Var and hauled her awkwardly onto his other shoulder. He ran.

He passed a phalanx of uniformed lawmen charging in. One of them tried to stop him, gesturing to the females he carried and particularly to Daria, but Tagen bulled past him and he did not pursue. They did not yet know that Tagen was responsible for the chaos, but he could not count on their ignorance for long.

He found Daria’s groundcar among those in the parking bay and set the humans inside, bundling them both together in the rear hold while Grendel looked on from the front seat, its golden eyes almost prissily shocked at the intrusion. Tagen took the keys from Daria’s pocket, slammed the hatch, and crawled into the front of the car where he spent several nerve-wracking minutes trying to work the controls for the captain’s chair so that he could fit in it.

He could pilot this. He could pilot sixteen different spacecraft, all of which were a hell of a lot more complicated than a groundcar. He’d watched Daria piloting it, and it didn’t look that difficult. He could pilot this. And he’d better, because sooner or later, the police would lock down the parking bay. If he were captured—

Tagen fit keys one by one into the trigger-slot until he found the one that ignited the engines. Immediately, something began to chime at him. Tagen scanned the console frantically and his eye lit on a flashing icon of a figure in a harness. Tagen tapped it hesitantly but the chimes continued to sound. What did it mean?

He couldn’t wait for Daria to wake and tell him. His entire body locked and rigid, Tagen put his hand on the directional indicator and pushed it into gear. The groundcar rolled backwards; Tagen stomped on a pedal and the car’s movement became a lurch that slammed it into the face of another groundcar.

“Shu-ra!” Tagen hissed, and shifted again. This time, when he pushed at the pedal, the engines raced but did not propel. More police were coming. Humans were all around him in their own groundcars, blasting their klaxons at each other as they swarmed back onto the road. He pushed harder at the pedal and felt the car actually shaking as the engines roared.

“Fucking thing, fire up!” Tagen bellowed. He shoved at the directional indicator a third time and finally the groundcar hit ahead-full. Tagen spun the steerer wildly and the car kicked up a spray of earth before leaping into motion. He managed to avoid impact with the trees that had shaded the vehicle, but he did rip out a large amount of undergrowth as he navigated the groundcar around in a wide arc.

At least he was moving. The right pedal was the accelerator. The left, the full-stop. If he remembered that, he’d be fine. At the first opportunity, he would stop and see to Daria’s injury, and find a way to bind his human prisoner before she woke. E’Var was on foot for now. There was time to get ahead of him, time to interrogate his prisoner and find out where he was going. There was time.

And even if there wasn’t, Tagen didn’t care. Daria came first. Let E’Var leave Earth ahead of him, and he could still pursue and someday capture him and repay him for Daria’s injury.

Or avenge her death.

No, he would not even think such a thing.

Tagen navigated onto the main road and aimed himself west. The smell of blood was thick in the close confines of the vehicle. Daria made no sound at all.

Tagen drove.

*

Kane ran.

Raven bounced on his shoulder, a burden of uncaring weight. He could feel the beating of her heart on his back. It was the only sign of life she gave him, but it was a warming one. He could go much faster without her, he knew, but it was not an option. He would leave the Vahst before he left her.

Where was he? They’d been traveling west for some time already, but where the hell was he? He couldn’t afford to get turned around now, blunder out into the road or, hell, into the Fleet officer’s path.

He didn’t think anyone was following him. The Fleet-man had run off with his wounded ichuta’a and he would probably be going just as far as he could as fast as possible, just like Kane. With any luck, the fucker’s face would be on the tee-vee by nightfall, and that would be a great help to Kane.

The heat was killing him and adrenaline could only take him so far. He couldn’t keep running.

Kane let his legs carry him to a stop, let Raven slide from his arms to the ground. He put his back against a tree and leaned into it. His hands rose and pressed to his ribs, as though he were trying manually to slow his heart, stretch out his breath. Gravity pulled him down, his legs splaying out before him. He sat, talons flexing in the dry soil, and tried to orientate himself in the here and now.

He’d hit the Fleet officer’s human. A shit shot in the leg, but he’d hit her. And if his gun hadn’t run out of bullets, he’d have hit her again. He hoped the bitch bled out.

Raven lay before him, by all appearances lifeless.

He hoped he had the chance to try again before he left Earth. He wanted to kill her right before the fucker’s eyes. The Fleet fucker who had dropped his Raven.

Kane opened the panel on his wrist band and activated his locator. He was still some three hundred thirty kilometers east and north of where his ship was. Three days and then some, and that was going to be hard fucking travel with Raven and him on foot.

Raven. The slave-fucker had dropped his Raven, told him he was prepared to kill her.

Kane reached out and caught her arm, towing her into his lap. He ripped off his coat, shredding a sleeve in his fury to be free of it, and then pulled her against his sweat-oiled chest. He felt her skin on his, watched the pulse throb in her throat.

She was stunned, that was all. He needed to get a grip on himself. Now was not the time to lose control.

Kane stood up, Raven cradled in his arms. His sides still burned, his breath felt hot and raw and his muscles were weak and watery, but at least he no longer felt faint or nauseated. What he felt instead was the itching of Heat deep in his tsesac, which meant that he needed to focus up and forget about revenge long enough to get away. He started walking west.

He had a lot of ground to cover.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The first thing she felt, oddly enough, was the rock or root or whatever that was pressing painfully up at her underneath her shoulder blade. And that was all she felt for a while, even after her eyes opened and she saw the man above her, rocking her in hard rhythm. His was a familiar face, so much so that even though she couldn’t come up with a name right away, she wasn’t alarmed to wake up and find herself being fucked by him.

She put a hand on his sunburned and sweat-damp shoulder, and his eyes snapped open, monster-closet black and reflecting nothing. “Raven,” he rasped, and that felt right so she nodded. She was feeling more now—his weight, his heat, the sweat raining down from his body, the massive club pushing in and out of her—and all of it was fine and familiar. Her eyes slid shut, dozing, and she didn’t open them again until he was finished.

His weight went away, and then she was being pulled up and against the slick plane of his chest. He whispered her name, prying her eyes open one at a time, and then bit her on the cheek, chin and throat.

“Kane,” she said and smiled with weak pride. His name was Kane. A little more lucidity snuck in and she managed to look at him. “What happened?”

He snarled explosively, but it was not directed at her. His arms tightened around her to the point of pain. “We need to go now,” he said.

She shifted, but couldn’t seem to get her limbs together enough to rise. She settled for looking around again. Trees and trees and bushes and more trees. The day was still suffocatingly hot and shrilling with the kind of high-summer insect noise that made sane men butcher their families in their beds. And somewhere, somewhere there were sirens. Lots of them. Raven’s world came a little more into focus. “Where’s Sue-Eye?”

He dismissed that with a curt shake of his head. “Back at the fair,” he said. His claws brushed along her cheek, but his gaze was elsewhere, stabbing at the shadows surrounding them. “V’kai showed up.”

She didn’t need clarification on that. Cop-words had the same sound in any language. “Where are we?”

He growled laughter. “Not nearly far enough away. Fucking heat!” Or maybe he meant Heat. Hard to tell sometimes.

“We need to get a car.” Raven tried again to rise and this time, she succeeded. His hand stayed with her, steadying and strong, until she found her balance. Just standing there, she could feel her head clearing, as if the fugue that had settled on her was susceptible to gravity and could be poured out onto the ground as long as she wasn’t lying on it. She swiped limp strands of hair out of her eyes and looked down at Kane with new clarity. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“That way.” He pointed with confidence, but there was a certain frustration in his eyes that showed he appreciated the unhelpfulness of his reply. “And it’s one fuck of a far walk off.” He got up, fastening his pants in curt, angry movements. “You can tell me you told me so if you want to,” he added bitterly.

She glanced at him, sorely tempted, and then shook her head. “Later,” she said. “When we’re good and out of this. I’ll probably even smack you around a little.”

He gave her a sharp sidelong look, and then showed his teeth in a brief, rueful grin. “Deal. Now get moving.”

He picked up his pack and caught at her arm, but she dug in her heels and stopped him. “We can’t run in this heat, we need to get a car.” She stared intently at the forest, trying for her bearings in futility. The sirens she heard weren’t moving and the longer she had to listen to them, the closer they felt. “Where’s the road from here?” she asked.

Kane aimed a claw, but his expression was dark. “We’re not getting anywhere near it,” he growled. “We were seen, Raven. V’kai and your law both. We were goddamn good and well seen and the last thing I’m going to do is walk out in front of them and let them see us again.” He glanced at the trees and then back at her, scowling. “It’s slower this way, but it’s safer.” He tried to move off with her in hand again, and again, she dug in and refused to budge.

“No, it’s not.” She pulled all the way out of his grip and he let her go, his head cocked and an expression of frustration growing on his face. “If your v’kai guy gets to his ship before we do, he’ll just be waiting for us out in space. Could you take him in a firefight?”

Right around the words ‘waiting for us’, Kane’s eyes went wide enough for a thin white ring to show their edges. By the time she finished her pointed question, they were narrowed nearly to slits. “No,” he said, and bared his teeth again. “I don’t even think the fucking thing has guns.”

“We’ve got to get a car,” she insisted. “Now.”

Kane snarled, but he was nodding. “Not here,” he said. “If we come out of the woods on that road, your v’kai will be waiting to take us down.” He shot a glance unerringly back at the siren-sounds. “Chok.”

Raven conceded the point with a nod and rubbed at her temples, trying to shake a thought free. “Okay,” she said finally. “We’ll keep going this way. We’re not that deep into the woods, we might run into a crossroads. If nothing else, it’ll get dark and we can find a house or something. Kane…how did this v’kai guy know where to find you? Are you wearing something?”

“Wearing…what?” Suddenly, his frustration washed out and he stared down at her, showing the whites of his eyes for the second time in as many minutes. Then they were gone again and Kane gazed away into the trees, his face closed. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It’s possible. I didn’t think they did anything like that, but…they keep prisoners unconscious to control them.”

There was no expression whatsoever on his face as he made this calm admittance. Somehow, that was the scariest she’d ever seen him look.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “It’s easy enough for someone to follow a trail of bodies.”

Kane grunted and adjusted the pack strap that lay over his shoulder. He started walking and she followed. “What made you even think of something like that?” he asked sourly.

She tried to avoid an answer with a shrug, but when he frowned at her, she said, “Your v’kai guy came to the fair before anyone knew we’d been killing people there.”

He spat out one of his alien curses, looking baffled and furious. Mostly furious. “But if that were true, he’d know I was here now.” He let that hang in the air for a while. “I shot his ichuta’a. With any luck, she’ll die. Hopefully, that’ll slow him up, even if he does have some kind of sacrat sunk in me.”

“You’re assuming he’s the only one.”

Kane shot her a third white-ringed stare. Without another word, he scooped her up and over his shoulder and started running.

*

There was a tube of dermal restorative among his medical gear, and Tagen applied it in a thick layer to Daria’s wound after determining the pellet had indeed passed completely through her thigh. There could be any amount of damage done; although soldier’s sense told Tagen it was not serious, he was no expert in human anatomy. He did not trust any of the pain medications provided by vey Venekus to work on humans, but he could prepare a dose of nanozymes to speed her healing and so he did.

She stirred when injected and Tagen stroked her cheek anxiously in case she wakened fully. It was unreasonably important to him that he be the first thing she saw when the neural stunner’s effects finally wore off.

But it was the blonde female who began to wake first, groaning and clutching blindly at her surroundings before falling back again. E’Var’s female. His prisoner, perhaps. Perhaps his accomplice. But a distraction now, in either case, from his injured Daria.

Tagen touched the soft hair that fanned out behind Daria’s lolling head for one last, lingering moment, and then he gathered up the other human and pulled her from the hold of the car. He lay her down in the dry grass and waited on one knee beside her, his hands clenching rhythmically on empty air, watching her fight her way out of stupor.

The blonde’s eyes opened. She stared slackly around for several seconds. Confusion sank in first, and then panic. “Kane?” she called, and looked at Tagen for the first time.

He saw recognition of his kind enter her, along with the awful understanding that she was caught. He had no sympathy for her. Prisoners do not call their keepers by their familiar names.

“Kane!” she shouted and tried to lunge away.

Tagen sprang after her, bringing her down with considerably more force than was necessary. She struggled, but she would be no match for a Jotan male even if she were not groggy from the neural stunner. He pulled binders from his gunbelt, flipped her facedown, and pinned her arms, wrist to elbow, behind her back. In seconds, he was rolling her onto her back again and snarling into her pale face, “Where is he going?”

She screamed. It was a harsh sound, a cry of pure frustration and rage, utterly devoid of fear. Her head rocked, her face purpled, and her heels gouged impotently at the earth. She screamed and gasped for air and screamed again.

Tagen had sedative, of course, but no time in which to indulge the erratic effects it provoked in humans. He elected instead to slap her.

Her lip split, not for the first time by appearances, but it did silence her immediately. She stared at him with tight-mouthed hatred, her breath shaking through her in violent pants.

“Where?” he said coldly.

“How the fuck should I know?” She made herself laugh. It was a bitter attempt. “You won’t have to follow him anyway. He’ll come for me. And he’ll rip you in half.”

“Come for you,” Tagen echoed. He stood up, solely to take his curled hands out of reach of her. “He left you, human.”

She sneered at him, mocking him from the cold place of her convictions. “He had to get away but now he’ll come—”

“He kept the female he wanted,” Tagen told her, very softly. “He is not coming back for you.”

It took a long time for that to sink all the way down to the place where her thoughts were made. With every new breath she took, the truth caught a more hurtful hold, and when she opened her mouth again, there was no sound. Tagen watched her struggle to speak, and then he watched her eyes well with furious tears.

“Son of a bitch,” she whispered finally, raggedly. “You son of a bitch. He…He was going to fix me. He promised. He—”

“Where is he going?”

“You son of a bitch!” she screamed.

Daria moaned.

Tagen turned from the interrogation at once and went to the open hatch of the groundcar where Daria lay. Her lashes fluttered and her eyes opened, calm at first, then perplexed, and then flooding with baffled pain.

“Ow,” she said. She clutched at him, missed, and gripped the side of the groundcar instead. “Oh owww! Oh, what’s hurting me? Owww!”

Her hand dropped to her wounded leg and came away fast. She stared at the blood marking her palm and said, “I was shot,” in wondering tones. “I remember now. He shot me.”

“Can you stand?” Tagen asked.

She looked past him to the other human still scream-sobbing her obscenities at his back. “Is that…one of his? Where’s the other one?”

E’Var’s human arched kicking off the ground to bellow, “Bitch!” at the top of her lungs. Her voice broke in the extremity of the curse. Tagen had swung around to order her to silence, but he found he did not need to; she lay with her lips pressed pale, glaring at the sky with wet and baleful eyes in seething silence.

“He took her with him,” Tagen said, returning his attention to the answering of Daria’s question.

She gazed up at him then, her brow beetling. “You mean he got away?” Her expression continued its slow slide past confusion into dismay. “You let him get away because of me?”

There were a hundred ways to answer that, a hundred excuses, a hundred reasons, but in the end, he simply said, “Yes,” and silently dared her to argue with him.

“Oh Tagen.” She sighed and rubbed at the place just above her wound. She did not meet his eyes. In the tee-vee programs, males who saved the lives of females were frequently rewarded with adoration and affection. The tee-vee misrepresented many things.

“So now what?” she asked finally.

“If E’Var reaches his ship before we…before I reach mine, it will be over. But there is a chance that I could overtake him yet. He is on foot for the moment…” His voice failed him. He stared down at Daria’s pale hand where it lay atop the blood-soaked sleeve of her pant leg. E’Var and pursuit were suddenly of ridiculous unimportance to him. “…but I doubt he will remain so for long.”

“Where are we?” Daria asked.

“Further west. Not far from the place of fair. The car…confounded me,” he admitted.

“You drove?” A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth, the edges blurred by pain. “I’m probably lucky I was unconscious, aren’t I?”

He sighed, but he couldn’t in all conscience argue.

Daria sat up and scooted to the edge of the hold. She lowered her feet to the ground, tested her weight with a wince, and slowly stood. “It hurts,” she said, sounding strained. “But I think I’d know if it were broken and I don’t think it is. Just shot.”

“I wish he’d killed you,” the blonde interjected.

Tagen spun fast and would have no doubt struck her if Daria hadn’t restrained him with a soft hand on his arm.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “She’s scared, Tagen.”

“Like fuck I am, bitch!” The words were bitter; the tone, shrill.

“She’s helped him kill a lot of people,” Daria went on, still with that confidential sympathy. “She thought she’d be free and clear of it when it was over. Now she’s stuck here. And people are looking for her.”

E’Var’s human fell silent. Apart from spots of brilliant color high in her cheeks, she was almost perfectly white.

“So leave her alone,” Daria finished, and dropped her hand from him. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about now.”

That much was certainly true. He needed to take back some measure of control and come up with a plan of pursuit. The name of Pahnee was synonymous with good planning. Tagen closed his eyes to the sight of the burnt hole in Daria’s bloody clothing and tried to find his wits.

“Take me with you,” the blonde human suddenly said. Her voice shook. “Take me with you when you leave Earth and I’ll tell you where he was going.”

He looked at her sharply.

“Tagen,” Daria said and sighed. “She doesn’t know where he’s going. She wasn’t there when he landed. And we already know where to cut him off.”

“We do?”

“He killed three times along Highway 20,” she reminded him. “Three times on foot, moving east, just a few days after you think he landed. His ship is somewhere west of that.”

“Somewhere west covers so much ground.”

“Yeah, but there’s only so many roads.” She shifted, gritting her teeth, and sat down again, holding onto the side of the car for balance. “And now that he knows you’re here, he’ll go straight there as fast as possible, and that means getting a car. If he’s in a car, he’ll have to use Highway 20 to get close to his ship again, and his girl will probably take I-5 to get to Highway 20. Come on. Let’s go.”

Tagen glanced back at E’Var’s human.

“Let her go,” Daria said softly. “She can’t get away. Not for long.”

The blonde human stared back at him in plaintive and furious appeal. She had nothing to bargain with, and he was not in a bargaining mood in any case, but still she tried to sway him. “Just take me with you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Tagen went to her, turned her on her belly and removed his binders from her arms. “Were it up to me, I would see you imprisoned myself,” he told her. “But I will trust your police to catch you. I have already spoken with one of their number. They know who you are, and they are closing on you.”

She rolled onto her side away from him and curled there.

Tagen helped Daria take her rightful place at the console of the groundcar. He harnessed himself into his seat and brought Grendel onto his lap. The blonde lay weeping on the ground during all of this. She did not move, not even when the groundcar pulled out onto the road and rolled away.

*

It was a long drive that followed, one that gave Tagen ample time to sit and brood on just how disastrous this mission truly was. He was starkly aware of his prisoner’s advantages when he could not recognize any road that Daria drove, could not read any sign they passed. Even in the first days, when he had been on foot in the mountains, he had never felt so lost and so alone on this hostile world. And now his only ally was injured, and he could not even care for her; even if he had known how, there was simply no time.

Time. It rode him, whipping at Tagen’s back, and he could do nothing but sit and stare out the window and smell Daria’s blood in the air.

She was frightening him badly. She had driven through the day, white-faced with pain, managing traffic that would have overwhelmed Tagen, moving from cities that frequently had them halted cold on the pavement to winding lanes fringed with forest, and then with mountains. She stopped only when the car needed refueling, and would not allow Tagen to do more than look at her wound.

Not that there was anything he could do for her. And if it were not for who she was and what she meant to him, he might admit that the injuries were superficial ones, or at least, they would be if they were back on Jota. She was young and healthy and her immune system was surely strong; the tissue would knit in its own time, but shock was the factor that unnerved him most. She was piloting the car without complaint, but she was doing it in an obvious haze. He tried only once to convince her of this and received in reply a rambling lecture on time and speed and necessity and perhaps on solar flares as well, it was difficult to tell.

But now, as the sun set, Daria suddenly pulled the groundcar over to the soft side of the road and looked around.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his hand going already to her injured leg.

“I—Ow! Don’t touch! I’m fine. Do you know where we are?”

Alarm unfolded in a hot spray through every bone of him. “Do you not?” he gasped.

“No, I…I mean, yes, of course I know where I am. I…” Her voice faded and she raised a hand to brush lightly at her eyes. She was pale, too pale.

Tagen tried to turn her towards him and she pushed his hand away with a grimace. This time, he threw out a warning growl and forcibly caught her chin, making her face him. He studied her eyes (watching him with strained amusement) and saw weariness there but no confusion.

“You are worrying me,” he told her. He kept her chin cupped in his hand and even raised the other to stroke her cheek. Her answering smile did not reassure him.

“What I’m trying to say, and mangling horribly,” she began, “is that the road sign we just passed says we’re about five miles beyond the place where E’Var’s first bodies were found. We need to turn around.”

“Ah.” He released her with reluctance and gave their surroundings an officer’s scrutiny. He could not be certain, but he believed these might be the same mountains, albeit a different cut of them, in which he had himself landed. Flipping up the panel of his armband locator, he saw that he was correct. They were scarcely fifty kilometers from his ship.

“So if he’s coming like I think he is, we need to go back a bit so that we can cut him off.”

“Cut him off?” he echoed, frowning at her.

“Yeah, that’s where you—”

“I know what it means. What puzzles me is how you mean to do it. You cannot think to lay a trap across the road.” A slight uplifting of the last word made it into a question; surely Daria was clever enough to see that placing hazards across the traffic lanes had a better chance of causing injury to innocent bystanders than in stopping E’Var.

Daria looked adrift for a moment, and he had time to think again how pale she was, how much pain she must be feeling, how it had felt to see her drop back so suddenly and fall with blood pouring from her. Then her eyes cleared and she looked merely chagrined. “No, I see what you’re saying. No, I wouldn’t do that. We’d only ending up killing the first guy who came along with his eyes on the radio instead of the road. Well, let me think.”

Tagen waited, watching the empty highway as the sky faded from pinks to blues and the mountains took on the black contrasts of night.

“Okay, we’ll go back to just before Santiam Pass,” she said finally. “The road’s pretty narrow there and we can find a turnout to watch for him. Then we can—”