Another forty minutes. The electrical storm intensifies. Comm signals sizzle and break apart.

Barometric pressure is plunging. I feel it in my ears. The leaden sky turns to ink. The gale rises. The heat has become unimaginable.

Where is Instancer?

Ahead?

Behind?

Is he at Gehenna now?

Where is Manning?

His channel comes through in snatches on the console screen depicting Humvee #1. But his vehicle locator signal has vanished. We have no idea where he is.

The sky crackles with migdalim. Gloom devours our headlights. It’s not yet six, but our truck creeps forward on a track gone to midnight.

BEN-DAVID

(into comm channel)

Rachel, this is Amos. Where are you?

We can see Rachel and Manning on our console screen (and even hear them in bits and pieces) but they can’t hear us. They’re not responding.

BEN-DAVID

Rachel, do you copy? Rachel!

(to himself)

Goddammit, what the fuck’s wrong with this thing?

Five more minutes pass. On the screen we can see Manning and Rachel. They’ve stopped.

MANNING

Amos! Dewey! If you copy . . . don’t follow us. I say again: stay back. We’ve entered some kind of defile . . . intense heat . . . way beyond—

Manning’s signal breaks up. Ben-David tries every channel to reach them.

Nothing.

They’re blind too in this storm.

Their EXT TEMP gauge reads 134° Fahrenheit.

Video from Manning’s Humvee returns. We can see him. He’s getting out of the vehicle. Great sheaves of gale-driven sand boom in. Rachel is shouting something to Manning. Something about water bags . . .

BEN-DAVID

They’ve boiled over.

The Humvee’s forward exterior camera shows Manning struggling to raise the hood. He’s wrestling a desert water bag from its rig on the Humvee’s grille.

An endless minute passes.

Now Rachel gets out. She too struggles forward into the storm.

Another minute.

Suddenly both Manning and Rachel come pounding back to the cab, diving in, in obvious extremis.

They have one water bag between them. Manning presses it into Rachel’s hands. He shouts to her to drink it, drink it all. It takes all Manning’s strength to get the doors closed. Rachel is upending the flax water bag above her mouth. But the liquid seems to vaporize the instant it gushes forth. Rachel gets only drops. She sucks the tube. The bag is dry.

INT TEMP 141.

Manning’s in the driver’s seat now. He starts the engine. Rachel shouts something that the channel garbles.

MANNING

We have to move. We’ll die if we stay here.

In Ben-David’s cab, I’m trying everything I can think of to get a fix on Manning and Rachel’s position. But the electrical storm is driving every instrument crazy. The magnetic compass on Ben-David’s dash is spinning like a top.

ME

Amos, we have to find them. Go forward!

BEN-DAVID

Where? Into a ditch? Over a cliff?