MANNING

Don’t worry about me. I’ll get there somehow. Amos, can you hear me? Get to Gehenna! I’ll get there!

Ben-David and I, and Giora, our driver, peer at the screen depicting the overturned interior of the Humvee illuminated only by flashlight. We glance to one another. No one speaks.

The screen continues to flicker and depixelate.

RACHEL

(to Manning)

We’ve stopped sweating.

Rachel’s fingertips probe her forehead.

RACHEL

Our bodies’ cooling mechanisms have shut down. We’re in heat shock. Our internal organs are failing.

The Humvee has settled at a ninety-degree angle. Buried, top and bottom. Manning and Rachel are immured. They can no longer hear the gale outside.

Manning’s side of the cabin continues filling with sand. He sets himself into the seat and braces against the seatback. Manning kicks with his bootheels violently against the windshield. The forward window glass in a Humvee is in two sections with a steel column between. Manning kicks first at his side, then at Rachel’s. The glass is two inches thick, laminated polycarbonate, bulletproof against even a .50-caliber round.

RACHEL

Stop.

Manning looses another volley of kicks.

RACHEL

Leave it.

Manning lets his weight fall against the passenger door, which has become the floor of the compartment in which he and Rachel find themselves entombed. He forces a breath of superheated air. Cascades of sand and grit sheet in through the chassis seals and the ruptures in the overhead. The sand rises like floodwater through the floorboards.

Manning’s eyes meet Rachel’s.

MANNING

Tell me one thing.

RACHEL

What?

MANNING

And for once don’t lie to me.

Rachel waits.

MANNING

You were with Instancer in Moscow. You drove the car after he murdered Golokoff. Tell me the truth. A witness saw you. A witness who has no reason to lie.

Rachel glances to the temp gauge on the dash: 147°. It takes her long moments to raise the strength to answer.

RACHEL

Yeah, I was with him. But only then. Only that one time. Every other place, every other minute, I was hunting him. That’s the truth, whether you believe it or not.

Manning makes no response.

RACHEL

You don’t know what it’s like.

MANNING

What what’s like?

RACHEL

Him. His power. To be with him. To feel him . . .

Rachel sets the flashlight down on the console below her. Its beam flickers, illuminating her face with an unearthly, orange glow.

RACHEL

Did I know who he was? I didn’t want to know. He was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

Rachel’s breath comes shallow and spasmodic.

RACHEL

His idea to identify the Thirty-Six was beyond brilliant. I don’t care what happened. He changed everything for me.

Rachel speaks not to Manning or even to herself, but as if to some universal, incorporeal listener.

RACHEL