Sax shrugged. “He was left behind in Cairo, and had the chance to get into some of the ones being used now for security purposes. That has been enough. I’d like to try something similar. Let’s see what Coyote says about it. He’s not in any records at all, so he must know how he did it.”

“He’s been hidden from the beginning,” Hiroko said. “That’s different.”

“Yes, but he might have some ideas.”

“We could just move into the demimonde,” Nadia pointed out, “and stay off the records entirely. I think I’d like to try that.”

Maya nodded.

Night after night they talked these matters over. “Well, a little change of appearance might be in order. You know Phyllis is back, we have to remember that.”

“I still can’t believe they survived. She must have nine lives.”

“In any case we were on too many news shows. We have to take care.”

• • •

By day Gamete was slowly completed. But it never seemed right to Nirgal, no matter how much he tried to focus on the making of it. It wasn’t his place.

News came from another traveler that Coyote would be by soon. Nirgal felt his pulse quicken; to get back under the starry sky again, wandering by night in Coyote’s boulder car, from sanctuary to sanctuary. . . .

Jackie stared at him attentively as he talked about it to her. And that afternoon, after they were dismissed from the day’s work, she led him down to the tall new dunes and kissed him. When he recovered his wits he kissed back, and then they were kissing passionately, hugging each other hard and steaming all over each other’s faces. They knelt in the trough between two high dunes, under a pale thin fog, and then lay together in a cocoon made of their down coats, and kissed and touched each other, peeling down each other’s pants and creating a little envelope of their own warmth, huffing out steam and crackling the frost on the sand underneath their coats. All this without a word, merging in one great hot electric circuit, in defiance of Hiroko and all the world. So this is what it feels like, Nirgal thought. Under the strands of Jackie’s black hair grains of sand gleamed like jewels, as if minute ice flowers were contained within them. Glories inside everything.

When they were done they crawled up to glance over the dune crest, to make sure no one was coming their way, and then returned to their nest and pulled their clothes over them, for the warmth. They huddled together, kissing voluptuously and without haste. And Jackie prodded him in the chest with a finger and said, “Now we belong to each other.”

Nirgal could only nod happily and kiss the long expanse of her throat, his face buried in her black hair. “Now you belong to me,” she said.