But what if I want to be found? What if there’s nothing out here but heat and dirt? We have no way to get home!

Home? she questioned, throwing cheerless images at me: the vacant apartment in San Diego, the Seeker’s most obnoxious expression, the dot that marked Tucson on the map… a brief, happier flash of the red canyon that slipped in by accident. Where would that be?

I turned my back on the car, ignoring her advice. I was in too far already. I wasn’t going to give up all hope of return. Maybe someone would find the car and then find me. I could easily and honestly explain what I was doing here to any rescuer: I was lost. I’d lost my way… lost my control… lost my mind.

I followed the wash at first, letting my body fall into its natural long-strided rhythm. It wasn’t the way I walked on the sidewalks to and from the university—it wasn’t my walk at all. But it fit the rugged terrain here and moved me smoothly forward with a speed that surprised me until I got used to it.

“What if I hadn’t come this way?” I wondered as I walked farther into the desert waste. “What if Healer Fords were still in Chicago? What if my path hadn’t taken us so close to them?”

It was that urgency, that lure—the thought that Jared and Jamie might be right here, somewhere in this empty place—that had made it impossible to resist this senseless plan.

I’m not sure, Melanie admitted. I think I might still have tried, but I was afraid while the other souls were near. I’m still afraid. Trusting you could kill them both.

We flinched together at the thought.

But being here, so close… It seemed like I had to try. Please—and suddenly she was pleading with me, begging me, no trace of resentment in her thoughts—please don’t use this to hurt them. Please.

“I don’t want to.… I don’t know if I can hurt them. I’d rather…”

What? Die myself? Than give a few stray humans up to the Seekers?

Again we flinched at the thought, but my revulsion at the idea comforted her. And it frightened me more than it soothed her.

When the wash started angling too far toward the north, Melanie suggested that we forget the flat, ashen path and take the direct line to the third landmark, the eastern spur of rock that seemed to point, fingerlike, toward the cloudless sky.

I didn’t like leaving the wash, just as I’d resisted leaving the car. I could follow this wash all the way back to the road, and the road back to the highway. It was miles and miles, and it would take me days to traverse, but once I stepped off this wash I was officially adrift.