Context (57 page)

No. Squinting, looking around— No
sign of anyone else. No mirrormasked men, no flyers.

Fled?

Looked at the two corpses once
more, and dry-sobbed as she pulled her torn jumpsuit around her bleeding torso.

I did it...

But suddenly her sobbing stopped,
and she knew it would not occur again.

I killed both of them.

And she knew, too, that she had
the power—that she had
always
had this power, though she had not felt it
consciously before this moment—and that she would use it again should the
necessity come to pass.

Good.

The
tourist station was a smoking ruin. Her rented TDV was an abstract sculpture in
melted slag.

They blasted everything in sight.

And fled. Because they didn’t
know where the energy-attack was coming from?

Irrelevant, for now.

Call for
—

But there would be no help. Her
golden infostrand was twisted, fused, and would not respond to finger tap or
whispered command.

Shit.

She was trapped in the desert,
maybe days from anywhere, with no water. Beneath a blazing sun: it could reach
130 degrees, on the local Fahrenheit scale.

It was the twenty-second century.
But without communication, in an environment not meant for unaided human
survival -

Damn them to hell.

— she was already dying.

Scorching
sun. Hammer, beating down.

Siebenundneunzig.

A staggering step.

Achtundneunzig.

One more.

Neunundneunzig.

Again.

Hundert.

Stumbling, righting herself,
panting open-mouthed with the effort.

Skin already blistered.

One more pace. Just counting
repetitions in the gym.

Ichi.

Switching to Japanese, to
Nihongo.
A mental trick, in extremis: reinforcing dojo discipline.

Ni.

Sand, hot against her face.
Pressing ...

Fallen again.

Get up.

It was a furnace.

Slowly, slowly, rocking from side
to side, she stood once more.

And step.

San.
Resuming ...

Just... count.

And.

Step.

Chi.

Again.

Yon.

Again.

Unrelenting.
Blazing. Hell.

Dried blood caked her face.

Cracking.

There was a need for movement.

Get up.

Hell’s furnace boiled her, tore
skin away with its heat.

Get
—

She
crawled, a little.

Again.

Swollen tongue filling her mouth.
A dry croak...

Ro tried to crawl, produced a
twitch of effort. Then nothing more.

I’m dying.

Shallow, painful breathing rasped
in her chest as roasting air, ultra-dry, sucked moisture from her lungs,
desiccated delicate internal tissues.

It burns.

It slammed upon her: white-hot
sun, intense blue sky.

A furnace.

No.

Fire, squeezing hard and powerful
as the fist of God.

No...

Face in the sand.

Unable to rise.

...
more.

It
was an arroyo, a baked riverbed.

Ro shivered fitfully.

Shaking.

As though she were freezing, but
the sand and air were oven-hot. Thirst, long gone.

Bad sign …

Her body’s heat dissipation had
been blown apart by thermal stress: the shivering mechanism, designed to warm
the body, is also a symptom of heatstroke’s final stages.

Dying. . .

Terminal phase.

Not long now, my father.

Hissing.

Snake...?

And then the rumbling.

Flyer. Come to finish
—

Neither.

The ground trembled beneath her.

Darkness beckoned.

Sleep?

Something
wet pattered against her cheek.

Dreaming.

Again. The plop, plop of
raindrops on baked ground.

Rain—
Impossible.

But it comes, finally, to
deserts, too.

Lifegiving rain.