of shock and concern as the lights blinked on and off, steadied, fluttered again. The doubled Tommy clawed his way toward her in a series of aborted lunges, face contorted, and still Julieta didn't move.
By the time Cree and Lynn made it into the ward room, Julieta had broken from her paralysis and was crouching at Tommy's side. As she leaned toward him, he rolled and raked at her face with one hand. And then his body went into convulsions again, everything flailing and battering. Lynn and Cree threw themselves on him, holding back the savage clawing and the pumping legs. Julieta fell back, two streaks of red across her cheek near her eye. Lynn's face was held hard as a skull as she subdued the bucking body.
What are you? Cree's thoughts screamed. Who are you? But the effort to hold Tommy down brought back the pain, blinding big mallet blows to her forehead. She couldn't think, could hardly see.
Looking down into his face as she held the twisting shoulders, Cree saw a difference in his eyes. One pupil was a great, dilated black hole, the other much smaller. As she looked down his right eye fixed her, held steady despite the tossing of his head. And with what looked like great effort, the eye winced itself shut. It opened again, still staring straight at her, and did it once more.
Maybe it was purely accidental, some fluke of his chaotic movements, but she couldn't escape the feeling it had been a wink. Had to be. Was it lascivious, taunting, pleading, threatening? She couldn't guess. But she could swear it had been a kind of communication-a signal from something living inside Tommy's skull.
12
Julieta tightened her legs around the big barrel of Spence's body as she urged him into a full gallop. The ground jolted and rolled away, and the cold rush of early-morning air gave her the feeling of being airborne. The black gelding was a powerful horse, smart with his feet, and now she goaded him to his utmost. His rhythmic lunging and the pumping bellows of his breathing soothed the painful nerve deep inside her. A welcome narcotic.
'Take me away, Spence,' she called to him. 'Fly me away.'
The sun hadn't yet broken the top of the mesa and the world was raw and fresh as she bucketed west from the rear corral gate. A wide track of disturbed ground showed that horses had been this way not long ago-Shurley's bunch, no doubt. The gray stallion and his mares must have visited Spence and the girls last night. From the deep bite of hoofs and wide scatter of soil, she could tell they'd left in a hurry.
Tommy's breathing had returned to normal by the time Joseph had arrived and inspected him. There'd been nothing for him to see but a very sleepy fifteen-year-old, understandably surly at being poked and prodded in the middle of the night. Once he was certain Tommy was stable, Joseph had checked Cree Black, looking for signs of concussion. Finally, he had come to Julieta to lightly touch the scrapes on her cheek, his eyes making it clear he was ministering not to the physical injury but to the deeper hurt she'd suffered from the assault. Julieta had left the infirmary at around four, leaving Joseph to spend what remained of the night in the bed next to Tommy's, and had gone back to her quarters.
Where of course sleep had been impossible. She was as tense as a bowstring, charged with hysterical energy and fear and need. When Joseph had walked her out to the infirmary's porch and the night had wrapped around them, she'd experienced an almost overwhelming urge to grab him, envelop his mouth with hers, tell him to take her back to her room and make love to her until the world got real again and there was warmth and safety somewhere and some things were certain and it was okay.
But of course she didn't. She went alone to the dark of her room, where the nightmare of Tommy kept at her. After an hour or so she gave up and sought the only little remedy she could think of. She dressed again, went out to the corral. The wind had died and the night was full of a waiting feeling, the stillness before dawn. Spence had been skittish at first, but she'd tempted him with an apple and spent a long time gently stroking him, and eventually he'd calmed down enough to accept the saddle. The sky had paled to slate gray by the time she swung herself onto him. She didn't look back once as the school dwindled and disappeared from view.
A mile out, the track of Shurley's horses veered to the southwest, but she reined Spence to the right, heading north along a little ridge in the undulating plain. She let him open up, find his own speed. He responded as if he needed this, too, this wild flight away from what had happened.
The image of Tommy came back to her: the impossible breathing, the independent movement of his anguished eyes, the horrible strength of his convulsions. Trying to restrain him, she'd felt an eerie fibrillation in his chest and shoulders as if individual strands of muscle were separately alive, steel wires trying to animate him against the resistance of the rest of his flesh. Then, later, awakening to the awful predatory fixity of his gaze and his sudden lunging, clawing attack. Beyond scaring her, it had felt like… what? A betrayal. Love rebuffed. The whole thing had been so wrenching she'd feared her mind, her whole world, would deform with the twisted force of it.
She'd never been a determined skeptic like Joseph; she'd been raised listening to Grandma Sandoval's tales of family ghosts, which as a child she'd believed as fact and as an adult had accepted as licensed but not utterly implausible. And you couldn't live out here without hearing rumors of mysterious and inexplicable events, wondering about the livestock mutilations, or sensing other presences in the rocks and shadows-it was one of the things she loved about this country. And yet, though she'd always been fairly open-minded about supernatural things, she would have described herself as a rationalist. Even two days ago, when she and Joseph had gone to meet Cree Black on Sandia Peak, she would have claimed a fairly secure belief in science and conventional medicine and the whole trend of rational, empirical Western thought since Aristotle.
But the events of the last few hours had busted all that up pretty good.
It was almost funny. Really, all she'd been doing for the last three weeks was continuing to live her mental habits, operating from her old paradigms. She was like that cartoon coyote, hurtling off a cliff and running in midair before he realizes he's suspended over a mile-deep canyon. As if the momentum of belief or habit or ignorance could defy the law of gravity!
'I don't believe in anything!' she called to Spence. His hide hitched at the sound of her voice, and he quickened his stride. She laughed bitterly at the realization and yelled to the empty land, 'I don't know what to believe! I have no idea what's real!' She wanted to laugh and cry and scream. She wanted to hit something, strike something and punish the world for its fickleness. For its unfairness in visiting this catastrophe on her. On Tommy Keeday, of all people.
The thought of Tommy brought her thoughts back a little. This wasn't about Julieta McCarty, she reminded herself, this was about Tommy. A beautiful child, a talented artist, a boy with a lot of potential that would surely be destroyed if they couldn't cure him. A boy who knew nothing about the psychodrama he'd walked into at Oak Springs School, the role he played in the principal's secret fantasies and neuroses. Who was not to blame and who must never know of any of it.
Spence was laboring now, still willing but getting tired. She spoke to him softly and brought him down to a trot. The big horse huffed and snorted, glad for a chance to get his wind back. Already they were three miles beyond school property and well onto McCarty Energy's Hunters Point coalfield. The land immediately around her looked the same, but a mile to the west a series of low, flat-topped ridges appeared, the spoil mounds from mining operations of thirty years ago. Even now, the desert vegetation had not returned to those dry slopes. She hated the sight of them-why had she come this way? She nudged Spence a little more toward the northeast.
She marshaled her thoughts. The gallop had tired her as well as Spence, burnt off the worst of the crazy energy. Principal, she reminded herself. Administrator. Head honcha. It's executive decision time: Where do we go from here?
Was there really any point in allowing Cree Black to work with Tommy? She'd been all but useless last night.
On the other hand, Julieta couldn't really blame her, given that she'd just about gotten her skull fractured as she'd rushed to help him. And no, actually, she hadn't been useless. Quite the opposite. If her psychic radar or whatever it was hadn't prompted her to go out to the corral, Tommy might have died, suffocating as his lungs labored to rebreathe each other's air. So they already owed her a great deal.
And Julieta had to admit there was something about Cree, some inner determination that she'd noticed at their very first meeting. She was a woman of about her own age and height, with medium-length brown hair full of
