He felt dazed. He'd found her, and might even be marooned with her. Or not. He stood and moved off toward his bedroll in the darkness to think.
Amaya quietly approached Raven as the group broke up. 'You don't seem as bitter as Ethan,' she observed.
'I just admit that I chose to come here.'
'You don't seem to be as shocked as us.'
Raven looked at her evenly. 'I've had more time to think about it.'
'Think about our betrayal.'
'I'm just a person who takes life as it comes. So should you.' Then she moved away.
The next morning the group split in two. Amaya, remote and lost in thought, elected to stay at Car Camp to nurse Tucker. Daniel and Ico, however, decided to accompany Raven and Ethan to find the remains of the transport.
'We're nuts if we let that bitch move out of our sight,' Ico muttered to Daniel as they set off. 'There's something more she isn't telling us. You're so pussy-blind you can't see it, but I don't trust that siren to tell night from day.'
'I hardly even know her, Ico.'
'Yeah, right. She seems to know you down to the color of your shorts.'
They walked northwestward, Ethan leading the way and happy to be free of the burden of pulling Tucker. He was back on their primary mission but still treated the newcomers as if they were unwanted, or as if there was some unspoken rivalry. He kept an emotional distance.
The pair had fled eastward from Erehwon, Raven explained as they walked, and the community would assume they were trying to cross the desert to get to the coast on their own. Members of the Warden's group deserted periodically, despite warnings of the trip's futility. Once out of sight of the compound, however, Raven and Ethan had circled back west toward Flint's crash site, stumbling on Daniel's party in the process. She seemed troubled by that coincidence.
'So what exactly are we looking for out here?' Ico tried to clarify.
'An emergency beacon,' Raven said. 'Something on the transport to call for help. All aircraft have one.'
'Why wasn't it triggered in the crash?'
'We don't know,' Ethan said. 'The Warden took some kind of transmitter but it doesn't work. Nothing electronic seems to work here.'
'So we're looking for something that does,' she said.
'Why would it work?'
'That's technical.'
He looked at her with dissatisfaction. 'Then what?'
'We call for help.'
'It would still operate after all this time?' Daniel asked.
'If it's standard, the batteries should last for a year.'
'You never told me you worked in aviation.'
'I never told you a lot of things.'
They walked on in silence. Finally Daniel addressed Ethan. 'What exactly happened to you?'
'I was coming here for the typical wilderness experience,' he explained. 'My transport crashed. I woke up still strapped to the bunk, half the plane gone, and everyone but the pilot dead. He unbuckled me, told me to wait, and went to the forward part of the wreckage I couldn't even see to get something. Then these strange people showed up- it was the Warden's convicts- and I ran. I fell, blacked out, came to. The pilot was missing. I think he told them they could get back if they caught me, but they couldn't. They let me live afterward because it was clear I didn't know a damn thing- or that if I did, I couldn't let it slip if I was dead. So the Warden took me back to Erehwon. There's a mix of convicts and refugee trekkers there, all of us confused. I thought I was stuck here forever until Raven came along.'
Daniel glanced at the woman who had intrigued him. She seemed to have discovered a way out of this exile when everyone else had failed. Interesting.
With Ethan recognizing the country with increasing confidence, they found the transport by noon. It was in two pieces. There was the intact tail where Ethan had survived, its metal frame glinting in the heat. Then a stretch of unmarked desert where the nose section had skipped ahead over a rise, followed by a sand furrow still seeded with debris. At its end was the burned-out hulk of the forward section of the aircraft, the fuselage ripped open to the sky.
Ethan hung back. 'Some of my friends might still be in there.'
'Yuck,' Ico whispered.
It wasn't the possibility of bodies that made Daniel reluctant to approach the forward fuselage. Rather, the derelict machine made clear just how completely cut off from civilization they now were. Somewhere in the sky above, satellites orbited. Somewhere across the heat-glazed horizon the sea broke, and out there ships ran and jets flew toward populated shores. But all that was across a gulf as impassable as the abyss between the stars, and instead of reassuring him of the reality of civilization, this burnt husk confirmed how far he was from it.
'It's not a sight to inspire confidence,' he said.
'Where one transport came, another might follow,' Raven countered. 'Come on, this is the way home.'
The group went cautiously forward. Despite Ethan's uneasiness, whatever corpses the transport had contained were long gone, disposed by scavengers and decay. One cockpit seat had disappeared where the pilot had ejected. The other remained, the instrument panel stained dark with what might have been the co-pilot's blood. It was the panel itself that interested Raven.
'See the empty place that held an instrument?' she said. 'That must be what the pilot came back for: a transmitter.'
'Which the Warden took and which doesn't work,' Daniel summarized.
'Yes. So now we look at the tail.'
It was a pillaged stub, some of its metal panels stripped for salvage and its seats uprooted. The absence of fire had saved Ethan's life and made that part of the wreckage valuable for salvage. Raven crawled into the rearmost recess and hunted, then backed out. 'The other instrument I'm looking for is gone too,' she reported. 'There's a hole where it's been removed.'
'Great,' said Ico.
'No, that's good. It fits my guess. I think the pilot gave it to Ethan.'
'How do you know that?'
'The pilot gave me something for safekeeping before we separated,' Ethan said. 'I was pretty groggy, but I knew he was anxious to get some other component and leave. He told me that what he was stuffing in my pack would keep us from having to walk to the beach, but I didn't understand what he meant.'
'So what happened?'
'He left and the convicts came, drawn by the smoke I suppose,' Ethan said. 'And he was screaming, and I was running for my life and trying to lighten my load…'
'You threw it away.'
'I didn't know what it was. I resented having to carry it.'
'He threw the damn thing away,' Ico repeated to Daniel. 'Unbelievable.'
'You'd better hope so,' Ethan said with irritation, 'or the Warden would already have taken the only way out of here.'
Daniel looked out the oval opening of the sheared-off tail at the desert. 'What if we can't find it?'
'That's not an option,' Ethan said.
They came back out. 'I'm looking for a box smaller than a shoe box,' Raven told them.
'Oh good,' Ico said, glancing around. 'That will stick out.'
Ethan pointed to some sandstone hills on the horizon. 'I ran that way and threw things into a ravine. We'll have to search there.'
As they hiked toward the hills, Flint's memory of the place began to come back to him. Here he'd left a GPS and range finder, he pointed, both long since pirated and scrapped by the Erehwon group to make metal tools.
