The sun set behind their backs, the monoliths black stubs in the distance now, and they marched on into dusk. There was no question of stopping. They walked as the moon came up, the desert lit like an old black-and- white movie, and held their direction by keeping the Southern Cross on their right hand. It was so quiet they could hear the squeak of sand under their feet. At midnight they came to the bank of a dry wash where ghost gums overhung the sandy channel like adults leaning over a cradle.
And there they collapsed and slept, fallen carelessly to the ground like leaves. The four of them slept in a cluster, huddling instinctively for warmth and reassurance, and were unconscious from exhaustion before anyone had a chance to comment on their geometry.
Ethan roused them shortly before dawn. They wordlessly wolfed down a few mouthfuls of cold food, drank, and pushed on. They didn't dare light a fire yet. A rhythm came into their flight. They walked hard for about an hour, rested five minutes, and then pushed hard again. They began to cross a series of flat pans of featureless clay. 'Dry lakes,' Raven guessed. 'They probably flood in the rains.' White salt glittered on the cracked mud.
At midday they crawled wordlessly into the shade of a cluster of ironwood trees to nap restlessly for two hours. Then they hiked on, walking again until midnight, their conversation mostly monosyllabic. The rocks of Erehwon had slipped permanently below the horizon. They saw no one, heard nothing. They were alone again, four adventurers in a desert wilderness, with no idea where they were or precisely where they were going, except east. It didn't matter. Walking was a substitute for talk.
When they stopped that night their weariness was so complete that it kept them from immediately falling asleep. They were brittle with tension. Ethan refused to sit after he dropped his pack and simply looked out over the dark desert, his shoulders hunched, his face gloomy, his body shivering slightly from the long hours of exertion. Raven sat slumped forward and pressed into the pack on her lap, her hair falling around her face like a cowl. Daniel's muscles were so tired that he watched his thighs tremble, tendons jumping under his skin like snakes.
It was Amaya who again broke the traumatized silence. 'I think we should talk about Tucker,' she said.
No one answered again.
'If we don't, we aren't going to make it.'
Ethan turned, his arms around himself. 'What about Tucker?'
'Our guilt.'
'What guilt?'
'That we're alive and he's dead.'
'We don't know for sure that he's dead. And it was his decision to be the rear guard.'
'Not guilt,' Raven interrupted. 'Fear.' She hadn't looked up and the voice seemed to come from deep inside her, as if issuing from a cave. 'That we'll all end up like him.'
'You mean dead,' Ethan said.
She didn't reply.
'We know we shouldn't have let him stay behind alone,' Amaya persisted. 'We shouldn't…' She stopped, sighing hopelessly.
'Have built a bomb?' Daniel guessed.
Amaya looked away.
'If you hadn't we'd all be dead or worse,' he said. 'You didn't take Tucker's life, you saved ours. We were in a pretty desperate situation. We still are.'
'Because we threw away our means of escape,' Raven amended hollowly, still not looking up, her voice exhausted. 'Used it like a rock, to hit someone.'
The rebuke irritated him. 'Your means of escape.' He said it bitterly. 'After you let me be lowered into a trap you knew was about to be sprung.'
'That's not fair,' Ethan told Daniel sullenly. 'She didn't know what this little irate friend of yours would do until it was too late. We'd met as a group and agreed as a group that she and I would go. And it's no secret why you might prefer to leave the activator behind. You threw it all away because…' He stopped in frustration.
'Because we've never been a group and never truly agreed. Raven has been setting us up from the beginning and so have you, never telling us our true situation until the last minute and using us like game pieces to get you back home. You turned us against each other. You turned Ico. Tucker's almost certainly dead. You've made a goddamned mess of the whole situation and now you can just sit in the middle of it like we have to. We walk to the coast, or stay in Australia, together.'
'That's unfair!' Ethan shouted. 'You'd already be dead without us!'
'Daniel, I was trying to help you,' Raven added with a groan. 'Help you get back, where you could do some good.'
'Why?' he challenged her.
'Why what?' Her reply was weary.
'Why get back? Why are you trying to achieve what United Corporations obviously doesn't encourage: our return? What if your bosses are right, Raven? What if I really belong here? What if you belong here?'
'Don't be absurd. Rugard belongs here. Not me. Not… us.'
'Why are you even here, Raven?'
'I had a mission. I wanted to see.'
'No you didn't.'
'It's for the best, Daniel. It's always for the best: I believe in them. It's all I have to believe in. I was going soft and getting confused, and so by checking the pilot's fate and getting the electronics I'd prove myself and either be confirmed in my mission or abandon it. I'm being tested, just like you. The problem is, you've turned a test into torture. We're more than a thousand miles from where we need to be.'
'Are we?'
Raven looked at him with exasperation. 'Yes. It's a long walk to the beach.'
'What if this is where we need to be?'
'What do you mean?' Amaya asked.
'What if we don't get back, ever? Could we make a life here? Find meaning here?'
'In that lunatic's prison?' Raven scoffed.
'No, not there. Not even here, exactly. But in Australia. There have to be more habitable places than this on the continent, if people truly lived here. What if we could find one of them and start over?'
'Haven't you had enough privation and savagery yet?'
'There have to be ruins we could use for salvage. New adventurers arriving with needed skills. Maybe we could turn the tables on United Corporations and stay by choice, creating a new colony as radical as America was, or the old Australia. It could be the utopia they pretended they were sending us to. We'd start over, but we wouldn't make the mistakes they made. Lives would have more meaning. We'd always be asking why, instead of how much.'
'Stay in this wilderness?'
'Stay for what I came for. To truly live life.'
She looked at him in wonder. 'You've gone insane, haven't you? You didn't throw the activator away, you thrust it away. You've burned our ships so we can't turn back, like Cortes in Mexico. You haven't learned a thing by coming here.'
'I've learned to keep asking why. You're the one who taught me that.'
Raven looked hopelessly out across the desert. 'I don't think I see what you seem to see out here.'
'Now you'll have time to.'
She took that as a challenge. 'No I won't. And by the time we get to the coast you'll be begging to come back with me.'
'Great,' Ethan muttered, watching the two of them.
'I said he'll be begging, Ethan. I didn't say I'd take him.' For the first time she allowed a slight smile. 'He's unreliable.'
'Unpredictable.' He looked at her wryly. He was mad as hell, but he still wanted her. The talking had helped, somehow.
'Co-dependent,' Amaya corrected.
It was true. As frustrated as they were with each other, they were forcibly linked and shared a simple goal:
