'Yes. Like Australia.' He turned then and smiled at her, suddenly feeling lightened at this encounter with the ruins. He hadn't been sure of his own reaction and now realized he missed none of this old world. His past held no allure for him, despite all the hardships in this one. 'I said I don't blame you for putting me here, Raven.'
'And I forgive you for throwing away the activator. The trip has been good for me. I admit it. So why is this so difficult?'
'Why is what so difficult?'
'Us.'
'Because… I'm in love with you without even being sure I like you. Because you won't love me.'
She sighed, saying nothing.
He watched her carefully. 'Ethan wants me to come back with you, you know.'
'He does?'
'He wants to give up his place on the rescue plane. He's falling in love with Amaya, and falling in love with Australia. It's beautiful here, far more beautiful than home. He wants to stay and send me in his place. Send me, to tell the world.'
'Would you?' She said it cautiously.
'I don't know.' He cocked his head, as if this were the first time he'd truly considered it. 'I don't know if anyone would listen, or care, even if they knew the truth. I don't know if they'd let me live to tell anyone.'
'I wouldn't let them hurt you, Daniel.'
'You already did, remember?'
She flushed, and he instantly regretted the retort.
'But that's not why I'm hesitating. I'm unsure because I've come to believe the planet does need a place for misfits like me. It always has.'
'You understand that?'
He moved away from the window, walking back into the cubicles. 'Not in the way you do. Come here. I want to show you something.'
She followed warily as if he were going to shock her with a pile of bones. But there was nothing like that, just a sheet of faded paper pinned to a cubicle wall. He pulled it off and gave it to her. 'Your institution.'
The paper was so aged it was hard to see. At first she thought it was something abstract, or a painted copy of the aboriginal designs they'd seen on rock walls. Then she realized it was a child's drawing. She squinted, looking closer. There were faint pencil lines on the drawing, forming two words.
For Daddy.
'It's not about economic systems, Raven. It's about the human heart.'
She blinked, flustered at this offering from a little girl long dead. The child would have been a woman now, with children of her own, looking ahead to grandchildren. Except she wouldn't.
'It's about letting people be themselves. Letting people be. This child didn't deserve her fate.'
'That's not fair.' There was a tremble in her voice that she hated. 'This city- this girl- might never have even existed without- '
'We have to go outside in order to get into our inside. Because if we don't then all that United Corporations stands for doesn't mean anything. It's just stuff, and disastrous mistakes, and little girls that end up killed by our own plagues in our mania to control our environment. We don't need an Australia as a dumping ground. We need wilderness to save us from ourselves, to remind us what's basic and simple and true.'
She squeezed her eyes shut again, the drawing fluttering to the floor. 'You have to look at the big picture…'
'That's why I don't know if I can go back with you, Raven. Because my heart doesn't know where it belongs.'
She was quiet for a while and then she spoke. Her voice was small. 'I'm sorry I can't say I love you. I don't know what I am supposed to say, to make you come back with me. I just want you to.'
'Why? I challenge everything you stand for.'
'To save the others.'
'That's not why.'
'I do care for them, you know. I do like them.'
'That's not why.'
She lowered her eyes. 'So I'm not alone.'
He stepped close, reaching out to grasp her arms. His grip was firm, his eyes intense as he looked into hers. 'Then say you'll stay here with me, Raven. Say you'll give it all up, for me. Say you'll stay in Australia. Say that and maybe it won't matter where I am, so long as I'm with you.' And then he bent to kiss her.
She stiffened again, but only for a moment. Then she was kissing him back this time, her lips open, her arms coming around him, her body pressing and then moving against his. He held her roughly, hungrily, his hands roaming to caress.
'I do love you, dammit,' she admitted fiercely when she broke briefly away. 'You know I do! I love all the mixed-up craziness that's in you, all the longing, all the desire. That's been the problem from the beginning!'
'Then it shouldn't matter where we are, should it?'
'No.' She sighed and kissed him again. 'It shouldn't.'
He took her hand and led her back to the musty stairs. Instead of descending, they climbed upward. It took two kicks to break open the door to the roof. Birds flew up, crying, but the couple found a corner away from their nests that was clean and warm, bleached deck boards providing a platform above the vinyl roofing. She knelt with him beside her, looking east. 'I wonder when we'll see the ocean.'
He reached over her shoulders from behind and began undressing her, watching the garments slide off her brown shoulders and mounding around the swell of her hips. Her nipples were hard, her belly trembling, and he caressed her torso as he kissed her, pulling the luxuriant fall of her dark hair aside to bare her neck. 'Say you'll live with me in Australia,' he murmured. 'Say you'll trade that world for this one.'
And with a moan she pulled him down on top of her, making a bed of their clothes on the wooden slats of the deck and promising nothingexcept, that for this moment, they were one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Ico Washington believed he knew what Exodus Port really was.
He hadn't found a geographic Exodus, of course. There was no bay on Australia's eastern coast that harbored an exit from this continental hell, of that he was sure. But there was a way to get back, Ico thought, a way that depended on exercising the mind more than the legs. You had to find a key to the lock, the answer to the riddle: that was the test of Outback Adventure. A test of wits! And in his case the answer was the transmitter. Whoever successfully signaled deserved to get back, and whoever did not deserved permanent exile. Every man for himself! Survival of the fittest! The orange-speckled cube that he'd safeguarded across half of Australia, and the battered transmitter that Raven had stolen, were- in combination- Exodus Port! With them he could not just escape, but return to the world of United Corporations a designated winner. Unless Raven got out from under the Cone and signaled first.
Right now Ico was in a world of losers. A dust-shrouded column of the crude, stupid, stinking, and dull. Rugard's Expedition of Recovery seemed to have developed some kind of perverse gravity, drawing in the desperate and cruel to make a small army, despite periodic desertions from its less-than-reliable ranks. People liked to belong to a group, Ico supposed. They liked being led. Plus, the vaguely understood promise of possible escape fired the growing mob like a promise of treasure. None knew, of course, that there was no room on a rescue craft for anyone but Rugard and himself. They'd realize that when the pair were gone.
Ico's conscience was not bothered by this planned abandonment because he'd come to loathe his allies. Familiarity had given him time to despise their tasteless jokes and vile nicknames and adolescent gang mentality. They deserved to be forgotten! They'd called him Psycho! And yet he was the only one who had brought them this far, he and the map that everyone had laughed at from the beginning.
Well, he'd leave them soon. Ico would win, he told himself, because unlike the others who were marooned,
