outside the rainy Northwest.
When she had laid eyes on Glen's aerial photograph of the Change compound in Arizona's high desert, her stomach had clamped up. It had remained taut, day and night, for the entire time since then, and had begun to loose only when the dry air had actually hit her face.
Funny, she thought as she had a thousand times in recent years, how the disastrous case in Utah eight years ago, four weeks of tension and despair that had ended with her getting shot, had faded in her memory. Not only was the shooting itself wiped from her memory, with the hours before only vague and sketchy, but all the rest had illogically and inexorably bonded itself to the original disaster in her life, Texas, becoming a seamless whole. In Anne's mind, Abby's death blended in with her own shooting, as if hundreds of miles and the ten intervening years of Anne's survival counted as nothing in the eyes of catastrophe. The two pains had merged, the Utah community under investigation tended to blur into the Texas Farm that she and Aaron had joined, and the desert had become one place, an environment inextricably linked with terror and pain.
She had set out fully expecting to spend the coming weeks shouldering the burden of what the desert represented to her, but now that she was actually here on a log with the grit under her boots and the memory- laden smell of the scrub in her nose, the burden was gone.
The relief was a bestowal of grace she could not have hoped for, so unexpected was it. She felt like weeping with release, or laughing with the sheer joy of living. She did neither; she merely sat with all her skin alive to the night, feeling the cold air waking her up and renewing her.
A dog barked far away, and a rooster crowed with irritating frequency from somewhere closer. A point of light moved across the heavens, becoming an airplane bound for Los Angeles or Asia. A car grew and whistled past without slowing, and faded, and when the headlights were gone, Anne raised her face to the heavens and saw the moon being born.
A delicate sliver of bright new moon hung above her in the cloudless expanse of black sky, sharp-edged and brilliant among the hard points of a million stars. A new moon was a good omen, Anne decided—at least, Ana Wakefield was sure to think so. Half-humorously, she lifted her bottle of beer to salute the vision, but before she could put the mouth of the bottle to her lips, to her astonishment the moon dimmed, flickered, and disappeared. From one end up to the other Anne watched the darkness crawl over it and take possession, leaving only a faint light shadow, like the impression that a brief glare makes on the retina. It was difficult not to feel uneasy, impossible not to feel relief when the crescent shape crept back into view. Then it wavered again, and was gone.
She watched for a quarter of an hour, openmouthed and oblivious to the cold and the cramp in her neck as the delicate crescent first was there, then gone. Eventually, whatever it was coming between the moon and its sun—high mountains on the other side of the world? distant masses of clouds? or just the curvature of the earth itself?—cleared away, and the moon resumed its place in the heavens, eternal and innocent as if it had never given reason to doubt its solidity.
For a believer in omens this would have been a mighty portent, the infant moon struggling to find the light that gave it definition. Among primitive peoples it would be the basis for myths about moon-eating demons and cause for lengthy political and theological debates, used by opposing sides to prove both divine support and disapproval of some controversial action.
How would Ana interpret the vision? Anne wondered. A woman who had worked her way through the I Ching (both coins and yarrow sticks), the tarot major and minor, and the consultation of crystals on a string would not take the birth pangs of the moon lightly. Perhaps I should drive over and buy that damned rooster, Anne mused, kill it, and spill its entrails in an attempt to divine the future.
Oh yes; it was easy enough to recognize an omen, in thing was how to read it.
III
Calcinatio
calcine
without fusing in order
to drive off volatile matter
or to effect changes
Chapter Seven
From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)
The following morning Anne crossed the border into Arizona, and returned to winter.
Working her way south through California, she had seen a concentration of spring akin to the time-lapse film of an opening flower. In the Pacific Northwest the first bulbs had been pushing their determined heads into the cold; by northern California the almond blossoms were out; in the central part of the state the glorious full blush of spring flaunted itself from every apple orchard, every wisteria-draped fence, every front garden, and by the time Anne entered the desert it might have been a Portland summer.
Not, however, in Arizona. The only sign of burgeoning life Anne could see from the window of the roadside coffee shop where she sat with her hands wrapped around a hot cup of coffee was the spray of flame-colored flowers on the tips of the ocotillo cactus, and even those had tufts of snow weighting them down.
For the past half hour she had amused herself with watching snow flurries approach from the west. They began as a dark shadow on the distant rise of the highway, a clearly drawn line that advanced steadily toward her. The thin sunshine would be blotted out and a whirl of thick flakes would pat against the glass for a minute or two before the flurry swept on by, leaving the road clear but for another dark line moving down the far-off rise.
Driving conditions were disconcerting but not dangerous, as long as Anne took shelter among those other refugees from the northern winters, the trailers from Idaho and the recreational vehicles with Manitoba plates. They all lined up obediently in the slow lane, nose to tail at three miles above the speed limit while the interstate big-rigs thundered past on the outside, sucking at Rocinante and the other frivolous beings with the vacuum of their passing. What had driven Anne to seek the shelter and coffee of the dubious-looking restaurant was not hazard, but comfort: Rocinante's heater, a vestigial entity at the best of times, seemed to have retreated entirely into the shell behind the back bumper.
The coffee was stale, but the buckwheat pancakes Anne had ordered with so little confidence turned out to be fresh and fulfilled the requirements of their kind to combine a hearty mealiness with the miraculous ability to absorb more maple syrup than any other substance known to science. The cafe had even disdained the modern notion of miserly glass jiggers of syrup in favor of the traditional metal flip-top jug, so that the final bites Anne lifted with her fork were as thoroughly saturated as the first had been.
It was tempting to stay within reach of this unexpected oasis and use the anticipation of what the cook would do with other diner staples—chicken-fried steak, say, and apple pie a la mode—as a means of getting through the heater repairs (standing with her head in Rocinante's innards and her backside hanging out in the snow). However, it was not to be; much better to make use of the repairs later, when they could become something more than mere repairs.
With a sigh, Anne dropped a tip on the table, carried her tab to the register, and pushed back out into the winter.
Even with long underwear, her new yellow recycled soda-bottle pullover, a padded jacket, wool hat, and gloves, the cold was pervasive, and Anne stopped every hour to thaw her fingers over a cup of wayside coffee.
The original plan, Glen's plan, had been for her to pass through the town of Prescott and meet her local contact there. However, vague memory told her that Prescott was at a considerably greater altitude than the road she was on now, and a parking-lot conversation with some tourists getting out of a snow-laden camper had confirmed that yes, Prescott was picturesquely deep in snow. However, the couple assured her that the roads were
