Within six strides he was walking, holding his ribs, grimacing, hunched forward, gasping for air. He’d gone perhaps seven miles, he thought. Wickie was going to be really ticked off if Sam Leaped out right now and left the body for its rightful owner in this condition.
At least he was too winded to be angry any more. And now he had to walk all the way back.
Next time, he thought wryly, he should try to scream and shout, or at least run in circles. That way he’d at least end up where he started from.
Well, he wasn’t here to prevent Davey from suffering from FAS. He’d have had to Leap into Davey’s unknown mother twenty years ago, and probably the Leap would have to have lasted the duration of her pregnancy—he shook himself convulsively. Once was enough, thank you; the thought of remaining in a woman’s body for the duration of an entire pregnancy was almost enough to start him running again. He couldn’t imagine how women did it. Over and over again, some of them.
Some things man was just not meant to understand.
So if it had nothing to do with Davey, what then?
And where the hell was Al Calavicci?
It was getting dark. The rare car that passed caught him in its headlights, spotlighting him like a deer and whizzing by, spattering him with the small stings of gravel and buffeting him with displaced air.
He could feel his heartbeat slowing down. Respiration was returning to normal. He thought about taking his pulse and decided not to bother. He seemed to be getting a lot of exercise this Leap, anyway. He wondered whether Wickie would be grateful.
He wondered whether Rimae would be, too. But he decided not to pursue that line of thought, since that seemed to be what was leading to all this sweating stuff. It wasn’t the way he usually reacted, but then, he hadn’t been himself lately.
Laughing hollowly, he trudged back up the road, back past the delis and ski shops and boutiques. He hadn’t been himself for as long as he could remember, but with the state of his memory, that wasn’t saying much, either.
If it wasn’t Davey, and it wasn’t Rimae, what was it? Kevin? Bethica?
Bethica?
He paused at the light, putting out a hand to support himself on the pole and using the other to scrub the sweat from his face with the hem of his T-shirt. About three more
miles to go, he calculated. It might as well have been three hundred. He couldn’t drive himself, or this body, any farther, not with any kind of speed. After a minute or two the panting stopped.
He couldn’t seem to get a grasp on this Leap. He was doing a lot of sweating, and getting some music in, but that seemed to be about it.
Headlights spotlighted him again, and a truck pulled up beside him. He looked up to see Kevin grinning at him from the driver’s-side window.
Oh, yeah. He’d been doing some fighting this time around, too. And it was beginning to look like he was going to be doing some more. He straightened up slowly as the truck pulled around the corner into the wrong lane, blocking his path, and the driver’s door opened.
“Hey there, Wickie.”
There wasn’t anyone else in the truck, which surprised him. He wouldn’t have expected Kevin to challenge him without an admiring audience. But audience or no, Kevin was getting out of the truck and facing him.
“Hey there, Kevin.” He was glad he had his breathing under control, though the after-dark breeze of an early mountain summer was beginning to chill him. He wanted to keep moving. If he did, Kevin would interpret it as a victory.
He supposed he could live with that, but he wasn’t sure Wickie could. But he didn’t see any point in getting into another wrestling match with his self-appointed antagonist.
He stepped around the boy and started up the slope toward the Polar Bar. He wasn’t particularly surprised when Kevin reached out and grabbed his shoulder.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Sam exhaled deeply. “I’m going home. It’s late.”
“You and I have something to settle first.”
Sam still hadn’t turned around to face the boy. “I thought we already settled it,” he said. “Come on, Kevin. Haven’t you done enough?”
It was the wrong thing to say; he knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but there was no way to call them back short of Leaping into himself in Wickie’s body and putting right his own mistake. Which didn’t seem
too likely. Kevin’s fingers were digging into his shoulders. Looking, he realized almost a moment too late, for the nerve center that would paralyze his right arm.
He dropped out from under Kevin’s hand and took a long stride away.
"I’m not interested in getting into a fight,” he said.
Instead of charging as expected, Kevin stood there and grinned at him. “You will be,” he said. “Maybe not right now, but you’ll be interested one of these days.”
"You think so?”
"I know so. I don’t forget.” Kevin turned his back on Sam and paused, as if daring him to do something, and when Sam didn’t take him up on the unspoken challenge he got back into the truck and started the engine.
“Real soon now,” he shouted above the revving engine. "Wait for it.”
The truck roared up Ski Line Drive, and Sam lifted his hand to protect his eyes from the gravel.
“You could at least have given me a lift,” he muttered.
"Kids got no respect these days.”
He was beginning to sound like Al, he thought.
But where the hell was Al anyway?
Verbeena Beeks tapped the point of a pencil against
