I reached the bottom and couldn’t take another step.
I bent over double and braced myself with my hands on my knees.
“Stand up straight, with your hands on your head,” Egara said. “It will expand your lungs and help you recover faster.”
I did as he suggested but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell the difference between standing like this and collapsing on the floor the way I wanted.
Egara marched up and down the valley as if our run over the sand dunes hadn’t affected him at all.
I hated him.
He peered at our surroundings, hands perched on his hips, frowning.
“I swear it’s supposed to be around here…”
“What… is?” I said around gulping mouthfuls of oxygen.
“A brook. According to the map, there should be one right here.”
“What… map?”
“The one my lawyer gave me before I was sentenced. It’s supposed to be right here.”
He stamped his foot, making a crunching sound.
Not what you would expect from very fine grains of red sand.
He got down on his front and peered closer at the rocks.
He fingered them and ran them through his fingers.
“These aren’t regular rocks.”
“No, they’re what… you would expect at the… bottom of a running… stream.”
He peered over at me, smiling, and dropping the remainder of the tiny pebbles.
“You said you were a historian. Not a geologist.”
I shrugged, finally able to stand without panting.
“I was a good science student.”
“Come on.”
He followed the narrow trail of rocks that ran between the sandy mountains.
“Maybe if we follow this, we’ll come to the stream I’m looking for.”
Our footsteps crunched on the gravelly pebbles and wound through the valley.
I was only glad it sloped downhill and not up.
I let gravity do most of the work, managing to catch myself with each step and avoid tumbling over flat on my face.
“I was thinking,” I said, finding my rhythm, “what happens if the guards come looking for us?”
“With any luck, we’ll be gone by the time they catch up to us.”
I hoped that was the case.
There were many rumors about this desert.
They called it the “Desert of Death.”
No prisoner who stepped foot into it had ever stepped out again.
I sincerely hoped we would not be joining their number.
Egara came to a stop around a blind corner and I almost crashed into him.
Before us, in a shallow pool of clear water that originated somewhere further up an adjacent slope, was a single stream of water.
“Oh, thank God,” I said.
I fell to my knees and placed my hand in the water.
I splashed it over my face and filled my mouth.
A hand slapped me on the back, forcing the water from me.
I coughed and glared up at the figure towering over me.
“What did you do that for?” I said, shaking off my wet hands.
“Don’t drink it. There’s no telling what the source of this water is. Maybe all water is clean and clear where you come from but not on this planet.”
I peered closely at the water with a measure of fear.
“You’re saying this water is bad?”
“I’m saying we don’t know. Here. Use this.”
He reached into his pocket and came out with a straw.
“How’s this supposed to help?” I said.
“It’s a filter,” Egara said. “It will clean the water as you drink it.”
I placed it to the water’s surface and glanced up at him to check I was doing it right.
He nodded.
I sucked the water through the straw, and already, I could taste the difference.
I wondered what I’d almost swallowed earlier.
It was dangerous enough drinking from an unknown source back home or when you were in a foreign country, never mind a foreign planet.
What had I been thinking?
As I slurped on the water, Egara got to his knees beside me and used his own straw to drink.
Sated, I leaned back on my ass and rested for a moment.
Egara got to his feet and tucked his straw away.
“Come on. We have to get a move on.”
“Can’t we rest here for a minute?”
“No. We have to keep going. That’s if we want to reach the shuttlecraft as soon as we can.”
I sat up.
“What shuttlecraft?”
It was news to me.
“The one my gang put here for me to use to escape after I got free of the prison,” Egara said.
I had no idea he had everything planned out.
By the look of him, I never would have thought he was capable of planning.
He looked much more of a fly by the seat of his pants kind of guy.
I was so exhausted, I got up in stages, as no part of my body was ready to carry out the entire movement just yet.
I rocked to one side, lifted one leg, placed a foot, and used the bent knee to hoist myself up into a standing position.
I stood up straight and wavered uncertainly before catching my feet.
I extended the straw to Egara, who waved his hand.
“Keep it,” he said. “You’ll need it later.”
“Why would I need it? You said we should reach the shuttlecraft soon.”
“Soon, but not immediately.”
I tucked the straw in my pocket.
I was excited at the idea of escaping this moon.
I had lucked out with coming across Egara when I had.
Or was I?
The truth was, I’d been shot at, chased, almost raped and kidnapped, and that wasn’t taking into account the situation I now found myself in.
Even if meeting him hadn’t been the greatest stroke of luck, he was still the best shot I had at getting out of the prison.
What other way was there to escape than this?
And why did he decide he would take me with him?
I was nothing but a liability.
I had no fighting skills, had no resources.
I was just another hungry mouth to feed.
It was then that I heard a rushing sound.
The stream was too small and pathetic to produce that kind of sound unless it widened around the next bend and turned into raging rapids, which I very much doubted.
I peered out at the sand dunes but no wisps of sand whipped off their peaks from a strong wind.
What the hell?
“Get down!” Egara said, stripping off his shirt.
“What?” I
