Maria felt as if she'd stepped on an elevator shooting straight down. She was wrong. 'No, the guard was a lot younger,' she told Michael. 'Sorry.'
Michael dropped back, and the Caddy roared off. 'Guess that would have been a little too easy,' he muttered.
Maria felt like reaching over and touching his shoulder or his arm, just some little touch so that he knew he wasn't alone in all this. But she kept her hands locked in her lap and changed her focus to the task at hand.
Maria pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window and tried to concentrate every bit of her attention on finding the rock, checking the shape of every one she saw. Not-chicken. Not-chicken. Not- chicken.
About a hundred not-chickens later, Michael pulled into the desert and stopped the car. 'Did you see something?' she cried.
'No, I felt something. A burst of fear,' he answered.
'From Max or Isabel?' Maria demanded. She knew that the aliens could feel each other's emotions.
Michael shook his head.
'Then who? Oh, Ray. How strong was it? Do you think he's okay? Should we go find him?' Maria asked in a rush.
'Wait. Let me focus a minute,' he answered.
Maria held perfectly still, the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.
'I don't know who it is.' Michael sounded amazed… and disturbed.
'How can you be sure what you felt isn't from Ray or Max or Isabel?' Maria asked. 'It's just raw feeling, not thoughts or anything, right? All three of them have to be having pretty extreme emotions right now. Maybe that's why it feels different.'
'It's, I don't know how to describe it. It's like different people have different flavors,' Michael answered. 'I don't recognize this one. It's not from anyone familiar.'
'Flavors?' Maria repeated.
'I can't explain it better than that,' he told her. 'It's not something you can really understand if you haven't experienced it.'
Maria nodded. I bet Isabel would understand, she thought. Is he wishing she was here with him right now?
'Wait.' Alex pulled the Rabbit to a screeching halt. 'Does that look like a chicken to you?' He pointed to a rock off to the left.
'That?' Isabel squinted. 'A frog, maybe. Aren't frog legs supposed to taste like chicken?'
'You're looking at it from the wrong angle.' He pulled her closer to him, breathing in her spicy perfume. 'See, it's like a chicken pecking the ground. That's its beak.'
'You're right.' A huge smile broke across Isabel's face. 'You're right! I think we found the chicken rock!'
Alex threw open his door, and they both raced over to the rock. It looked even more like a chicken up close. He hadn't been expecting to find it the first time out. He'd had his doubts that they'd find it at all. But here it was! The chicken rock! He let out a loud cluck and started beating his arms like wings. Isabel started clucking, too, and scratching her foot against the ground. They circled each other, clucking, pecking, scratching, and laughing. He was laughing so hard, his sides started to cramp. But he didn't care.
Max was going to live! Isabel was going to live! Michael was going to live!
Alex stopped clucking and grabbed Isabel. He swooped her off the ground and spun them both in fast, dizzying circles. He was obviously in the midst of some stress/relief-from-stress hysteria. But he didn't care! It felt too good.
'Put me down,' she half laughed, half gasped.
He reluctantly slid her to the ground. She spun in one more slow circle, her laughter trailing off, her smile disappearing.
'What? We found the chicken rock! Yeah!' he cried.
'But where's the compound?' Isabel asked. 'I don't see anything but desert.'
'Maybe underground?' Alex offered, starting to feel idiotic for getting excited over a rock. It wasn't celebration time yet. 'We should look for cracks in the desert floor, like the entrance to your cave.'
'You can't see the cave entrance until you're practically standing on top of it. And we have no idea how far Valenti drove past this rock,' Isabel answered. 'This is totally hopeless.'
'No, it's not. We'll get everyone out here. Concentrate the search,' Alex argued, trying to convince himself as much as he was her.
'It's still going to take too long.' Isabel's voice rose into a shriek. She clasped her hand over her mouth as if she couldn't believe that sound had come out of her. 'Sorry,' she muttered.
'Don't be sorry,' Alex reassured her. 'I understand.'
'You can't understand,' she said quietly, without meeting his gaze. 'I know you want to. I even know you try. But you can't.'
'That's it. We've covered our assigned section.' Liz turned the Jeep around and headed back toward town.
Max's eyes felt tired from the strain of staring out into the desert. He let them drift up to the stars. They were so bright, so close to the earth. He found the sight of them soothing somehow.
'A lot of them are part of binary pairs,' Liz commented, catching him stargazing. 'Even through a telescope they can still look like a single star. Things… they just seem to belong in twos,' Liz continued.
He made an oh-interesting kind of noise, without turning toward her. He wasn't liking the way this conversation was going.
'What happened to you, it's made me think about the just-friends thing.' Liz suddenly pulled the Jeep off into the desert and stopped.
'We need to get back,' Max said. He lowered his gaze from the sky but still didn't look at Liz. If she tried to make him talk about how he felt about her, he would lose it. The bubble would get ripped away all at once, leaving him defenseless. Skinless.
'This is important,' she insisted, getting that stubborn sound in her voice. 'When you told me we had to be just friends, you said it was for my own protection.'
'It was, it is,' Max answered, without looking at her. 'Getting too close to me can bring Valenti down on you- you know that. And you know what he's capable of. He killed Nikolas right in front of us.'
'I know,' she told him. 'That's not my point. My point is that you've been keeping us apart because you wanted me to be safe. But it's you who… who are in danger right now. Not from Valenti. Not from anything you even knew existed.'
'But what does that have-' he began to protest, finally turning to face her, struck as always by how beautiful she was with her sleek hair, perfectly formed lips, and dark eyes.
'I'm trying to explain. Just listen,' she said.
Just listen. As though that was nothing. As though her words weren't slicing through his heart.
'We don't know what is going to happen to either of us,' she went on. 'You could get hit by a car before your akino even reaches its… conclusion. I could get leukemia or something. Neither of us knows how much time we have. I just want to know why you won't let us be together for whatever time we do have. Why, Max?'
Max tilted back his head and stared up at the stars. How could he answer that? How could he explain something that hardly made sense even to him anymore?
'I wonder which ones are pairs,' he said, stalling.
'We are,' she answered softly. 'We shine with the same light.'
He lowered his head and looked at her again. 'You're right,' he admitted. 'But what if-'
'Shhh.' Liz unfastened her seat belt and leaned toward him until her lips were just a fraction away from his.
