by S. A. Beck
“Yeah,” Jaxon replied.
She didn’t need to be told that detail. It was at least 120 degrees by day, sometimes more. If they tried to walk to the highway in the daytime, they wouldn’t make it more than five miles, and the highway lay a lot farther to the west than that.
Jaxon looked out over the desert, the dunes lit faintly by starlight and rolling like a dark, rumpled blanket to the horizon. Not a light was to be seen except in the sky, which was brilliantly clear. She had never seen such a sky. Each star was a sharp pinpoint of light, and there were so many of them that she had trouble picking out the constellations. High above arched the Milky Way, a faint band of countless stars.
She found herself staring at the sky a lot lately, wondering about her heritage. The scientists Yuhle and Yamazaki insisted the Atlanteans were human, perhaps the original race of humanity, but Jaxon wasn’t so sure. Perhaps the Atlanteans came from space. There was no shortage of books that said so. Sure, those books were trash, but perhaps they were onto something. She’d always been interested in UFOs and unexplained phenomena, and even though she didn’t really believe in all that stuff, thinking about it made the world more interesting.
And now she was the unexplained phenomenon.
The beauty of the desert sky made her forget her problems for a moment, but the awful reality soon came crashing back down on her. They were in the middle of nowhere. From the maps Jaxon had seen yesterday—which were also in one of the Land Rovers—she knew that a remote, dusty highway lay about fifty miles to the west. Fifty miles of walking through the Sahara desert in August. Even if they made it, walking by night and rationing their water, there was only a small chance someone would actually drive by before they died of thirst. That highway was one of the most remote stretches of road in the world.
And even if someone did come by, Jaxon might prefer to take her chances in the desert. Grunt and Vivian had told her all about Mauritania. There was an active slave trade here, and Bedouin gun runners, and some terrorist group called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb. Plus, there was a rebel army of people called the Tuareg who wanted their own nation, and the national Mauritanian army wasn’t too friendly either.
Since they had crossed from Morocco illegally, the army would assume they had ulterior motives for being here, which was true enough. Explaining to them that they wanted to cross their country illegally so they could enter Mali illegally in order to avoid the attention of the United States government was not the kind of excuse that would go down well with the North African version of Border Patrol.
So she and Vivian were alone. Alone was safer, but being alone wouldn’t save them. The only people they could trust in this desert might already be lying dead under its surface.
Jaxon cringed, drawing up her knees and putting her forehead on them. No, Otto couldn’t be dead. He had to be out there somewhere.
She had been cold to him for the last couple of days. He had been hanging out with that crazy tattooed mercenary, Grunt, too long and was turning into a gun nut. Thought he was a hero in some cheap action movie. Otto had been so kind and accepting before.
I guess the situation has changed him, she thought. It sure has changed me.
She looked back at some of the things she had done in the past month, like hunting criminals in Los Angeles in the middle of the night. That had really gotten out of hand. Her friend Brett had been killed because she had gotten used to the adrenaline rush of danger. Then she’d been offered the chance to find her heritage by going on this crazy trip, and she’d said yes despite her misgivings. Now she might have killed a bunch more people.
Her head slumped in regret and weariness. She’d never had a happy life, never fit in, and now it looked as if she was a curse on everyone around her.
Giving the desert a final mournful look, Jaxon turned in for the night.
Despite her fear and the uncomfortably cramped interior of the tent, she drifted off quickly, the first fragments of a dream sparking in front of her eyes. The Forever Welcome Group Home wavered in front of her. Therapy with the kind but clueless Dr. Hollis. Snotty remarks from the bully Lizzie. Glimpses of the TV room, the cafeteria. Why am I here? Long ago. So long ago. A few months but a lifetime. Jaxon rose out of sleep to half consciousness. I’m in the desert. I might die. Sleep. The group home pulled her back.
Otto. Jaxon and Otto running off to the greenhouse to talk and get away from his oh-so-perfect and oh-so-flawed parents. A smile. A kiss.
Then an attack. Bulky men trying to grab her. Flames. She could see the greenhouse burning. The red flare of gas igniting, spreading fire across the wooden structure.
The flames brightening. Fading. Brightening again.
Jaxon’s eyes snapped open. The light was real. The side of her tent was illuminated in a bright-red glow.
“Vivian! The flares!” she shouted, untangling herself from the sleeping bag. She fumbled with the zip and scampered outside.
Just in time to see another red flare shoot high up in the desert. It looked as if it was coming from about a mile away, and as the flare gun shot, she caught a snapshot glimpse of a vehicle and a couple of figures. Otto? Grunt?
“Hey!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, waving her arms even though she knew they couldn’t see her.
“Hey!” she shouted louder. Maybe in the still desert air, with nothing to block the sound of her voice and no sound but a gentle breeze rustling across the sand, her voice might carry to them.
Then she remembered the flashlight. Of course! She pulled it out of her pocket.
She was about to turn it on when a hand grasped her wrist and another hand clamped over her mouth.
“Stop shouting, and don’t you dare turn that on,” Vivian whispered.
She held Jaxon’s mouth for a moment then let go.
“Why not? They’re right there,” Jaxon objected.
“Our flares are yellow,” Vivian said.
Jaxon stared at her, unsure what she meant.
“Those aren’t our flares,” Vivian explained. “Now help me bust down the tent. We have to get on the other side of this dune in case they have night-vision scopes.”
Vivian turned and started packing everything up as fast as she could. Jaxon stared at her until realization dawned.
It had not been Otto and the others.
Someone else was out here.
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