was the light on the camera that pushed her back, its sharpness piercing like a scalpel, making her not see not understand so much as feel, way down in the base of her brain, that Karyn was being done, not doing.
White teeth. “Come on in—we’re just getting started.”
The light stabbed at her, pushed her back. She took two backward steps from the door of the tent before she turned and ran.
21
When she turned from the blaze of white light in the tent door, Jamal was there behind her, spot-lit, his skinny arms outstretched and his face blanched to a featureless pallor by the blast of illumination. Had he herded her, manipulated her into this place?
“You—” she said, “You—” The blur of his face resolved as she came nearer, but she couldn’t think what to put behind that You—accusation, endearment, curse? The light went out suddenly, and for a second or two Julie couldn’t see anything at all, then forms begin to pick themselves out of the darkness, blue-black sky outlining the cliff, the silvery shapes of the bikes where they were parked. And nearer, Jamal’s spidery silhouette, an arm reaching toward her, and she thrust out her hand, to deflect him, or to grasp—she didn’t really know which. Their fingertips barely brushed as she rushed by, and that contact tingled, shimmered like a déjà vu. Go, Jamal hissed—she was already past him now.
Jamal had turned back toward the tent. “Just let her go, Marko.” And Julie was thinking that he meant her to escape from the situation altogether, but how? She didn’t even know how to start Jamal’s little scooter, the only one of the three bikes she might have been strong enough to manage, and it could never outrun the Harleys anyway, and they were out on the empty desert with nowhere to hide, unless she went up the same way on the ledges around to the other side of the cliff, where the hawk had been that afternoon—
“Too late,” Marko’s voice was reasonably calm, a reasonable tone stretched over strain. “She’s in this far, look it, she’s got to come all the way.”
Julie turned back. Jamal had rooted himself in the sand, knees bent and his feet set apart. Marko crouched in the mouth of the tent, holding a flashlight now, with a softer beam than the spot on the camera, the light stain fading as it spread across the sand behind Jamal’s boots.
“Julie’s not in this.” Jamal said. “She never was.”
“If that’s how you feel,” Marko said, “you dumb-ass sandnigger, all you had to do was keep her away.”
Then Marko’s attention moved to her, though Julie wasn’t sure that he could see her where she hesitated, high on the balls of her feet, a little beyond where the pool of flashlight failed. “Come back, Jule—we’re not gonna hurtcha! It’s all. . . . It feels good, once you get into it, y’know, like Karyn is.”
Something in that scared Julie a lot more than she had been scared before and the run impulse was shooting up her legs, erupting in her spine, and still somehow she was frozen in place, transfixed by Marko’s wolverine eyes, if he could actually even see her, when Jamal was blocking most of the light. Then Marko suddenly charged up out of his crouch, raising the flashlight like a club, and it was one of those six-D-cell maglites like the cops used, too, but Jamal went down on one knee and as Marko rushed him he tossed a palm’s worth of sand into Marko’s face, and that broke the momentum. Marko dropped the light and covered his eye-sockets with both hands, calling out blindly, you stinking camel-fucker, I’ll kill you when I catch you, you—
Julie ran. All she could hear was Karyn screaming, the two-note scream that switched itself on at ball-games or car wrecks or concerts or if Karyn saw a snake—it just kept on going like a siren or a car alarm till something shut it off. She reached the cliff and scrambled up the ledges, tripping and crouching, using her hands. Her eyes had recovered from the spotlight blast, and now she could see well enough in the feathery light of the moon, but she supposed the others could see her too.
22
Once, Julie had been riding up an escalator while Jamal (was it Jamal?) was riding down. She didn’t know him then, not really, but the same impulse struck them both at the same time, so that they reached their hands across the gap between the up stairs and the down. Their fingertips brushed with a feathery tingle, for one light instant before the machinery carried them each away on a separate orbit. As if some other life had swung just close enough to hers for that faint touch, then veered off. She didn’t look back after they had passed. The escalators ran in a well of glass walls, and the afternoon sun came pouring through, bathing everyone in a flood of golden light.
The herd of animal persons swirled into the opening at the end of the great hall, which she was now approaching—she was guided by a force she felt inside her, though that force was not her own. Her bare feet fit securely into heel prints that led her through the portal now. The horned being she’d expected to see was not there. She touched the back of her own head with her fingers, and saw again the image of Julie at the bottom of the shaft, lying in the bluish-white glow of her cell-phone screen. Where had the animal persons gone? She had seen them all streaming through the opening into this small round chamber, but now they were nowhere to be found. Her vision fractured, and the pattern of dots streamed in a spiral—she thought that the dots must be the eyes of the animal persons, which had lost their bodies but were still regarding her.
Then they were gone, and her vision steadied. On the curving wall before her she did see a series of little horned heads—no, they were handprints, negative images, a black paint surrounding the pallor of the stone, so that the hands seemed to glow a little, like the phosphorescent plastic stars stuck to the ceiling above her bed at home. One print seemed to attract her hand magnetically, the left one, and when she laid it there it fit so perfectly there was no line around it. Her left hand disappeared entirely into darkness as complete as the velvet black of a starless sky; it sank a little way into soft stone.
23
She ran for the bikes before she realized that she had no way to start one up, and the Harleys were too heavy for her to handle anyway. The big tent had gone dark now, and from its shadow came the shrill two notes of Karyn’s repetitious scream, and the low grumble of Sonny’s voice, trying to shut her up. Marko lunged toward her, a silent bulky shadow, and Julie dodged behind his Harley. Her jacket still lay across the saddle where she had left it in the heat of the afternoon. Black vinyl, torn and cheap; she couldn’t afford leather. As Marko rounded the bike and came at her again, she snatched it up by one sleeve and lashed the chrome studs into his face. She had no strength, and the jacket no weight to make any real impression on Marko, but maybe a stud had caught him in the eye. He fell back against his bike, one hand rising to his cheekbone, and the bike collapsed under him. Marko dropped with it to the sand, air oofing out of him as his tailbone slammed down.
Julie ran for the cliff and scrambled up the ledges, tripping and crouching, using her hands. The jacket encumbered her but for some reason she didn’t want to let it go. She stopped long enough to tie it around her waist by the sleeves. Someone was climbing up after her, though, but not Marko, not yet. He was still struggling to get his bike upright in the loose sand.
Julie stopped, winded, on the ledge below the first rock shelter. The pale moon sailed through the sky like a paper coracle. Karyn’s scream had subsided to a whistling gasp. Sonny stood with her outside the big tent; he had wrapped the Indian blanket around her and draped his arm across her shoulders, almost tenderly.
There was someone climbing toward her—she heard scrabbling on the rocks . . . though
