"Yes! Now will you please tell me about Rane?"
"She was with Stephen," Jacob said. "They looked at the cows and fed the chickens and Stephen ate some stuff in the garden. Stephen jumped with her and she didn't like it."
"Jumped?" Keira said.
"From some rocks. She liked him." Keira looked at Eli, questioning.
"Stephen Kaneshiro is our bachelor," Eli said, heading for the house again. Keira followed automatically. "He saw the two of you and asked about you. I aimed him at Rane."
"And she likes him."
"I'd say so. This little kid reads people pretty clearly." "Is she with him?"
"She could have been. Stephen said it was too soon for her, so she's alone. Kerry, she's all right, I promise you. Beyond infecting her, no one wants to hurt her."
"Keira," Jacob said into Eli's ear.
Eli laughed. "Yeah," he said. He looked at the boy. "You know it's time for you to go to bed. Past time."
"Mom already put me to bed."
"I figured she had. What'll it take to get you to stay there?" Jacob grinned and said nothing.
"The kids are more nocturnal than we are," Eli said. "We try to adjust them more to our hours for their own protection. They don't realize the danger they're in when they roam around at night."
He held the door open for her and she went in. "There are bobcats in these mountains, aren't there?" she asked. "And coyotes?"
"Jacob's in no danger from animals," Eli said. "His senses are keener than those of the big animals and he's fast. He's literally poison to most of the smaller ones-especially those that are supposed to be poison to him. No, it's the stray
humans out there that I worry about." He stopped, looked at his son who was listening somberly. "Keira, you take your
medicine, then go back to your room. There are some books in there if you want to read. I'm going to put this one to bed."
She obeyed, never thinking there might be anything else she could do. She caught herself feeling grateful to him for not hurting her, not even forcing the disease on her, though she didn't know how long that could last. Then she realized she was feeling gratitude to a man who had kidnapped her family. Her problem was she liked him. She wondered who
Jacob's mother was. Meda? If so, why was Meda trying so hard, so obviously to get Blake Maslin into her bed. Perhaps
he was there now. No, Jacob's mother must be someone else. She sat staring at the cover of a battered old book- something from the 1960s-written even before the birth of her father: Ishi, Last of his Tribe. She had intended to read, but she had no concentration. Finally, Eli appeared again to take her to her father.
That meeting was terrible. It forced her to remember that her liking for Eli could not matter. The fact that she was not afraid for herself could not matter. She had a duty to help her father and Rane to escape-and that terrified her. She did not underestimate the capacity of Eli's people to do harm. Her escape, her family's escape would endanger their families. They would kill to prevent that. Or perhaps they would only injure her badly and keep her with them in agony. She had had enough of pain.
But she had a duty.
"I shouldn't have let you see him," Eli said.
She jumped. She had been walking slowly back to her room, forgetting he was behind her. "I wish you hadn't," she whispered. Then she realized what she had said, and she was too ashamed to do anything but go into her room and try to shut the door.
He would not let the door shut.
"I thought it would be a kindness," he said, "to both of you." And as though to explain: "I liked the way you got along with Jacob and Zera. They're good kids, but the reactions they get sometimes from new people ..."
She knew about ugly reactions. Probably Jacob knew more, or would learn more, but walking down a city street between her mother and her father had taught her quite a bit.
She reached out and took Eli's hands. She had been wanting to do that for so long. The hands first pulled back from her, but did not pull away. They were callused, hard, very warm. How insane to expose herself to the disease now that she
knew she must at least try to escape. Yet she almost certainly already had it. Eli and her father had deluded themselves into believing otherwise, but she knew her own particular therapy-induced sensitivity to infection. Her father knew it
too, whether or not he chose to admit it.
The hands closed on her hands, giving in finally, and in spite of everything, she smiled.
PAST 17
Ironically, Eli, Meda, and Lorene interrupted someone else's attempted abduction. Off Interstate 40, they found a car family or a fragment of a car family raiding a roadside station. There were few stations in the open desert these days. They offered water, food, fuels from hydrogen to fast-charge for electric cars, vehicle repairs, and even a few rooms for tourists.
"Stations help everyone," Meda said as they watched the fighting. "Even the rat packs usually leave them alone." "Not this time," Eli said. "Hell, this isn't our fight. Let's see if I can get us out of here."
He could not. The Ford had apparently been spotted. Now, as Eli swung it around, the car people began to shoot at it. The Ford's light armor and bulletproof windows were hit several times, harmlessly. The bullet that hit the left front tire
should have been equally harmless. Instead, the tire exploded. At the same moment, a high-suspension, tough Tien
Shan pickup came across the sand from the station to cut the Ford off. They could not get back to the highway.
Eli stopped the Ford, and grabbed Gabriel Boyd's old AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. It wasn't the newest of old Boyd's collection of antiques, but Eli liked it. He slipped off the safety, and looked the Tien Shan over. Its too-large, crudely
cut gunports presented the best targets. He aimed through one of the Ford's own custom crafted gunports. The Tien
Shan's big openings were bull's-eyes. The barrel that emerged from one of them seemed to move in slow motion.
Eli fired. The rifle barrel in the Tien Shan jerked. Eli fired twice more, rapidly. The barrel in the Tien Shan slid backward, stopped, then remained still, pointed upward. Eli held back his last two rounds, waiting to see what would happen.
The Tien Shan sat silent. An instant later, Meda fired her rifle. Eli looked around, saw a man fall only a few feet from the Ford. On the opposite side of the car, Lorene fired her husband's rifle at a nearby rise. At first, it seemed she had done nothing more than kick up a puff of dust. Then a woman staggered from concealment, arms raised, one hand clutching her rifle by its barrel. As they watched, she fell face down into the sand.
Meda, who had probably been the best shot of the three of them before the disease, took aim at one of the other cars. She fired.
Again, nothing seemed to happen, but Eli swung the Ford around and charged the two cars. He had literally seen the bullet go through a window that was slightly open. And he could see through the tinted glass of that window well
enough to know that Meda had made another kill. Others in the car had apparently had enough. The car turned and fled into the desert, followed by the third, unscathed vehicle.
"Amateurs!" Meda muttered, watching them go. "Why'd they have to come to us to get themself killed?"
Eli glanced at her, saw that she was actually angry at the car family for forcing her to kill. She was almost crying. "Idiots!" she said. "Big holes cut for shooting! Open windows! Kids!"