But not just the river had changed. The quality of the light, the feel of the stone ledge beneath her, everything—the whole place had become both more and less real. The most grotesque of the exaggerations were gone, but when Renie moved her head quickly, there seemed to be an infinitesimal lag. And there was something else. . . .
She was distracted by !Xabbu moving. His eyes were open, although he did not yet seem to see her. She put her head on his chest, felt it moving, listened to his heart.
"Tell me you're all right. Please."
"I . . . I am alive," he said. "That is one thing. And I seem to be alive . . . after the world has ended." He struggled to sit up. She got off him. "That is another thing," he said. "A very strange thing."
"There's something else," she told him. "Feel your face."
He looked at her with surprise. The surprise deepened as he felt along the side of his jaw, let his fingers move out onto his chin and up over his mouth and nose. "I . . . feel something there."
"The mask," she said, and suddenly could not help laughing. "The mask from the V-tank. I've got one too! Which must mean we can go offline again." But even as she said it, she thought of something. "Jeremiah—Papa—can you hear us?" she called. She said it again, louder. "No. For whatever reason, we don't have communication with them yet. What if there's something wrong with the tanks?"
!Xabbu shook his head. "I am sorry, Renie, I don't understand. I am . . . tired. Confused. I did not expect to feel all the things I have felt." He rubbed his head with his hands, a gesture of weariness so unfamiliar that Renie could only stare for a moment. She put her arms around him once more.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Of course, you must be exhausted. I was just worrying, that's all. If we can't speak to Jeremiah and my father, we don't know that the tanks will open. There are emergency release handles inside, but. . . ." She realized she was almost as tired as !Xabbu. "But if they don't work for some reason, we'd just be stuck in there." The idea of being trapped inches from freedom in a pitch-black tank filled with gel, after all they had already survived, made her feel queasy.
"Perhaps we should . . . wait." !Xabbu was having trouble keeping his eyes open. "Wait until. . . ."
"A little while, anyway," she said, pulling him toward her. "Yes, sleep. I'll keep watch,"
But the warm, reassuring solidity of his head on her chest quickly drew her down as well.
She came up again slowly, her lids gummed together and so hard to open that for a panicky second she was certain they had awakened in the tanks after all. Her fog-headed thrashing woke !Xabbu, who rolled off her and thumped down onto the ledge.
"What. . . ?" He raised himself on his elbows.
Renie looked around at the now-familiar stone pathway, the rock wall behind them, the shadowed empty expanse beyond the ledge. "Nothing. I . . . nothing." She squinted, shook her head, looked again. The river had stopped glowing—it was now only a dark scratch at the bottom of the pit—but something else was creating a warm, pinkish-yellow light which spilled across the stones where the child-thing had crouched and waited.
"There's something shining down there," she said.
!Xabbu crawled forward and peered down. "It comes from a crack in the rock wall—there, to the side of the river." He sat up. "What can it be?"
"I don't know and I don't care."
"But perhaps it is a way out." He seemed already to be recovering some of his natural bounce; by contrast, with her adrenaline no longer flowing, Renie felt like she had been given a beating by experts. !Xabbu pointed up the path. "Look at how far it would be to climb back up."
"Who said anything about climbing up? We're going to wait until Jeremiah or my father know we're ready to come out. And if we don't hear from them, well, I suppose at some point we'll take the risk and do it ourselves. So why the hell would we care whether there is another way out?"
"Because it might be something else. It might be a threat. Or it might be our friends looking for us."
"What, with flashlights?" Renie waved her hand at the idea.
"Then you stay here and rest," he said. "I will go and look."
"Don't you dare!"
!Xabbu turned to her, his expression surprisingly serious. "Renie, do you truly love me? You said that you did."
"Of course." He had startled her, scared her. Her eyes burned a little and she blinked. "Of course."
"And I said the same to you. And it is a true thing. I would not stop you doing something you felt was important. How can we live together if you will not show that respect to me?"
"Live together?" She felt as if whoever had beaten her up before had come back for a last sucker punch.
"Surely we will try. Isn't that what you want?"
"Yes. I guess so. Yes, of course, I just. . . ." She had to stop and take a breath. "I just haven't had a chance to think about it much."
"Then you can think while I go look." He smiled as he rose, but he seemed a little distant.
"Sit down, damn it. I didn't mean it that way." She tried to order her thoughts. "Of course, !Xabbu—of course we will live together. I couldn't be without you. I know that. I just didn't expect to have this discussion in the middle of an imaginary world."
His smile was a little more genuine this time. "We have not had any other kind of world lately in which to discuss things."
"Come back, please." She put out her arms. "This is important. We have never been together—not as lovers—in the real world. In some ways it may be as strange and difficult as anything we've experienced in this . . . not-real world."
"I think you are right, Renie." He was solemn now.
"So let's start with the basics. We seem to be stuck here, at least for now. Whatever is making that funny light doesn't seem to be going anywhere. We've been here for hours and it hasn't done anything to us. It's not getting brighter—or even dimmer for that matter."
"These are all true things."
"So instead of arguing about some new piece of virtual foolishness, why don't you come here and hold me?" She was worried, she realized, but she was also hungry for his touch. They had survived countless horrors. Now she wanted something better. "We have a ledge. We have time. We've got each other. Let's do something about that instead."
He raised an eyebrow. She could almost have sworn he was embarrassed. "You city women are not shy."
"No, we're not. How about you desert men?"
He sat and leaned toward her, put his hand around her neck and gently pulled her toward him. She decided he wasn't that embarrassed after all.
"We are very healthy," he said.
She had slept again, she realized, this time from a happier sort of exhaustion. Her eyes drifted open and she made a slow inventory of her surroundings. The stone, the empty expanse, the distant sky—nothing seemed to have changed. But of course, in a way, everything had changed.
"Do we count that as our first or our second time?" she asked.
!Xabbu lifted his head from her breast. "Hmmm?"
She laughed. "I like you this way. Relaxed. Is this how a hunter acts when he's had a big meal?"
"Only a meal that good." He slid upward and kissed her jaw, her ear. "It is funny, this kissing. You do so much of it."
"You're picking it up," she said. "So—first or second time?"
"Do you mean before—when we found each other in . . . in the great dark?"
She nodded, pulling at the coils of his hair with her fingers.
"I don't know." He lifted himself above her, smiling. "But we still have another first time to go!"
She had to think about it for a moment. "Real bodies. Jesus mercy, I'd almost forgotten. That certainly felt real."