"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. He could feel their warmth across the tiny distance.
All he had to do was make one infinitesimal move. How could he turn away from her? Max closed the distance with the softest kiss. Everything about this moment felt fragile, as if one wrong breath could shatter it.
Then Liz wrapped her arms around him, squeezing onto the seat beside him, and he realized he was wrong. There was nothing fragile here. Liz was strong, and warm, and vitally alive.
He wanted to get closer to her, even closer. He slid his hands under her shirt and ran them up the smooth skin of her back. Liz twisted around, trying to bring more of her body in contact with his. She deepened their kiss, inviting his tongue into her mouth, stroking it with hers.
A low groan escaped from his throat. Then Liz let out a yelp of pain.
Max broke their kiss. "What happened?" he exclaimed.
"I cut my hand. On the roll bar, I think. There must be a rough rivet or something," she answered.
"Let me see." He took her hand and studied it. "It's pretty deep. Let me heal it for you."
"It's like the day in the cafe," she said.
The day he had healed her gunshot wound. The day he had trusted her with his secret. The day everything had changed forever. Pretty much the best and worst day of his life. Until today. It was worse, but better, too.
Max took a deep breath and focused on making the connection he would need to heal the gash. Instead of the rush of images from Liz he expected, he got the same one again and again-the image of him with his eyes rolled back in his head.
Why wasn't it working? Why wasn't he in? Max took another breath. Think of Liz, he told himself. But he only got the same sickening image.
Liz eased his hand away from hers. "It's okay. It's no big deal. Do you have a handkerchief or something? We can just make a bandage."
Max ripped the bottom off his T-shirt and carefully wrapped it across her palm. "Will you be okay to drive?" he asked.
"Yeah." She slid back behind the wheel and pulled back onto the highway. The desert around them felt much darker and dangerous now, now that he knew he no longer had his powers.
"Looks like we're the last ones back," Alex commented as he pulled into the school parking lot.
Isabel didn't answer. He hadn't really expected her to. She'd been silent the whole drive back. So had he. Every time he thought of something to say, he remembered Isabel insisting that he couldn't understand. And whatever brilliant comment he'd come up with seemed way too lame to say.
He parked next to Max's Jeep, and they hurried over to the others. "We found the chicken rock," he announced. "But no sign of the compound," he added quickly before they could all start dancing and clucking.
"At least we're a little closer," Maria said. She pulled the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands, like she was freezing or something. Alex didn't think it was that cold out.
"If you want to assign us areas to search around the rock, I'm definitely up for going back out there," he told Michael.
Liz shot a look at Max. "Why don't we meet up here tomorrow morning instead?"
Alex took another glance at Max, trying not to be too obvious about it. Yeah, he looked about ready to topple. "Tomorrow's good for me," Alex answered.
"I was thinking we could hit the party at Corrine Williams's," Michael suggested. "It will have heated up pretty nicely by now."
"Do you want to?" Alex asked Isabel. He figured a little distraction might be good. He wondered if she was thinking much about what the akino info meant to her directly. Or if she was only thinking about Max right now.
Alex was definitely trying to keep his brain on the Max problem. If he started to think about Michael and Isabel… if he started to think about them dying, too, he'd end up getting himself locked in a loony bin somewhere.