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But when she slept,
her brain changed. When she slept, she had no waking consciousness to
tie her to her past self. Chal liked the idea of being given a new
chance every day to create herself as a person. That was as religious
as she got.

When she would argue
with lovers, she told them that she didn’t mind going to bed
angry.

“I won’t
be the same person tomorrow,” she said, and she was usually
right. She would wake up refreshed, her brain settled down and not
flushed with adrenaline and all the other chemical compounds that
induced anger. She often wondered why she had been so mad the day
before. The answer that she found made the most sense was just that
it was a different version of her self that was mad.

Of course, sometimes
she would wake up and realize that the Chal she had turned into
didn’t care for the person sleeping next to her anymore. She
took this in stride, although she often wondered if there would ever
be someone who could catch her attention for longer than a few weeks
at a time. She had been criticized for her callousness, but Chal
thought this was misguided criticism. She was never cruel, simply
honest. It wasn’t her fault that all of her past relationships
had slid into boredom. The worst relationships were not those which
were rife with anger or sorrow, but those which wandered aimlessly
and ended up mired in impassionate routine.

It may have been the
type of man that she attracted, but she found nearly all of them
boring after a while, their sex life stalled into blank routine,
their conversations void of any spark of life. She had tried
counseling after one relationship with a man who had insisted on it
before letting her go. She went obediently to the first three
sessions and then quit.

“It’s
like trying to resuscitate a rock,” Chal had said when her
lover had begged her to try just one more session.

It didn’t
matter anyway to Chal. Tomorrow she would be a different person. If
the philosopher Locke was right, she couldn’t tell what she
would do next or who she would find herself attracted to. She would
just take it in stride, one day at a time. This worked for her, or at
least she told herself it did.

Now as she was
carried through the long, sloping tunnel, she felt her mind drift in
and out of the world and considered herself reborn each time she
opened her eyes.

One blink, one
lifetime. One person born, one killed.

She could do
anything, she thought hazily. She could wake up as anyone. In the
clouds of her mind, she yearned for something new, and did not know
what it was. Something else. Something that was not Chal the
lecturer, Chal the precocious daughter, Chal the great and famous
scientist.

In the recesses of
Chal’s consciousness, she found herself holding tight to the
man who was carrying her.

***

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

When Chal awoke she
did not know where she was. She heard a low roar coming from behind
her and when she wiped her eyes clearshe saw the stars. She blinked
hard, turning her vision to the side, and what she saw left her
breathless for a few seconds.

She was in the
cockpit of a small airplane, in near-total darkness, and Alan was
piloting.

“You’re
awake. That’s good,” Alan said. He seemed calm, and Chal,
scared as she was, allowed herself to breathe for a moment before
replying.

“Where are
we?” she said, her voice trembling.

“We are
heading west over a desert,” Alan said. “There’s a
road to the north of us that I’ve been following.”

“How–”
Chal said, then stopped. Her head hurt and she raised her hand to
touch it, wincing. There was a bandage over the wound. “How did
we get here?”

“You were
asleep,” Alan said. “I carried you out. There was a plane
just outside of the tunnel. I thought it would be faster than
walking.”

“A plane?”
Chal asked.

“I imagine it
was Dr. Fielding’s.”

She closed her eyes,
seeing Dr. Fielding again crumple to the floor as his clawed hands
beat spasmodically at his own head. She would never be able to wipe
the image out of her memory. “You know how to fly?”

“There’s
a manual in the side pocket,” Alan said. “It wasn’t
that hard to figure out. There’s a medical pack too. How is
your head?”

“It’ll
be fine,” she said. She was thinking about brain structures and
Evan’s preprogrammed capabilities. “How long have I been
asleep?”

“Around an
hour,” Alan said. “We’ve been in the air for fifty
minutes.”

An hour. They must
be flying over the Mojave desert, or maybe the Sonoran, depending on
how far south Alan had taken them. She looked down but could not see
anything at all. There should be a map somewhere. She rifled through
one of the packs in the back of the cockpit.

“There are
some pills for alertness. I’ve taken two so far, but I should
probably sleep soon,” Alan said.

Chal simply nodded,
but she was thinking of how quickly he had fallen asleep during the
last session. How had he stayed awake for over an hour? She darted a
close glance at his face. His eyes were rimmed red, twitching from
side to side. It was more than dangerous for him to be staying awake
for so long.

“Let’s
land,” Chal said.

Alan nodded. “I’ve
been considering it for the last few minutes, but I thought I’d
consult you first. There’s nothing down there but sand.”

“And? We can’t
land there?”

“It’s
not so much the landing,” Alan said. “It’s the
taking off afterwards if we damage the landing gear. And I’m
pretty sure we’d scrape off everything underneath the plane
landing on bumpy dunes.”

“Oh.”
Absently, Chal considered the neurological development that must have
allowed him such foresight. She continued going through the packs,
thinking of what they could do if they hadn’t any map. They had
to land somewhere, and soon.

“Here’s
a change of clothes,” she said, pulling a shirt out of the
pack, then a pair of pants. Alan was still stark naked, sitting in
the pilot’s seat, and she couldn’t help but be distracted
by his sitting so nonchalantly. “You’ll need them once we
get down .”

“I’m
just going to try to get us down first.” Alan smiled wanly.

She found the map
tucked into the side of her seat. The coordinates pinpointed their
location with remarkable precision. They were close to the California
border, which was good. One of her mom’s friends had immigrated
nearby into America, and she was the one Chal most wanted to see now.
Lucia would be able to help them if anyone could. Chal just hoped
that they would make it there.

“Let’s
turn south,” Chal said. “There’s an old highway we
can land on not too far from here.”

Her face was pale
but at least now she had a plan.
They
had a plan.

***

The last time Chal
had been down to this part of the country, she had been struck by how
desolate it was. Most of her time was spent in lecture halls and
laboratories, hopping from one big city to another. For her entire
adult life, she had surrounded herself with people. Now she looked
down at the vast expanse of sand as an entirely alien thing.

Of course when they
came close to the old highway it was not as desolate as Chal had
hoped. In the darkness she could see pinpoints of light underneath
them, headlights of travelers going somewhere in the night, or
escaping from somewhere.

“Dammit,”
she said. “We can’t land on the road.”

Alan looked wearier
than ever, his eyes bloodshot, and he reached for the pills. Chal
stopped him. She had seen the medicine’s ingredients, mostly
amphetamines, and they were not healthy for anyone to use three times
in a row, let alone someone whose brain was just developing.

“I can’t
keep flying like this,” Alan said. “I need to take
another one.”

“We’ll
land now,” Chal said.

“But the
road–”

“We’ll
land in the desert,” Chal said, looking worriedly at the map.
“Where we’re going isn’t that far.” Fifty
miles, maybe sixty. But even a short distance was long in the desert.
It wouldn’t be good to depend on outside help, but it looked
like that was what they might have to do.

“Where are we
going?” Alan said. He turned the plane away from the highway so
that they were running parallel to the road. Chal could see the
desert floor dimly through the wisps of clouds.

“To a friend’s
house,” Chal said. “To someone who might be able to help
us.”

Alan nodded, his
eyelids drooping half-shut. He blinked and shook his head, trying to
stay alert. The plane nose turned down, and the low, level sand
stretched out before them. They dropped below the clouds, then
further. In the dusky sky, they crept downward, the black ground
looming larger before them until Chal felt as though they would be
swallowed by it.

She was calm until
Alan brought the plane down to about a hundred feet above the ground,
and then she started to panic. The sideways wind made the small
plane’s wings shake, and now that she had a background
perspective to compare it against the dipping wings seemed certain to
smash into the ground. Her ears were filled with the motor’s
roar. Without thinking, she reached over and clasped Alan’s arm
in one hand. The other hand braced against the cockpit dashboard.

“It’s
okay,” Alan said. The cockpit lights flashed on his face, red
and blue.

“What?”
Chal said.

“The
conditions are adequate,” Alan said, raising his voice
slightly. Chal seemed to hear him from a hundred miles away over the
roar of the plane.

“Adequate?
What does that mean?”

“Better than
poor,” Alan said. The plane dropped down with a sudden jerk,
and Chal’s stomach rose upward in her chest.

“Better than
poor.”

“But not as
good as fair.”

Chal’s face
had never looked so horrified.

“It’s
okay,” Alan repeated.

She shook her head
in mute agreement but stared out of the window at the rapidly
approaching ground.

From the sky the
desert had seemed like one smooth dark surface, but as they got
closer and closer Chal could see the looming shapes that made up the
desert floor. Craggy rock outcroppings dotted the landscape, and the
ground was speckled with thick sagebrush, pocketed with ditches and
gullies. There would never be an open space that was clear to land
on. They were going to crash. There was no way they could make it.
Her fingers were clenched white.

Still Alan dropped
the plane lower, and Chal held her breath as the wings dipped and
tilted. The desert rushed past them underneath at incredible speeds,
rocks and brush and cacti whizzing backwards. Alan flipped the
switches and the wing flaps opened, slowing their descent and making
the roar of the wind ever louder.

The floor jolted
under their feet, and Chal was sure they had hit a rock until she
heard the familiar whir of the landing gear.

Closer and closer,
until they were mere feet about the desert floor. There was a
horrible pause during which Chal thought they would be dashed to
pieces against the ground, and then the plane’s wheels hit the
sand. Touched it, first, bounced back up, and then all of the wheels
were on the ground and the plane was rumbling across the desert.

Chal had thought the
plane descent was terrifying, but at least in the air the turbulence
was only felt as a brief uneasiness in her body. Now, though, they
were bouncing hard over rocks and brush. On the left, Chal saw a
rocky, brush-covered berm emerge from the camouflage of the desert
floor.

The brush rose up in
front of them, and she averted her eyes, bracing herself for impact.
Alan stomped down on the right steering pedal, pulling the plane into
a careening curve. The wing clipped the high brush on the berm, the
branches grating across the aluminum surface of the plane. Chal shied
away from the cockpit window, her knees rising instinctively to
protect her body, curling up into a fetal position.

They pulled out of
the berm and into a gully, and this time Alan had no chance to react.
The plane crashed down sideways, stopping with a jerk as left wing
caught a rocky outcropping, and the cockpit glass shattered on Chal’s
side, raining shards of plastic and metal into her lap.

“Ohhhhh.”

Alan groaned,
turning his head to one side, and Chal’s heart wrested in her
chest. She had been thinking of them as partners in this escape, but
only now did she realize how much she considered herself dependent on
Alan. And above all this rose her acute need to protect him. He was
worth millions, tens of millions, after all, and she was sure that
someone – the U.S. Military Intelligence Division, perhaps, or
a Singaporean spy – would be out to find Alan and retrieve him.
Kidnap him.

“Are you
alright?” Chal asked. “Are you injured?”

Alan shook his head,
but he was already falling sideways into a control panel. Chal pulled
him back, and his head bobbed gruesomely to one side before finally
flopping over onto his shoulder.

“Alan?”
Chal’s voice was strained with worry. She opened one of Alan’s
eyes to check for signs of trauma.
Please, don’t let him be
in a coma
, she thought.
Please don’t let him have a
concussion. Please no internal bleeding. And please, oh please, any
of these rather than that he were dead. Please don’t let him be
dead.

“Not dead,”
Chal said, after a brief look under Alan’s eyelids. “Not
dead. He’s not dead, Chal.” She leaned back in the
cockpit and looked up at the stars overhead. Her seat was tilted
sideways and she slid sideways, her head lolling against the
seatbelt.

“Not dead,”
she repeated, letting her forehead rest for one moment against the
strap. “Just sleeping.”