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***

They had eaten
quickly, their energy replenished by the meal of rice and beans.
Lucia apologized again and again for not having meat, but Chal’s
body seemed to crave simplicity, and it was more than enough.

As they ate, Chal
noticed that Alan ate silently, his attention wholly focused on the
meal in front of him. He seemed to savor every bite of food, but
still his plate cleared quickly.

“Thank you,
Lucia,” Alan said, blotting the napkin to his lips and tucking
it aside.

“Yes,”
Chal murmured. “This was wonderful.”

“It is
nothing,” Lucia said. “But we have much to do before I
can help you.”

After taking a
Polaroid photograph of each of them, Lucia led them to the guest room
that doubled as a library. She left quickly, claiming that she needed
to go to the village to pick up materials for their passports.

In the room books
lined every wall and cranny, piled up on the tables. It was strange
to see so much paper. Alan was curious, wanting to read everything
there, but it was getting late and they were both tired.

Chal thought back to
her childhood. Lucia had told the children story after story, and
Chal always wanted to hear more. Her stories would always begin
realistically, usually with two girls playing. Then something magical
would happen, and the girls would be absorbed into the fantasyland
that Lucia had conjured up for them out of pure imagination.

A story was
something you created, but it was also something that created itself.
You begin by planting a seed, a situation, a chapter one. The story
grew and wove itself together, backwards and forwards. Sometimes it
grew the way you wanted it to and sometimes one vine would grow apart
from the others and have to be retrained onto the desired path. And
sometimes, just sometimes, you let the vine grow, to see if it led to
a treasure in the sky.

Chal lay down on the
bed and soon Alan joined her. It wasn’t until she heard the
sound of his breathing slow down and become even that she allowed
herself to nestle her body against his for warmth. As if by instinct,
his arm rose and came around her, cradling her into his chest.

Chal was safe. The
world was outside, chasing them, but in this small room there was
nobody but the two of them. She tucked her chin down into the crook
of his shoulder and fell fast asleep.

***

They woke up to
Lucia shaking them awake.

“Here, child,”
she said, thrusting a dress at Chal. “You cannot leave dressed
like this.” She handed Alan a battered suitcase. “Your
passports. Also some food. Other things. Quick, get up!”

“What’s
happening?” Alan said.

“There were
men in the village as I was leaving,” Lucia said, a spark of
fear in her eyes. “They come with guns, I saw them under their
jackets. Their cars, too – the plates were strange, all
numbers. Government cars.”

“What should
we do?” Chal said. Her first instinct was to run and hide, and
she felt frozen. Seeing Alan in danger made her numb with fear.

“Take my car,”
Lucia said. “The airport is only fifteen miles north.”
Chal pushed her fear aside and began to undress.

“Up the
highway?” Chal said. She had stripped down to her underwear,
but the air of urgency made any possible embarrassment disappear.

Lucia shook her
head. “They are sure to be there, waiting to block the road. Go
around.”

“You drive,
I’ll need to go through the documents,” Alan said,
handing her the keys calmly. Chal didn’t know how he could be
so calm in these circumstances.

Chal turned to
Lucia. “How will you get your car back?”

“Don’t
worry,” Lucia said. “Just go, go!”

Shaken, Chal pulled
Lucia’s dress over her body. It was a deep burnt orange, the
fabric light and silken against her skin. They hurried out to her
car.

It was an old,
rusted station wagon and it took Chal a few tries before the ignition
finally caught. She pulled out backwards onto the dirt road and waved
goodbye to Lucia. Lucia smiled and motioned for them to leave,
shooing them away with both hands.

Chal shifted into
first gear and let the car rattle forward, the smell of kerosene
billowing from the air conditioner vents. A modern vehicle this was
not. Rolling the window down, she turned off of the road onto the
desert. They would be able to circle around the town and get back
onto the highway farther up, hopefully missing the government men.

They had guns?
Chal’s eyes were wide, her entire body now awake and raring
with adrenaline. The car bumped up over the curb, the entire car
frame creaking, and for a moment Chal thought the motor would stall
and die. She caught the clutch and eased onto the gas. To her relief,
the engine shook and then revved nicely, propelling them up and over
the low dune and back out into the desert.

It was a bumpy ride,
although Chal did her best to avoid the myriad rocks that appeared in
her path. In the grey dusk it was hard to make out the terrain, and
sometimes she dropped the car into gullies that she did not see
before it was too late. Biting her lip, she concentrated hard on the
ground in front of her.

They circled around
the town, Alan looking through binoculars toward the center. The
buildings from a distance blended into the dim landscape, their walls
daubed with shades of brown and red.

“There’s
no sign of the government cars,” Alan said.

“I’m
not sure if that’s good or bad,” Chal said.

“At least they
aren’t on top of us already,” Alan said.

“I’m
going to start angling us toward the highway,” Chal said. “You
think that’s okay?”

“Sure,”
Alan said, his eyes glued to the binoculars. “Sure, I think
that’s okay.”

They bumped their
way across the cracked desert floor. The low chaparral crunched under
the tires and Chal winced at every large rock that made the car
shiver. The suspension was completely shot, and the rattling of the
car was almost too loud for Chal to bear.

It was a blessing
when they reached the highway and Chal eased the station wagon onto
the road, speeding up. The car’s engine squealed as she
increased the speed, shifting into fourth, then fifth gear. Fifteen
miles. That was nothing. They would be there in no time, and then –

The police car was
behind them and had its siren blaring before she saw it come out from
behind a dense cluster of brush. The circular whirring of the LED
siren flashed in the rearview mirror.

“Shit,”
Chal said. Her foot jammed down on the pedal, and the car whined,
reluctantly speeding up.

“What are you
doing?” Alan asked.

“What should I
do?” Chal said. “I’m trying to get away.”

“In this
thing?” Alan laughed, and his laugh was so incongruous that
Chal found herself relaxing her shoulders slightly.

“It’s
not a government car,” Alan said, looking back. “They
probably just caught you speeding.”

“They might
still know,” Chal said. “What if–”

“We can’t
outrun them in this car,” Alan repeated. He put his hand over
hers. Chal breathed out.

“Ok.”
Her heart was racing, but she let up on the pedal. In the rearview
mirror the siren flashed red and blue. She brought the car over to
the side of the road.

The policeman came
over to the car.

“Identification,
please,” the policeman said. Chal dug into the suitcase pocket
and pulled out the passport Lucia had made for her. The name written
on the front was Lillian Fraser. It looked normal.

The policeman peered
at the passport, then back to Chal. The radio on his hip crackled to
life.

Unit 217, come
in, over.

The policeman handed
Chal back her wallet and stepped away from the car, taking out his
radio. Alan watched with intense focus as the man listened, then
looked up at them. There was a strangeness in his eyes.

Alan opened the car
door and was over on the other side before Chal could say a word. He
had pulled the pistol out and had one finger over his lip, motioning
the policeman to be quiet. The man’s hand hung in the air by
his ear, the receiver still bellowing orders.

Chal gasped. She
watched as the policeman raised his hands, his eyes wild with fear.
He obviously hadn’t expected this to be a dangerous stop, and
he was too young to know how to handle it. Alan unhooked the police
radio from the man’s belt and set it down on the ground,
kicking it away for good measure.

“You’re
going to let us go,” Alan said. “Do you understand?”

The policeman
nodded, perspiration beading on his forehead. Alan took his handcuffs
and pulled the man’s arms behind his body.

“Please don’t
hurt me,” the policeman said, his voice trembling.

Alan took the keys
to the police car and threw them as far as he could out into the
desert. Chal watched the keys sparkle in a wide arc and then skitter
across the desert floor, disappearing into the rocks and dust a long
way away.

Alan pointed in the
opposite direction. “Start walking.”

“Please,”
the policeman said, “please don’t hurt me.”

“I’m not
going to hurt you,” Alan said gently. “Just keep walking
that way. A thousand steps, and then you can come back.”

The policeman
nodded, eyes bright with fear. He nearly tripped over a crack in the
asphalt, but caught himself. He looked back over his shoulder once as
he strode away, eager to be away from the dangerous criminals he had
stopped.

“Don’t
look back,” Alan said. “Just keep walking.”

The man was almost
out of sight before Alan returned to the car.

“We probably
don’t have much time before they come to find him,” he
said.

“I’ll
drive fast,” Chal said. Alan looked over at her, one eyebrow
raised.

“Okay, okay,”
she said, smiling. “Not too fast."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Although Chal was
jumping at the sight of every man in a suit, they made it through the
small airport without issue, except once at the scanning station.
Chal tried to look calm as she stepped onto the sensitized pad, the
sensor fan’s arms whirring around her. The standard face
scanners were trained to identify emotions on the faces of passengers
in order to better detect terrorists, but they were not linked to the
national identification database, or at least they weren’t
supposed to be. Chal held her breath as the scanner passed over her,
but no alarms sounded.

It was only a few
seconds before the metal arms whisked to a stop, but to Chal it felt
like forever. Her senses were heightened, and she heard the air
whisper between the fan blades. She looked back toward Alan, and saw
him staring back at her dispassionately. She wanted to reach out to
him, to never be separated from him again, not by anything.

Time seemed to slow
as she watched the blades pass by and obscure him from her vision in
an alternating pattern of real life and reflected image. The metal
blades mirrored her figure back at her, a blurred and distorted
reflection, in between her glimmers of his face. She tore her gaze
away and quickly strode forward out of the scanner, forgetting her
passport on the counter.

“Lillian? Mrs.
Fraser!”

It was only when the
airline worker caught up to her and touched her on the arm did Chal
jump back with a start.

“Sorry to
scare you, Mrs. Fraser. It’s just your passport. You left it.”

“What? Oh,
thank you,” Chal said, taking her passport back from the
airline worker.

“No problem,”
the worker replied.

“No problem at
all, Mrs. Fraser,” Alan echoed, once the airline worker was out
of hearing. “Will that be all?”

“It had better
be,
Mr. Fraser
,” Chal said. “I can’t take
too much more of this.”

“Pity,”
Alan said, looking at her with a fond expression. “I rather
like your alias.”

“You like me
as a Lillian?” Chal asked, teasing.

“As a Mrs.,”
Alan said.

Chal’s eyes
widened slightly. Alan simply grinned.

They waited
impatiently in the airport terminal, sitting in an inconspicuous
corner as the news played over the many full-screen walls. Most of
the news reports dealt with the destruction caused by the earthquake.
Chal caught only snippets of the newscasters.

“..biggest
Phoenix has ever seen...”

“...projecting
over two
billion
dollars of damage. That’s right, two
billion
...”

Alan had his arm
around Chal, and Chal leaned into his body. The warmth made her
drowsy in spite of her fears, and her head lolled against his
shoulder. He pulled her close to him, planting a gentle kiss on her
temple.

Chal felt herself
respond to his touch and wondered at the reaction.

“Are you
ready?” Alan’s words were full of meaning.

“Yes,”
Chal said. It was an automatic response, but she felt something
inside of herself cinch together in excitement.

“Yes,”
she said again. “Are you?”

Alan’s body
was warm against hers. “I think so,” he said. She didn’t
know where his reluctance came from, but then the intercom announced
that their plane was boarding and his hesitation, if indeed there had
been any, was gone.

As they waited in
line, Chal caught a familiar face out of the corner of her eye and
twisted her head. She froze. Lieutenant Johnner’s face was
projected across the main news screen.

“Alan,”
she said, tugging him out of the line.

“ –
lowing an investigation of the destruction of a military base near
Phoenix. Several high-level military officials have been accused of
treason and selling military intelligence to Singapore. Coming on the
heels of Singapore’s declaration of war, this revelation has
increased tension between the United States and India, who has pulled
their consulates out of Washington for the time being...”