Jack frowned, uncertain if he should remind Diana. But that was stupid. Of course Diana would know if she’d read Sam or not.
“Do it as soon as you can,” Caine said. “You saw the way everyone looked at him? And when I asked for nominations, his was the first name mentioned. I don’t like it, his being Nurse Temple’s son. That’s a bad coincidence. Get a read on him. If he has the power, we may not be able to wait to deal with him.”
Lana was healed.
But she was weak. Hungry. Thirsty.
The thirst was the worst thing. She wasn’t sure she could stand it.
But she had been through hell and survived. And that gave her some reason for hope.
The sun was up but not yet touching her with its rays. The gulch was in the shade. Lana knew that her best chance was to make it back to the ranch before the ground grew as hot as a pie fresh from the oven.
“Don’t start thinking about food,” she rasped. She was heartened to discover that she still had a voice.
She tried to climb straight back up to the road, but two skinned knees and two abraded palms later she admitted that wasn’t happening. Even Patrick couldn’t make the climb. It was just too steep.
That left following the ravine until, hopefully, it came out somewhere. It wasn’t an easy walk. In most places the ground was hard, but in other places it shifted and slid and landed her on hands and knees.
Each time she fell, it was harder to get back up. Patrick was panting hard, plodding rather than bounding, just as tired and footsore as she was.
“We’re in this together, right, boy?” she said.
Brush tore at her legs, rocks bruised her feet. In places there were thickets of thornbush that had to be bypassed. In one place the thorns couldn’t be avoided, and she had to work her way through with time-wasting caution, accumulating scratches that burned like fire on her bare legs.
But once through she laid her hand on the scratches, and the pain ebbed. After ten minutes or so, there was no sign of the scratches.
It was miraculous. Lana was convinced of that. She knew she didn’t personally have the power to heal dogs or people. She’d never done it before. But how the miracle came about, she did not know. Her mind was on more pressing issues: how to scale this sudden rise, or skirt that bramble patch, or where, where, where in this parched landscape she could find water and food.
She wished she’d paid a lot more attention to the lay of the land while driving to and from the ranch. Did this gulch head for the ranch, or did it veer past? Was she almost there? Was she now wandering blindly toward the true desert? Was anyone looking for her?
The walls of the ravine weren’t as tall anymore, but they were just as steep, and closer. The gulch was narrowing. That had to be good news. If it was narrowing and becoming shallower, didn’t that mean she must be nearing the end?
She had her eyes down on the ground, watching out for snakes, when Patrick stopped stock-still.
“What is it, boy?” But she saw what it was. There was a wall across the gulch. The wall rose impossibly tall, far higher than the gulch itself, a barrier made of…of nothing she had ever seen before.
Its sheer size, combined with its utter strangeness in this place, struck fear into her. But it didn’t seem to be doing anything. It was just a wall. It was translucent, like watery milk. It shimmered just slightly, as if it might be a video effect. It was absurd. Impossible. A wall where no wall had any business being.
She edged closer, but Patrick refused to come along.
“We have to go see what it is, boy,” she urged.
Patrick disagreed. He had no interest in seeing what it was.
Up close she could make out a faint reflection of herself.
“Probably a good thing I can’t see myself any better,” she muttered. Her hair was stiff with dried blood. She knew she was filthy. She could see that her clothing was ripped, and not in an artistic, trendy way, just ripped to ribbons in places.
Lana covered the last few feet to the barrier and touched it with one finger.
“Ahh!”
She yelped and pulled her finger away. Before the crash she would have described the pain as searing. Now she had higher standards for what counted as real pain. But she wouldn’t be touching the wall again.
“Some kind of electric fence?” she asked Patrick. “What is it doing here?”
There was no choice now but to try to scale the side of the gulch. The problem was that Lana was pretty sure the ranch lay to her left, and that side was impossible to climb. She would have needed a rope and pitons.