Claire lay prone in the hot afternoon sun. Gravel dug into her chest and elbows as she balanced the binoculars in her hands. The narrow field of vision that came through the optics revealed the border, warbling in the heat. The road narrowed to two lanes in front of it and was flanked on either side by several sandbagged machine gun emplacements, though no one was, at the moment, manning the guns. She could see a full compliment of border guards, but most were lying in the shade of the trees off to the left, where a long-abandoned picnic area had once played host to families stopping for a minute on the way between Mexico and the United States. The customs building was small and glaring white in the sun. Claire could see a patch of blue on one wall, peaking through beneath peeling white paint to reveal what had once been an American flag. Around the front, next to the glass door was the Protectorate logo with blind justice and the familiar "to protect" slogan. Farther past the door she could see the large window where customs officials observed the crossing itself, though the sun was at the wrong angle to give her any idea who or even how many people might be inside. Spanning the road in front of building itself was a system of steel girders holding up scaffolding with more machine guns sandbagged some twenty feet up, above the Caution, You Are Now Leaving the Protectorate sign. Below that were several booths that once held officers who would simply look down, make an inspection decision based based on the biometric scans that surrounded the vehicles passing through. Now the lanes were barricaded off and limited to a single open lane. Clearly no one was just waving people through anymore. Claire knew the borders were tense. She had been reading about for the last two weeks in Tucson's dSheets. The UAS's decision to allow some forms of AI and it's ban of the Protectorate's bioengineered seeds had made the borders a focal point of what some thought would eventually lead to another round of fighting. Today there was just one biodiesel truck pulled to the side of the road, stopped a bit before the customs building. She could see the driver, hands zip-tied behind his back, sitting on a bike rack in the shade. Through the binoculars Claire thought he looked like a UAS citizen, though she couldn't see his wrist to tell for sure. He had a heavy black mustache that obscured his lips, but Claire thought he looked bored, not overly concerned that he was cuffed while three protectorate soldiers torn apart the back of his truck. He flinched when one of the soldiers pitched a box to the ground, but otherwise he did not seem worried. Or, Claire thought, he's just really good at hiding his fear. Beyond the Protectorate border she could see a stretch of no man's land, about fifty meters she guessed, full of barbed razor wire and warning signs about staying in your vehicle or being shot. The banner on the UAS side said simply welcome, though above it was the same type of scaffolding walkway, bristling with machine guns trained down on the no man's land. Again, there was no one maning the guns. Most of the soldiers must be inside she reasoned since there were few to be seen milling around the spartan building that she assumed held the customs and immigration office. There was no one on the UAS side waiting to attempt a crossing. The bulk of traffic coming in to the Protectorate in this region was passing through the much larger border to the west, just south of Tombstone. Claire set the glasses down and rolled over looking up at the sky. She watched a small, lonely patch of clouds blowing overhead. Now what? Clearly, she thought, there was no way to just waltz through, wave some papers, show a little skin and walk off into the UAS, where, although not entirely welcome, she was at least not a wanted fugitive. She was pretty sure that whatever the sonic boom had been had nothing to do with her, but clearly it had someone spooked. She was also beginning to think that her disappearing home room in I2 was also not directly related to her either. The man at the roadside outfitters store, where she had purchased the binoculars and a small alcohol-burning stove, was the fourth person to tell her that his I2 properties had evaporated. Claire was beginning to suspect massive server failure. She was also pretty sure that the server failure had something to do with the sonic boom. But the daemon sniffing around her half-deleted I2 space was definitely looking for her. Still, whatever had convinced the agents to leave her grandmother's house, she reasoned, was big enough that for now, she was insignificant. Whether or not she was insignificant enough to slip through the border without hassle was what she needed to find out. The Nogales border was not the most sophisticated she had crossed, but it still had several bioscanners and would definitely require her to show some sort of identification. She had no Protectorate biochip and nothing that identified her as being a citizen of UAS either. All she had was the forged Greenada passport Sil had given her years ago. She wiped the sweat from her brow and cursed herself for not buying sunscreen at the outfitting store. She rolled back over and stared at the sonic fence that ran as far as she could see in either direction from the border. People crossed the border all the time. Sil acted like it wasn't even something worth talking about. She had done it by sea with his help. But then Sil had the money to pay bribes and pass through borders unmolested. She was pretty sure he had never tried to actually cross the sonic fence. She was pretty sure no one who had ever tried to sneak through the fence itself ever talked about. If they did they did it would be with some jittery form of sign language since they would no longer have ear drums or a fully functional nervous system. She wondered how long it ran. She swept the binocular to the west and looked at the ridges of the hills. The fence ran up the first ridge and then disappeared. Eventually she found it higher up on the next ridge. Did it go all the way to the UAS border in Old California? Did it really cover every bit of those mountains or had they skipped a few places to save on funds? She wished she could get an I2 connection to find out. She didn't want to climb all over the mountains just to find out that it did indeed run the entire length of the border. She thought about her great-uncle who had once lived not far west of here, a little town called Arivaca. She had very dim memories of Thanksgivings at his house, perhaps even a Christmas. Before her parent's plane crashed. Before her uncle gave up and moved back to Tucson. She remembered the sunsets mainly, how beautiful the mountains looked, the bloodiest red sunsets she had ever seen, and then the clouds turned purple as the light waned and night descended. She remembered her father sitting out on the porch with her uncle, Claire playing with her toys on the steps in front of them. Her uncle's house had been on a small ridge that overlooked the hill country to the south. He would smoke cigarettes and talk to Claire's father. Sometimes they would see immigrants moving down in the arroyos, picking their way through the mesquite trees and cacti undergrowth, long before the sonic fence, long before the Protectorate. Then she remembered hiking around her uncle's property with her father, long, rattlesnake-infested grass and jagged lava rock made walking slow and painful. Claire remembered falling on a lava rock once, how it gashed her knee, how the blood ran down her leg. She remembered watching it fall on a stalk of grass, trickle down its length, turning it red like a silver of sunset. She remembered sitting on top of the hill, her father holding her as they watched two men walking through the arroyo below. That's the way to do it, Clairebear. Her father pointed at the men below. We'll go back that way, stick to the low country, the dry gulches, the sandy washes. You'll be fine. Realizing there was no other choice, Claire gave up on the idea of crossing over in the wilds of the mountains and crawled backward on her belly until she was sure she was out of view of any cameras or bioscanners. She stood up and walked back down the hill, through the mesquite and Palo Verde trees, down to the river where the stolen electrovox was parked in the shade of a cottonwood grove. She pulled a jug of water out of the trunk and drank deeply. She debated whether or not she should risk bringing the car. On one hand, she reasoned she was already wanted for using artificial intelligence within the protectorate, punishable by life in prison, so adding a stolen car, a hand crank at that, to the list hardly seemed important. On the other hand she didn't want the stolen car to be the thing that gave her away. There was some chance, with communications obviously glitchy, that whatever bounty or bulletin might be out there alerting the authorities to her crime had not yet made it to this particular backwater of the border. She decided she would ditch the car and cross on foot, perhaps see if the zip-tied trucker would give her a lift, provided he got across. She drove back to the main highway and into Nogales. The streets were deserted. She passed an abandoned petrol station that had been half converted to a biofuel depot and still smelled of rancid vegetable grease. The main drag, which led down to the border crossing, was lined with abandoned curio shops, falling down cinderblock buildings with broken windows and collapsing metal roofs, just intact enough to remind the locals of better times. Claire parked the car next to the rusted out hulk of an old oil-burning Ford. She pulled her bag out of the trunk and stepped through the shattered glass of a tourist shop. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could make out cracked pottery shards and old cisterns lining the shelves. Broken glass and smashed up shelving littered the floor. In the corner she found a pile of once colorful woven blankets, no covered in dust and rat droppings. She pulled her t-shirt over her nose and shook one of them out. She opened her pack and pulled out the gun. She stuffed it under the pile of remaining blankets. She pulled out most of her clothes and sorted them on the floor, bandoning everything but two pairs of pants and a couple t-shirts. She stuffed the banket down in the bag, tightened down the straps and threw it over her shoulder. She looked around the back of the shop for a hat, but found nothing. Outside the sidewalk cracks were full of weeds. plastic wrappers lined the curbs and lufted in the breeze that had begun to blow. She noticed an ominous line of clouds on the horizon and considered going back inside the shop to look for a tarp, but decided it might feel good to be wet. She set off down the street, headed for the border, wondering where the some ten thousand inhabitants of Nogales were hiding today. She walked by what looked like the old courthouse, or what was left of it, a mortar shell having taken out the columns and collapsed the roof, she could see piles of the roof and other rubble half-hidden in the shadows. Outside a cypress tree was beginning to uproot the steps. Two blocks later she found a few of Nogales's inhabitants gather in the shade around what looked like an outdoor comida. Deciding she didn't want to go to prison on an empty stomach, Claire walked over and took a seat under the tattered blue tarp that provided a minimal bit of protection from the sun. A few of the largely male crowd glanced up as she walked into the shade, but most ignored her. They were staring at the ground or off into space, lost in thought, memories of dread. They were gathered in a crowd around the central post which held up the tarp, an old Mesquite limb with a shortwave radio hanging halfway up the pole on the numb of a long-since sawed off branch. The men looked much like her, dirty jeans and t-shirts, theirs stained with bio fuels that Claire could smell over the smoky odors of burning cow shit and sizzling meat. Above the hook where the radio hung were several bag filled with water, which did nothing to keep the flies at bay. Claire swatted at the air as she fished in her bag for some sort of currency. Eventually she gave up on the flies and walked over toward the grill, where a several planks of ironwood laid atop a stack of bricks served as a counter. A woman with blackened teeth smiled and took her order in halting English. Claire watched as she pulled meat and tortillas out of an icebox and laid them on the grill. Claire turned around and looked back at the crowd, trying to hear what was on the radio. A few of the men were watching her now. She noticed suddenly that the crowd was quite young, not one seemed to be over forty. Migrant workers she decided, still coming north in search of stronger currency. One man, with jet black eyes and a mustache that hid his lips watched her closely, as if trying to decide her story. Claire met his gaze and he smiled. She started to smiled back, but decided against it. She turned around and pretended to watch a group of children kicking a soccer ball in an empty dirt field across the street. The air under the tarp was dead still. It was oppressively hot. The air weighed down on her, felt like a lead jacket at the dentist's office. The tarp occasionally flapped in the breeze. The sound reminded Claire of the sails during her voyage to New York. If only the breeze would come under the tarp Claire thought, but there were too many buildings around, the wind remained tantalizingly close, but gave no relief. The woman turned the meat over, smoke from the grill became thicker as the grease sizzled on the coals. Claire took her lukewarm bottle of soda and went back to the table. The radio crackled as she drank. The Spanish was too fast for her to follow. Her ears perked up at the words atacar and Nueva Orleáns, but she couldn't imagine how that might affect I2, or produce a sonic boom in Tucson. And then she remembered her vision, New Orleans on fire. She went to the counter and asked the old woman sitting on a stool what the radio was saying. The woman handed claire a plate of rice and beans with a few hunks of bony meat and several tortillas. Atacar. Oil thieves. Oil thieves? Nueva Orleáns? Sí. The ships come, torres de perforación petrolera. Petrolera? Oil derricks? Sí. Derricks. The woman smiled, revealing a badly blackened set of teeth. Soon petrol. Claire nodded and thanked the woman. She carried the plate over to her table. She doubted Nogales would ever get any petrol, but it certainly gave the Protectorate army a leg up and would no doubt break the back of New Orleans, which had always been too far from the rest of UAS to have any real hope of lasting. Claire sat back down and stared at the plate of food, but suddenly she was not hungry. Her head was spinning, her heart racing. Was it just a coincidence? If not what else was it? How did you possibly see the future by eating a cactus? She forced herself to relax. She took a bite of the beans and began to shovel more food in her mouth, swallowing too quickly to taste it, forcing herself to eat since she didn't know when she would again. After she had finished, failing to learn anyone for the shortwave, she set out toward the border. Before she was even within sight of the actual border she passed a troup of soldiers sweeping down the middle of the otherwise empty street. A few glanced in her direction but none of them said a word, marching silently, doggedly through the heat. It wasn't until she reached the border area proper that she began to think twice about her plan. She didn't get within 100 yards of the border before two soldiers approached her. Both had M60s slung across their waist, hands resting on the tops of their guns. Is the border open? The soldier studied her for a moment before replying. Why wouldn't it be? Claire stammered, I don't know, the radio, she gestured helplessly behind her. It's open. Follow me. He turned and began to walk away, the second soldier followed suit. Claire fell in behind them. The soldier held the door open for Claire and she stepped inside the immigration office. There was counter with on one at it, overhead a ceiling fan spun far to slowly to cool move any air. Paint was blistered and peeling off the ceiling. Claire walked to the counter and looked behind it to find a man in customs uniform sitting at desk, feet propped up. The desk was littered with paper that seemed to have simply been thrown there. An I2 monitor behind the man was playing snow. Perhaps they don't know Claire thought, suddenly thinking that she might get through without anyone the wiser. The man looked up as she approached, but did not speak. Claire said hello, her voice sounded loud and the man half-started as though he had not been expecting her to speak. I wanted to cross the border. The man sighed, heaved his legs the ground with exaggerated effort and finally shuffled slowly over to the counter, pulling a form off the desk as he went. He slammed the form down on the counter, I2 crapped out again. You'll have to fill this out. Claire let her packpack slide to the floor and grabbed a pen off the far end of the counter. She leaned over the form and began to write the name that appeared on her passport. Oh and hand me your bag, I'll run it through the scanner. Claire lifted the bag up and handed it over the counter, the agent shuffled slowly back toward a door, opened it and disappeared inside. He returned a short while later with the bag. Bag's fine, was his only comment before sitting back down at the desk and propping his feet up. He watched as Claire finished filling out the form. When she was done he repeated the slow process of disentangling himself from the desk and returning to the counter. He then shuffled back to the desk and opened an archaic laptop. He set the form beside it and slowly began to checken peck the information into the machine. It took twenty minutes, which, after handing over her very high quality forged passport, she spent outside smoking cigarettes with the soldiers. What are you planing to do in UAS? the shorter of the two asked. Claire told a story about looking for her nanny now that grandmother was dead. Even Claire was impressed with the heart-warming details she created out of thin air and it seemed to somehow endear her to the soldier, himself a family man as he repeated several time. The taller man said nothing, just smoked and stared at the no man's land behind them. TK she makes it through the protectorate side Behind the counter, feet propped up like his doppleganger on the other side of no man's land, sat a decidedly different looking official. The man was dark-skinned, looked of mixed blood and wore a bedded neckless tucked into a smartly pressed uniform. His hair was jet black and greased back from his forehead which gave way to equally dark eyes. His mouth curled into a something between a smirk and smile as Claire approached. She set her passport on the counter. He waved his hand, as if the passport were unnecessary and Claire's heart momentarily leaped in spite of his somewhat sinister expression. Then he puled his legs smartly off the desk and stood up. He walked to the counter, back stiff in a military pose, but with a certain grace. He stared straight into her eyes and Claire forced herself to return his gaze. I2 is down on their side yes? He said it matter-of-factly, picking up her passport and flipping through the pages far to fast to read anything. Yes. Yes, I know it is. Because otherwise you would not be here Miss TK, because they would have seen the two open bulletins, one under the name on this passport and one under your real name. Our I2 is working perfectly well. So is our new AI bioscanner which you stepped through a moment ago. So I know these things. Claire lowered her head. She considered saying she wanted asylum, but decided to keep her mouth shut. He stepped from behind the counter to her side. Place you hands behind your back please. Claire felt the zip tie slip over her wrists and then tighten. This way please. He marched her around counter, through the office and into what Claire too to be an interrogation room beyond. The man pulled out a chair and pushed Claire down in it. He went back to the office and rolled his own chair into the room, sitting opposite her at the metal table. He unrolled a dPaper scroll and began to study it as if lost in thought. Claire wiggled in her seat, trying to find way to stop the zip ties from digging into her wrists. he looked up at her with a certain interest. I have always wanted to meet a terrorist. What? I'm not a terrorist. It says here you are. He slide the dPaper across the table until the screen was right under Claire's nose. Claire saw a picture of herself, at least half a dozen years old. The headline said wanted for the terrorist use of AI. Do you see what it says? Reward? Yes? Claire saw a considerable sum of money at the bottom of the very old photograph of her. It was more than she had been paid to steal the collider data. You know that the protectorate bombed Los Angeles and has attacked Nueva Orleáns? Claire looked up suddenly. Bombed? Yes. Bombed. Early reports called it a nuclear bomb, but it was not. It was several of their new digital bombs. Concussion blasts, network disrupters. Either way, an act of war. Again. She watched her face, looking for a reaction. And now you want in our country. A known terrorist... perhaps fleeing, perhaps having already made a deal... A deal? I didn't make a deal. You said yourself the I2 is out over their, I snuck through. Yes, it is. Perhaps you did. But that's awfully convenient wouldn't you say? No, it's not. It's just the way it is. The man smiled and stood. He walked out of the room and closed the door behind him. He returned a few moments later with her backpack over his shoulder. He proceed to throw it on the table. He opened the top and bagan to pull things out, examining them briefly as he set them on the table. Eventually, when the bag was empty he tossed it on the floor behind him. He picked up a few of the clothes, shook them as if there would be something to fall out, eyed her suspiciously and then tossed them behind him, on top of the back. He inspected the blanket, curling his nose in disgust as he unfurled a cloud of dust from it. Stole this on the other side did you? She shrugged. He smiled. Only two items remained on the table, the box of ashes and the book. He picked up the ashes and shook it. Be careful with that, Claire spoke before she could catch herself. She lowered her head again. That's my grandmother's ashes. The agent recoiled from the box somewhat. He set it back on the table and opened the lid, peaking inside. You had your grandmother cremated? Claire looked down at the table, saw the ashes, a sandy brown and gray dust. She... her body was... She was killed in a flash flood. The agent crossed himself and put the lid back on the ashes. He did not say anything. He regarded Claire for a minute. She could feel his dark eyes beating down on the top of her head. She continue to look down, willing herself to tears, hoping that perhaps he would take pity on her. So you used AI inside the protectorate. That's a huge risk. That's life in prison. You must have had a good reason for that. Enlighten me. Claire shrugged. I didn't know it was an AI agent... He smiled. Yes you did. No I didn't. She glared at him. I just wanted to see my old house. My grandmother's death... I guess I was feeling nostalgic and wasn't thinking... That's not a very good story Claire. The man who paid you to get the information you have, would not be impressed. Claire felt the air suck out of the room, her head began to spin. She kept her eyes down trying not to betray the fear rushing through her, pounding in her veins and making her skin crawl. The immigration man just kept on smiling. I think, he said slowly, that you have the information on your person. I left it in Tucson. He arched an eyebrow. I doubt that very much. He walked around the table and pulled Claire up from her chair. He began to pat her down, feeling her pockets, the underwire of her bra, making sure to cup her breast in the process. She felt his breath on her neck, it smelled of fish and agave beer. She shuddered. He stopped and stepped back. It appear that you perhaps have it inside you... No. I left it in Tucson. He stepped in front of her and smiled menacingly. No. You didn't. He pulled a long knife from his waist band and placed it at her throat. If you know the people that hired you, and I know you do, you know that they want their information and they really don't care how I get it or what happens to you in the process. Do you understand what I am saying? Claire stared back in his eyes with hatred. I do. He slide the knife down and pointed the tip into her throat and then with single smooth motion, slashed the front of her t-shirt open, leaving a trailing cut down the center of her chest and stomach. A thin trail of blood began to leak out of it. Claire's eyes never left the shining blade. The man flipped it lightly in his hand, hanging at his side. He brought it up again and held it to her face. His other hand reached under her shirt and pulled her bra out from her chest. He slid the knife under, letting the tight fabric of her bra push the point into her chest. Claire winced. Then he snapped the knife back toward himself, serving the bra. Claire threw herself forward as the knife went back, knocking the man off balance and sending the knife clattering across the room. Claire smashed her head into the man's head and the world went black, she saw stars, tiny points of light and then the room began to come back, a red overlay at first, but eventually taking shape again. The man was screaming. Claire rolled off him and threw herself to the floor in the direction of the knife. She squirmed until it was in her grasp and then she heaved herself up until she was standing. The man had slumped over onto the ground, bent at a strange angle, no longer screaming, Claire turned the knife in her hand and turned around, she squatted so she could see the point of the blade and then pressed it to the man's chest. She sat down with all her weight and felt the knife slide in. a gurgling sound came from the man['s throat. She felt something hot and wet splash against her pants and the back of her shirt. She stood up and turned around. Blood was pumping out of the man's chest in spurts. she leans back when he cuts the bra, pulling him away from the table and then when he cuts it, she falls on top of him and breaks his back against the edge of the table. Then she sticks the knife in him and kills him. Then she she pulls her legs through and cuts the zip tie off. Then she cleans up, leaves a note stuck to the man grabs her things and leaves. She takes the man's gun and makes a run for it. Outline: The soldiers find the man, but Claire is able to hide from them with the help of people in the shanty town at the board. Last scene she pulls out the ashes, opens the box and retrieves the key fob. She scatters the ashes on a hillside as the sun is rising. She sets out south. Then seque to Waiben being kidnapped. Then back to Claire losing consciousnesss in the desert. Then at the nunnery where she is nursed back to health and then smuggled south, down to the ameritown where Dean has his bar/whorehouse and Sil happens to be after escaping new orleans. Maybe Claire and Sil and Dean are trying to find Waiben to have him shut down the collider? The desert stretched out before them, a void, grasses, sage brush, mesquite trees marking a river that Claire guessed was two or three miles from the small, featureless hill where she stood scanning the distance with the binoculars while, Chaz tried in vain to use an already tattered scrap of duct tape to make his Adidas hold up for another day of walking over a landscape dominated by sharp lava rocks, dry thistles and dead ocotillo bushes. Claire's own shows weren't in great shape either but she hadn't worn through the sole yet fortunately. She let the bincolurs fall around her neck and watched Chaz's back, the dirty yellow of his once white t-shirt soaked with sweat. It was nearly ten o'clock in the morning, they needed to find shade. It had been two weeks since they crossed the border. A shortwave radio in Marselo, a tinny five building village they passed through over a week ago had told them what they had already knew. "Nuclear devices" was a the phrase. It wasn't even translated to Spanish. Claire had peiced the rest together from her limited language skills. Los Angeles. Countless dead. Evacuation. Wind. Moving east. Symptoms. Emergency roadside clinics. Other words mashed in together that she didn't know, but could guess. Everything in the immediate fallout area had been evacuated, the borders were sealed. Quédese en casa. Mantenga la calma. La ayuda está en camino. América será vengada. Clarie caught the old man watching them out of the corner of his eye as he made a plate of tortillas and beans. She couldn't think of how to say radiation isn't contageous in Spanish. And then she began to wonder if that was true. Instead she sat in silence listening to the radio with the two women who sat silent and Chaz, who simply waited for her to tell him what was being discussed. Eventually the news stopped. An ad for laundry detergent came on. The old man set the plates in front of them and they ate. After dinner Claire managed to convince him to sell them a bag of beans and some torillas. She asked about water. Tanks, wells, anything, but the old man just shook his head. She wasn't sure if he meant no or that he didn't know. They spent the afternoon sleeping through the heat in the old man's living room and set out again when the moon rose. They pushing south, ostensibly away from the fallout zone, but Claire also knew they were now illegally in a foreign country in a time of war. She wanted to stay as far from the border as possible. After the first few days they realized they needed to avoide roads at well. So they walked through the desert grasslands instead. Often in silence. Each pushing themselves toward something that would make their flight worth flying for, but so far it was just desert and distant looming Sierra Madre to the east. According to an old map they found two days later at a long abandoned gas station there should be another town in just two more days walking time, but Chaz's crumbling shoes were slowing them down. Claire had always suspected that tennis shoes were not a wise purchase. Now she had unfortunate proof. I think it's about five miles to the river. Chaz made no reply. Claire had started to exaggerate distance whenever possible so Chaz would be happily surprised when something wasn't as far away as he had thought. Of course he still had eyes. He still knew where the tree line was. The terrain was getting worse as they moved southwest. Agave began to make the ridges impassable. All morning they had been traversing arroyos and following dry stream beds, only occasionally climbing the ridges to get their bearings and correct course. The sun was high in the sky before they reached the tree line and dragged themselves into the shade. There was no water. Claire cut a few prickly pear leaves and they sucked out the sour pulp for moisture. They put the last of the beans on tortillas and ate in silence. Chaz fell asleep and Claire stared at the map, willing it to show a river where there was, quite obviously, none to be found. She realized for the first time that they might well die out here. The thought produced a panic that rose up out of her belly, like an insidious snake clenching tighter around her chest as it move up her throat. She had to stand and pace for a few minutes before the feeling passed. She sat back down and stared at the map again. As best she could figure they were roughly half way between the the mountains and the coast in what had once been a flood plane, but was now just endless grass and desert. They could risk heading for the coast, Tordilla was probably no more than two hundred miles from where they were. Or they could change course and head east into the Sierra Madre where towns were scarcer, but water more plentiful. Claire set the map down beside her and put a rock on top of it. She slide down in the soft sand of the arroyo and propped her head against a piece of fallen mesquite. Claire's leg was asleep when she woke up; her body contorted around a white sheet. The pillow lay on the floor next to the mattress. She shook off the dirt before propping it back under her head. Claire was pretty sure she had been woken up by rat running over her leg but she tried not to think about. Windblown rain beat against the cracked windowpane. A trickle of water ran down the inside of the glass pooling in with its brethren when it reached the sill. The palm fronds beating against the metal roof sounded like the harsh crunch of chewed ice. The light was already almost gone, a dull grey twilight, the same dull gray twilight that had cast itself over the house for days had shifted to a smoky darkness as she lay watching the beads of water leak in the window and stream down to the floor where they found the cracks in the boards and disappeared under the house. The monsoon had finally arrived a week ago, filling their jugs as it run off the roof and postponing, at least for a few weeks, death by dehydration. Now Cholera or Typhoid were more likely. In the evening when the first ran came Claire ran outside and stood with her face up to sky, swallowing water as fast as she could justs like she had as a child. It was then, standing half naked in the rain that sde decided she would try for the sea. Later that night she lay on the floor and watched the water pouring off the roof in great sheets that splattered on the mud street in from of the hut and then began to roll down hill under the house. Lightening lit up the sky like like the thousand flash bulbs and Claire rolled over on her stomach to watch the water run under the house, digging gullies that she though might one day give the little hut a cellar, which made her smile, something she realized afterward, she hadn't done in months. Ever since then, around dusk, Claire would lie flat on her back on the floor, her head turned to the side and, in the illuminated glimpse of lightening flashes, she could see the dank dirt and yellow orange mold growing beneath the house. She did much the same thing the previous summer, when the stiffling still heat hung over the house and the world became so quiet she could lie perfectly still and hear the termites gnawing at the wood in the walls, eating out the house from a round her as she lay waiting. Chaz would come home in the evenings haggard, in a foul mood, smelling of alcohol and cigarettes, having spent the afternoon at the bar drinking the rot gut tequila that a few of the families still brewed in secret. Claire would watch him shuffle around the kitchen, open a can of stolen beans with the rusty knife he kept in his pocket, a knife that reminded her of the weeks in the desert when it had been all they had to cut into prickly pear ears and drink the foul smelling water of barrel cacti, which she had come to think might be worse than death itself until they got much closer to death... watching each other grow thin, eyes retreating into their sockets, skin leathery from the sun and lack of food... until Chaz announced that he was done trying to survive and sat down to die. Now the knife was so dull he could never stab it into the can with one thrust and would cut himself curse and grab the nearest rag, usually soaked in rancid oil or slimy black papaya seeds which would send him reaching for the faucet, too drunk to remember that there had been no running water for years. Defeated on all fronts he would then limp, dragging his bad foot behind him until, oveer to the couch where he would work at the can slowly, hitting the same mark until an opening formed and he poured cold beans directly into his mouth and eventually fell asleep without speaking a word to her. Later she would remove the can, tip him sideways and prop a pillow under his head. For the last week though she had been studying him, memorizing the lines of his face, the strands of hair hanging over his cheek, the the curl of his arms around the emptiness of the room, the sound of his breath as he slept... storing it up for the coming journey, trying to hold on to the parts she loved while letting go of the parts that had become something else, far different from the wide-eyed wonder, the bright willingness she had dragged into the peyote desert that first night in Tucson. She allowed herself one cigarette in the evenings, tobacco ground from whole leaves she bought in the market, which was really little more than two carts pushed into the shade of the pharmacia awning. She lit the cigarette and stood in the doorway watching the rain, thinking about how to procure some canned food for the trip over the mountains. Claire lived on fruit and soups made from vegetables she gathered and stole when she had to; Chaz still managed to find bags of rice, cans of beans and half rancid meat stolen from the men who paid him to drive the trucks. He had stopped sharing them with her some months ago, screaming about work and risk. It was the first time he hit her. Since then he had lived like a rat, secreting away stashes of cans, counting them in the mornings when he thought she was still asleep. She could hear the cans clattering in the quiet gray dawn just before the cruch of tires on the dirt and the slam of a truck cab door told her it was safe to get up. Claire had stolen a can of peaches from one of his stashes last week when the water ran out and she needed the liquid. She popped the top and poured the juice straight down her throat, letting a little trickle on her lips, the sugar burning the cracked and peeling red corners of her mouth. The next morning she woke up to fists raining down on her head slong with the lash of the belt she'd once forced him to eat, a detail that made her laugh inspite of herself, smiling up at him as the blood trickled out her nose.... But the salty taste lingered in her mouth after he had stormed out the door and made her think of the rumors that, on the other side of the mountains down by the sea things would be better. She sat in the doorway watching the trucks on the highway at the end of the street, realizing that her rarified oyster act had just been undercut by what Waiben would have called the crucible of reality... It was then that she realized that oysters were not so different from rats and that one was a delicacy merely the fickleness of whim... And she had plenty of time to study rats, sitting around the house during the afternoons, mending clothing and making watery soups from scraps of vegetables stolen during her morning walk through the neighborhood. Sometimes there was nothing and her hands would worrying the skin of her protruding hips, Two days later she stuffed Chaz's remaining stash of can in an old plastic sandbag sack she'd dumped out on the bed and covered with a sheet. The blue protectorate relief insignia bulged promentantly around the the water jug she'd stuffed inside hoping that it would last at least until she found streams in the mountains. It took both her hands to sling the sack over her shoulder and she still had no way to open the cans, save the industious use of stones, but nevertheless, undaunted she walked to the end of the street and turned east, heading up into the mountains... Over time she came to realize that he resented her more for making him live than for shooting off his toes. Claire and Chaz deteriorate around the mention of waiben, distance, abuse but naturally the sex remains strong because its the only way they have left to communicate on the fundamental level at which all connections must happen be the connect mental physical or spiritual the commonality is depth and a particication in a realm beyond the waking one that surrounds us. not that this was change since the birth of El Norte, merely a change in the hands of power without the power itself seemingly affected at all. from wikipedia: Individuals experiencing starvation lose substantial fat (adipose) and muscle mass as the body breaks down these tissues for energy. Catabolysis is the process of a body breaking down its own muscles and other tissues in order to keep vital systems such as the nervous system and heart muscle (myocardium) functioning. Vitamin deficiency is a common result of starvation, often leading to anemia, beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy. These diseases collectively can also cause diarrhoea, skin rashes, edema, and heart failure. Individuals are often irritable and lethargic as a result. Atrophy (wasting away) of the stomach weakens the perception of hunger, since the perception is controlled by the percentage of the stomach that is empty. Victims of starvation are often too weak to sense thirst, and therefore become dehydrated. All movements become painful due to atrophy of the muscles, and due to dry, cracked skin caused by severe dehydration. With a weakened body, diseases are commonplace. Fungi, for example, often grow under the esophagus, making swallowing unbearably painful. The energy deficiency inherent in starvation causes fatigue and renders the victim more apathetic over time. As the starving person becomes too weak to move or even eat, his or her interaction with the surroundings diminishes. .. the sand was so hot in those little valleys that even if you were watching them it was hard to detect movement because they were always shimmering with heat, warping and warbling the tree branches and rocks... But in the evenings the temperature was a little more bearable and that's when you'd see most of the people... My uncle owned the lot next to his place as well and there was an old barn, or more of a shed actually, gray, rotting wood walls, caved in sheet metal roof, but a structure that offered some protection... A lot of the bolder ones would spend the night there... On Thanksgiving and Christmas, which was generally to only time we went down there, I'd take out a plate of leftovers, some turkey and tortillas, corn mash, whatever we had, and see if anyone was staying the night. Ocassionally there was someone there and they'd hide at first but I knew enough Spanish to convince them that I wasn't going to hurt them or deport them or whatever. What'd your uncle do? Claire shrugged. He's part of the whole don't ask, don't tell generation. You know what I mean? They knew what was right somewhere deep down, they just didn't have the balls to act on it all the time so they kept quiet -- they didn't help, they didn't hurt, you know...? I wish he would have helped them... maybe he did, but I don't think so. Still. He was a good man. And he was gay, living out here in the desert, in about as "manly" a country as you'll find ... so I think he had a bit more empathy that most, certainly more than the rest of my family, most of them probably would have shot them if they had known they were there, but they lived inside the umbrella of their own experiences, which were pretty narrow... not that there's anything wrong with them, just that a whole lot of life seemed to pass them by... my grandmother was different though, she knew, she might not have always let on that she knew, in fact, she cultivated this aura of helplessness, partly I think it was the same generational thing, the female side of it, but partly it just the way she chose the exercise power, if you seem weak everyone ignores you, they don't any attention to you and so they drop their guard, forget you're in the room and reveal perhaps more of at's wrong with wandering in the desert, Claire mumbled under her breath. But then she gave in with a sigh. Okay, we'll go down to Nogalas and have a look. But if we end up in some FEMA camp I'm going to be pissed. Chaz laughed. You don't really believe in those do you? No, Claire smiled. But I bet they can set them up in a hurry.