Cannibalism or no, Solomon snacked her way through the chicken breast at an impressive clip. Upon finishing, she asked Jessica for the second time that evening, "Solomon stay all night?"
Jessica nodded. "That's what CJ said. I think your Boss is in trouble with her." When it had become obvious through her video spying that CJ would need to plant the bird with someone, Jessica had quietly let it be known around the base that she had dealt with birds before—which was the simple truth, her mother having kept an aviary, a veritable Noah's Ark for the bird kingdom, during Jessica's childhood. So Jessica had not been surprised the previous afternoon when, stepping out of her cocoon, she had found CJ standing in her office, looking for someone to take good care of Solomon this evening. Jessica had quickly agreed to the planned overnighter because, in her role of learning everything about Morgan, it seemed reasonable to become acquainted with Morgan's oldest surviving friend.
"CJ good girl. Solomon good girl. Boss needs us."
"Frankly, Solly-girl, I'm surprised you aren't jealous of CJ."
"Jealous of people-girl? No, no. She not parrot!"
"I guess that makes sense." Jessica put her chicken down. "You know, Sol, I'm supposed to learn everything I can about your guy."
"Okay. You next Boss?"
Jessica considered the question. "Well, that's the plan."
"Okay, Okay. I help."
"Cool, Sol." Jessica slid closer. "I was hoping you could answer some questions I have." She watched Solomon's eyes wander over to the box of chicken. "And I have plenty of food."
"Ask, ask."
Jessica could see that it would be a pleasant evening, discussing her job with the most alien intelligence of her experience.
* * *
Free at last. Reggie took the rickety old taxi to Henderson, where he rented a skycar and took off for Lake Havasu.
He had offered to fly to Stanford to pick Mercedes up, but she had sensibly pointed out how it was ridiculous for him to fly for an hour to get her, then turn around to go most of the way back. She had assured him that she was a big girl, and her car worked perfectly well. He had bowed to her logic and her stubbornness.
He saw her at the Bridge, a light breeze ruffling the folds of her simple blue shirt; her cutoff jeans were too tight for the wind to catch them. "Mercedes!" he waved to her. She did not hear, and he tried again. The second time she waved back. He started trotting toward her. Realizing how undignified it was, he slowed to a quick walk. They met at the end of the bridge.
Mercedes brushed her hand across the old stones of the bridge. "Goodness, I had no idea what a sullen collection of gray rocks they'd used to make the London Bridge. Tell me, is this typical of your country's architecture? Is it all this dreary? Or did they run a big prizeboard to find the most sorrowful stones of the nation to build this bridge?"
Reggie looked at the stones beneath his feet. Someone with more money than sense had moved the Bridge to Havasu from London long before the Crash. "No, Britain is certainly not this dreary." He pointed to the cloudless sky. "Here, the sun shines brightly. Such sunshine gives everything a dash of luster. At home, in the gray fog, this bridge was surely much more dreary."
Mercedes laughed. He joined her. For just a moment, he was a little more serious. "Of course, if they'd left the bridge in London, the first Shiva would have vaporized it."
She shook her head. "I'm sorry. Did you lose anyone . . . important?"
Reggie shrugged. "It's hard to be British and not to have lost someone when London burned." He'd been eight years old at the time. He'd spent two days trying to dig his mother out of the rubble of their home before someone noticed and took him away. His father had been in the financial district. There hadn't even been any rubble there to dig through.
Reggie clapped his hands. "But enough of this. I thought I'd take you for a different kind of a ride."
Mercedes raised an eyebrow.
He held up a pair of keys. "Let me show you." He walked with her down to the wharf and pointed.
Mercedes laughed again. "Waverunners! You're right, it'll be a new experience. I've never been on one of these before." Her expression turned doubtful. She looked down at her clothes. "Umm, I'm not exactly dressed for this."
Reggie pointed at himself, with his creased pants and polished black leather shoes. He widened his eyes. "You think you're not dressed for it?" He pointed at the Catch'n Rayz sun boutique a short distance away. "I made arrangements. Pick a swimsuit; it's yours."
"Goodness!" Mercedes said. "You have all the bases covered, don't you?"
"Constant preparation and attention to detail is a British trademark." Reggie looked down his nose ever so smugly.
"Mmm . . . I thought it was a national form of obsessive-compulsiveness."
"No, you're thinking of the Germans," Reggie replied grandly. "Race you to the shop."
Mercedes won the race to the shop easily. However, Reggie was the first to pick a suit and get back to the waverunners. He watched the shop, and when Mercedes came out, his heart almost stopped.
She had chosen a metallic purple one-piece, about as conservative a suit as the shop had. But nothing in Catch'n Rayz could really be called conservative. Her copper-bronze skin glowed in the sunshine. She was so beautiful it hurt.
Reggie flexed his muscles. They were good muscles, he enjoyed stretching them. He hadn't raced in ten years. But he still swam laps whenever he was home in Dover . . . which wasn't really that often, if you got right down to it.
He threw Mercedes the bracelet that keyed one of the runners. He himself hopped on the other machine. She stepped onto her vehicle with less grace than normal as the runner rocked beneath her feet.
Mercedes moved the handlebars left and right. "Is this little thumb-lever the throttle?" she asked, pushing it down. Suddenly she was moving as the electric motor silently went into action. "Ooops," she said, releasing the control.
Reggie gunned his own steed and caught up with her. "Careful, it's a no-wake zone here," he chided her, and brought his own machine to a legal speed. Mercedes followed him out into the main lake, hugging his port side.
Just as Reggie could still marvel at the roton, he was now amazed by his waverunner. He had seen old footage of the first waverunners. Nightmares on water. Those machines had screamed like banshees as you brought them up to speed, ruining the water's pleasure for everyone for miles around. Clearly detestable toys of the proletariat, at least from a proper British perspective.
These waverunners, though, were hardly louder than canoes. At least, they were no louder than canoes at canoe speeds.
The two of them reached deeper water. Reggie heard the sound of rushing waves rise astern, off his port side. Next a gale of laughter surged passed him, and Mercedes picked up the pace, accelerating ever faster. He gunned his own engine to catch up, but she had gotten the edge and was not about to yield. The wind whipped her long black hair in sinuous waves; the light of the sinking sun caught the edges of the waves, splintering with flecks of red and gold.
Mercedes veered to starboard to avoid a speedboat—a boat that seemed big and clumsy to a rider of the wave—and Reggie got caught in her wake, putting him even farther behind. Finally, she noticed that he was not by her side anymore and slowed down. He bounced out of her wake and maneuvered to her starboard side once more. "That way," he yelled, pointing north.
Mercedes nodded. She spun the waverunner on its heel as if she'd been born to it. Once again her vehicle rose out of the water as she glided to full speed. This time Reggie expected it and clung doggedly to her side. They sped along for a couple of minutes before they reached the mouth of the Colorado River that fed the lake. Reggie glanced at the GPS-location map, the only instrument the vehicle had besides the fuel gauge. He waved Mercedes slightly to port, and soon they were running out of the lake, up the river.
Finally, Mercedes slowed down. The rush of wind and water subsided, and they could talk. "Goodness, it's beautiful out here," she exclaimed. Her eyes s
wept over the hills and low-slung mountains that staggered away from the river.
"Yes. Quite austere, but quite beautiful in its own, different way." He pointed at the hills. "How can you have such a barren desert, just a few meters away from a veritable flood of water?" Despite the sometimes thick clusters of reeds and other greenery at the water's edge, the hills stood starkly barren, highlighting the naked beauty of the red and golden-yellow stone that embodied the region.
Mercedes saw, and understood. "You're right. It's odd," she replied. Her face lit up with a wonder that mirrored Reggie's own feelings, and Reggie could not help believing he had met a soulmate.
"This section of the river is called Topock Gorge, by the way, if you ever want to come back." Reggie spotted a tiny beach on the eastern shore of the river up ahead and waved to his companion. "Come with me," he said, and led her onto land. "Let's go on up the hill," he suggested.
"Not yet," Mercedes replied. Unbuckling her life jacket as she went, she ran back out into the water, her long legs splashing water in all directions.
"Hey!" Reggie called. "Come back here!"
Mercedes dived headfirst into the water.
Reggie had no choice but to follow.
He dove into the water, a shock as cold as the air was hot. But he'd expected that, and started cruising toward the escaping girl. He'd catch her in less than a minute.
But somehow he seemed to have trouble catching up. He lifted his head for a moment to get a good look and saw why. Mercedes was pulling away with a flat-out butterfly stroke. Only a pro could master the rhythm of the butterfly with Mercedes' sinuous grace. He was being hustled!
Reggie surged back into the water, pulling out all the stops. He followed his butterfly in a wide arc as she tried to outrun him and get back to the beach. Finally he came close enough grasp her foot on the upstroke of a dolphin kick.
"Hey!" Mercedes spluttered, laughing and catching her breath at the same time. "Thought I'd be easy just because you got a medal, right?" She tread water and splashed his face with one hand. "Wrong, buster!"
Reggie puckered his lips, blew her a kiss, and slapped a huge wave back at her. They swam back to the beach side by side.
They reached the beach. Reggie once again pointed up the hill. With wordless agreement, they started to climb.
The sun descended. The air felt cool as the water trickling down their backs dried. Mercedes started a new conversation. "You promised you'd tell me about the Twin Mysteries, crop circles and pyramids."
Reggie chuckled. "So I did. And now I am honor-bound to explain." He clasped his hands together. "Consider the pyramids. Could you have built them with your bare hands?"
Mercedes laughed. "Of course not." She traced a finger lightly across Reggie's chest muscles; he tried not to flinch. "Perhaps you could, though."
Her touch had destroyed his train of thought, and it took him a moment to recover. Her eyes were still laughing when he went on. "For you, perhaps I could. But lifting the stones into place, difficult as it is, is not the hardest part of building a pyramid. Laying it out with the required precision is even more remarkable, particularly without modern tools."
"I suppose so." She looked away, pursing her lips. "You're right, it would be pretty hard to do."
Reggie clapped his hands. "There you have it. Clearly, the pyramids are too big and too well constructed to have been created by mere primitive humans. Clearly, they must have been built by aliens from another star." He swung his arms out in a great arc, ending in the sky.
Mercedes reached out with her hand in an arc that came within millimeters of his chest but did not touch. He snapped his hands down in a defensive reflex, fast enough to grab her hand in his. He did not let go. She did not try to escape.
"The crop circles, of course, are more mysterious than the pyramids. How could you see what you were building except by flying, and how could you cut such a swath without a machine that would leave a telltale trail from the road?" He held his head in mock pain. "Impossible for the mortal man. Crop circles too must have been created by aliens."
Mercedes guessed where he was going. "And the Church of the Stellar Light turns that attitude into religion. If we can't even build pyramids and crop circles, how can we hope to fight these really, truly alien spaceships?"
Reggie nodded. "That's how it looks to me." He sighed. "It's hard to dent the faith, too." He chuckled. "But once in a while you get a special circumstance . . ." He became lost in a personal reverie.
Mercedes poked him in the shoulder. "Yes? I take it you brought someone some Light of your own?"
Reggie shrugged. "More or less. My grandmother was certain that aliens must have created the crop circles." The lines of his face drew back in pleasure at the memory. "I never could have convinced her with logic and diagrams that people made them. But I convinced her nonetheless. I gave her a coffee-table book—a real book, mind you, something solid and expensive that suggested it wasn't forged and couldn't be dismissed like a Web page. The book was a photo layout of all the winners of the annual crop circle competition, in Kansas. The winner with the red baseball cap didn't look like an alien at all." His chuckle took on a wicked tinge. "Though some of the other winners, I confess, looked rather strange and alien. Forced me to question my own beliefs."
Mercedes laughed, and put her arm through his. The warmth of her body drew a line up the side of his hip and shoulder.
They reached the summit. With the sun to their back, they looked out on the desert landscape.
"Very different from home," Mercedes muttered.
"And very different from Britain, as well," Reggie replied. "The Yucatan has very little in common with England, but at least they both are places where things grow all the time. This is about as different from that as you can get, short of the Sahara."
The rich red hues of the sinking sun transformed the hills moment by moment, from gold to bronze to copper. Reggie sighed. "It's time for us to head back," he said.
"Yeah," Mercedes agreed reluctantly. "I still have work in L.A."
They turned and started walking down the hill. A bright stream of white foam turned the northern bend in the river, heading south toward them at a tremendous speed. Mercedes pointed. "It's another waverunner," she said. "Miercoles, were we going that fast?."
Reggie laughed. "Oh, yes, I promise, that's just what you looked like a few minutes ago."
The runner charged closer, then started doing doughnuts in the water. Two people sat astride the vehicle, a young woman and an older man. Mercedes stopped, and Reggie saw her peering intently at the couple. "They look familiar," she muttered. "Do you recognize them?"
Reggie looked more closely. The man, he could see, seemed to have unnaturally short legs . . . and Reggie's eyes widened with recognition. The waverunner spun. Reggie watched the woman smile and recognized her as well. "She won an Olympic medal a couple of years ago," he replied limply; a discussion of the Angels would have broken the mood. "I was watching as she took the gold away from the leader in the triathlon." He remembered her look of exhaustion as they came into the last lap, how beaten she had seemed . . . and how in those last moments she had called upon an inner strength, perhaps the kind of strength that built the pyramids. He remembered watching her power grow till she reached the finish line. How remarkable her victory had been.
The runner spun again, so Reggie could see the man's face. Reggie's eyes widened even further in astonishment. "He's smiling," Reggie observed, and the sense of wonder filled him.
"Who's smiling?" Mercedes asked.
Reggie nodded toward the couple. "The old goat over there. That smile, my dear, is more remarkable than anything else we've seen today."
Mercedes looked at the people, then back at Reggie. "It's unusual for him to smile? What kind of person is he?"
Reggie frowned, then relaxed. "He's a person who deserves a chance to smile. I just hope this is the right chance."
Mercedes ran a finger down Reggie's cheek. "Everybody de
serves a chance to smile." Her eyes looked into his, and he looked back. He stepped closer, and then they melted together in an embrace where the waverunners, and the hills, and the water receded, shimmering into the distance.
* * *
They skimmed beneath an old bridge of some sort and plunged forward. CJ turned her head. "We're going into Topock Gorge," she yelled. "Quite beautiful, don't you think?"
Bouncing across the waves at fifty mph, with the water spray pecking at his eyes, and CJ's hair swirling across his mouth, Morgan attempted to look around and appreciate the beauty of nature. The effort was too absurd for even the most intent student, and in the end Morgan broke into a strained laughter. "You are a madwoman," he yelled into her ear. Every muscle in his body tensed up, both from the desperate desire to hang on, and from the desperate attempt to keep warm, as the frigid Colorado River water soaked his clothes with a cold that penetrated deep into his body. Yelling into CJ's ear, he found that the crook in her neck was the only warm place for miles around. He buried his nose there.
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