Axis

"Assume the worst. Take the next exit. Find a gas station or somewhere we can stop without arousing suspicion."

"I know people around here," Turk said. "People I can trust, if we need a place to stay overnight."

"Thank you, Turk, but I don't think we should endanger anyone else. And I doubt Lise is anxious to make the acquaintance of one of your old girlfriends."

"Didn't say anything about a girlfriend," Turk said, but he blushed.

He pulled into a filling station attached to a retail store. This was the part of Port Magellan where the refinery workers lived, lots of prefabricated bungalows assembled in haste during the boom years and gone shabby since. He parked away from the pumps, under an umbrella tree. The last daylight had gone and there was only the yellow-orange glare of the street lamps.

"If you want to dump the car," Turk said, "there's a bus station a couple of blocks down. We can catch the bus to Rice Bay and walk to Arundji's. Won't get there till midnight, though."

"Maybe that's best," Diane said.

"Hate to abandon another vehicle, though. Who's paying for all this transportation?"

"Friends and friends of friends," Diane said. "Don't worry about it. Don't take anything out of the car."

Lise begged permission to go into the small store and buy something to eat—they hadn't stopped for a meal since breakfast—while Turk and Diane unscrewed and discarded the vehicle's license plates.

She bought cheese, crackers, and bottled water for the bus trip. At the counter she noticed a stack of disposable utility phones, the kind you pick up when you've lost your personal unit, also favored, or so she had read, by drug dealers seeking anonymity She grabbed one and added it to the groceries. Then she walked around the back of the store, bag in one hand and phone in the other.

She tapped out Brian's home number.

He picked up almost immediately. "Yes?"

Lise was briefly paralyzed by the sound of his voice. She thought about clicking off. Then she said, "Brian? I can't talk right now, but I want you to know I'm okay."

"Lise… please, tell me where you are."

"I can't. But one thing. This is important. There's a man named Tomas Gi

"Listen to me, Lise. Listen. You don't know what you're involved in. You're with Turk Findley, right? Did he tell you he's a criminal? That's why he fled the States, Lise. He—"

She turned and saw Turk come around the corner of the store. Too late to hide. She closed the phone, but that was a useless gesture. She could see the anger on his face in the stark artificial light. Wordlessly, he took the phone from her hand and threw it into the air.

The phone sailed past a lamp standard and fluttered like a huge moth before disappearing down the embankment of a ravine.

Too shocked to speak, Lise turned to face him. Turk's face was livid. She had never seen him like this. He said, "You have no fucking clue, do you? No idea what's at stake here."

"Turk—"

He didn't listen. He grabbed her wrist and began to pull her toward the street. She managed to break his grip, though she dropped the bag of cheese and crackers.

"Goddamnit, I'm not a child!"

"Fucking prove it," he said.

The bus ride wasn't exactly pleasant.

Lise sat sullenly apart from Turk, watching the night roll by in the frame of the window. She was determined not to think about what Turk had done, or what she might have done wrong, or what Brian had said, at least until she calmed down. But as the anger abated she simply felt desolate. The last bus south was half-empty, the only other passengers a few grim-faced men in khaki pants and blue shirts, probably shift workers who lived downcoast to save the cost of city rent. The man in the seat behind her was muttering in Farsi, possibly to himself.

The bus stopped periodically at concrete-block terminals and storefront depots off the highway, a world populated by forlorn men and flickering lights. Then the city was behind them and there was only the highway and the horizonless dark of the sea.

Diane Dupree came across the aisle and took the seat next to Lise.

"Turk thinks you need to take the risk more seriously," the old woman said.

"Did he tell you that?"

"I surmised."

"I do take it seriously."

"The phone was a bad idea. In all likelihood the call can't be traced, but who knows what technology the police or Genomic Security might bring to bear? It's better not to make assumptions."

"I do take it seriously," Lise insisted again, "it's just…"

But she couldn't finish, couldn't find the words for the sudden awareness of exactly how much of life as she had known it was slipping away under the wheels of the bus.

By the time the bus reached a depot near Arundji's airport Turk had stopped gnashing his teeth and had begun to look a little sheepish. He gave Lise an apologetic sidelong glance, which she ignored.

"It's a good half mile to Arundji's," he said. "You two up for the walk?"

"Yes," Diane said. Lise just nodded.

The road from the depot was rural and sparsely lit. As they walked Lise listened to the crackle of her footsteps on the barely-paved verge of the road, the rush of wind raking scrubby, treeless lots. Off in the high grass some insect buzzed—she could have mistaken it for a cricket except for the mournful tone of its creaking, like a disconsolate man ru

They approached the fenced territory of Arundji's at a back entrance, away from the main gate. Turk fished a key out of his pocket and swung open a chain-link gate, saying, "You might want to stay inconspicuous from here on in. The terminal shuts down after ten o'clock, but we've got a maintenance crew on site and security guards out where they're grading the new runway."

Lise said, "Don't you have a right to be here?"

"Sort of. But it would be best not to attract too much attention."

She followed Turk and Diane to an aluminum-sheet hangar, one of dozens lined up at the rear of the terminal. Its huge doors were chained shut and Turk said, "I wasn't kidding about that crowbar. I'll need something to spring this."

"You're locked out of your own hangar?"

"Kind of a fu

Use was sweaty and her calves ached from the walk and she needed to pee. She no longer owned a change of clothes.

"Forgive Turk," Diane said. "It isn't that he distrusts you. He's afraid for you. He—"

"Are you going to do this from now on? Make these guru-like pronouncements? Because it's getting kind of tiresome."

Diane stared, wide-eyed. Then, somewhat to Lise's relief, she laughed. Lise said, "I mean, I'm sorry, but—"

"No! Don't apologize. You're absolutely right. Its one of the hazards of great age, the temptation to pronounce judgments."

"I know what Turk is afraid of. Turk is burning his bridges behind him. My bridges are still there. I have a life I can go back to."

"Nevertheless," Diane said, "here you are." She smiled again. "Speaks the guru."

Turk came back with a piece of rebar from the construction site and used it to lever off the latch, which was flimsier than the padlock attached to it and came away from the door with a concussive twang. He rolled open the big steel doors and switched on the interior light.

His plane was inside. His twin-engine Skyrex. Lise remembered this aircraft from their abortive flight across the mountains—ages ago, it seemed.