If I feel hunger then I’ll feel
the cold of night in the desert. I make for the dead tree, wondering how it got
here. I marvel at the idea that it ever grew here at all. I slide down the
slope and I’m reminded of the beach Teague took us to. How long ago was that?
An hour? How can so much happen in an hour.
Is this hell?
The thought claws at the edges
of my mind. I push it back, refuse to give it centre stage. I can’t have gone
to hell. I’m a man of science. Everything I’ve seen so far has been explained
by cold, hard fact so that must mean that there is an explanation for this
place.
I run through a list of deserts
in my head and try to place myself. The Sahara? The Gobi? Death Valley?
Something makes me think that this is none of those places. The feeling I have
and my manner of arrival set a seed of dread deep in my stomach, buried to
fester and grow beneath the layers of hunger.
I reach the bottom and stand in
the narrow shade of the tree. It feels real to my touch. Rough, dry and dead.
Bits of bark crumble away.
I can’t stay here. I close my
eyes and concentrate.
Nothing happens. I strain to
picture Yates’s house. The smell of the hay, the rolling fields behind it. The
old house covered in books.
I open them again and shift my
feet in the sand. What’s happened?
I close my eyes again and reach
out. I try to sense the world around me the same way I’ve done a thousand
times. The Edge doesn’t appear. All I see is the blackness of the back of my
eyelids and the image of the sun left on my retinas.
Hello! I think. Shouting in my own head. Elle! Yates?
There’s no reply.
Turning on the spot, stranded in
the middle of this endless sea of sand I come to a horrible realisation. I
think I’m alive.
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