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  How long would it be before the police arrived? The city of Calama was several hours away, giving the rifleman ample time to abscond with the bulk of the evidence. Gabe could do nothing to thwart him. Fontecilla had asked him to wait where he was, so even a return to the observatory was off the table.

  It’s not over, is it?

  Though Gabe had done his part for the cause, almost dying for people he’d never met, he suspected that extricating himself would not be easy. He was a witness who’d looked the killer in the face but hadn’t seen a thing. Terrific.

  Somehow they were all connected: Micha Lepin, the man mentioned in the DINA papers; the Midnight Messenger, aka Alban Oliveras; the boy with the pinwheel; the woman in the Radio Flyer.

  Somehow, somehow …

  * * *

  At four in the morning, Mira chased three aspirin with the best cup of coffee on Mars.

  For the last hour, her brother’s new best friend had described what sounded like either a tall tale or a ghost story, depending on the amount of peyote you were enjoying. Having been high only once—the typical and not-even-worth-mentioning ritual of life as a college freshman—Mira couldn’t file it away as myth. Especially not when Luke was interjecting his own commentary. They were like a pair of sportscasters in the booth, except what they were describing sounded more like Auschwitz than a playoff game.

  Jonah’s colleague Eduardo had just completed an inspection on the buggy they’d driven to Mentiras. Now the six of them stood around the Land Rover in the lights marking the ACEF living quarters, where Donner was getting some sleep after returning from the observatory.

  “How long will it take the police to get here?” Mira asked. She posed the question because she teetered on the cusp of collapse. This had possibly been the most eventful day of her life, and she wanted it finally to be over so she could plunge into a rehabilitating sleep. “If you called them over an hour ago…”

  “They’ll likely bring a helicopter,” Ben said, “but even as the crow flies, they’ve still got a good stretch of desert to cover. We’re deep in the big empty, sugar.”

  “I guess I didn’t realize how far we are from civilization.” She looked at Gabe. He hadn’t touched the coffee that Jonah provided. She wanted to ask him more about Luke simply because of how she’d felt when Gabe described events. Though the whole episode had scared her panties into a figure eight—to use her mother’s phrase—pride had replaced her fear. But she thought again of the woman he’d described and lost her grip on sisterly conceit. “Mars really knows how to show a girl a good time.”

  “You do realize,” Jonah said, “that a day on Mars is nearly forty minutes longer than an Earth day. Imagine the trouble our friends here might get into with such time on their hands.”

  “Troubletroubletrouble,” Luke said. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

  “How is the day longer?” Mira asked.

  Eduardo, the project’s young botanist, eagerly elaborated. “When a planet rotates, the stars and the sun appear to move, but they often do so at different rates. On Mars, the stars complete their cycle in thirty-seven minutes, while the sun requires thirty-nine. So a full day on Mars, or its synodic period, is technically thirty-nine minutes greater than Earth’s. NASA has considered making the official Martian hour last for sixty-two minutes, which would help synchronize events on the two planets.” He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and looked at Ben. “But if I remember my fiction correctly, your Martian settlers chose to keep the standard hour and use those extra minutes more … creatively.”

  Ben shrugged. “What can I say? When men and women are cooped up in atmosphere suits all day, they’re looking forward to a little R and R that is literally off the clock.”

  Mira smiled to herself. She remembered that part of his novel. Lieutenant Dycar and the other colonists referred to those thirty-nine minutes after midnight as the Trysting Hour. One chapter in particular was rather risqué, with Dycar and his lover, Tilanna, knowing each other in the biblical sense, and Luke blushed every time he read it. But to Mira, veteran of many a bodice-ripper, Ben’s romance scene was rated PG.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Eduardo said. “No matter what planetary body we might be roaming, human nature always wins in the end. In fact—”

  His head tipped sideways. Red mist dappled Mira’s face.

  Eduardo fell.

  Confused, Mira touched the moisture on her cheek. Blood stained her fingertips.

  “Get down!” Gabe snagged her arm and pulled her to the sand. “Everybody on the ground!”

  Mira realized, then, that Eduardo had been shot, though she’d never heard a sound.

  Luke dropped to his knees behind the Land Rover, and Ben did the same. With a touch, Jonah drove his chair into the fender.

  “It’s him!” Gabe shouted. “Stay behind the truck!”

  Mira pressed her back against the door, Luke on one side of her, Gabe on the other. Ben stayed near his brother, who’d lowered himself in his chair so that his head nearly rested on his knees.

  A few feet away, Eduardo lay dead, a bullet hole just above his eye.

  Mira surprised herself by not screaming. The sight of a dead man only two feet away from her was so improbable that she couldn’t even give voice to her surprise. The suddenness of it robbed her of breath.

  Jonah, however, mumbled a rapid stream of words, stringing them together senselessly, saying Eduardo’s name over and over, interspersed with garbled syllables of fear.

  Glass shattered. A few inches above Mira’s head, the driver-side window turned into a kaleidoscope.

  “I think he’s mad at us,” Luke said.

  The sound of her brother’s voice jarred Mira from her trance. Her mouth was as dry as it had ever been. The proximity of death seemed to have sapped the moisture from her, so that now she was a proper desert beast. She knew only that she had to keep Luke safe. She defaulted to what had been her prime directive for over twenty years.

  Staying close to the ground, she reached up and opened the vehicle’s door. “Inside!”

  Luke had covered his ears with his palms. He moved his head right to left and back again, though he otherwise didn’t look particularly frightened.

  Mira jerked one of his hands away. “Get in the truck, Hansel. Now.”

  Though he normally enjoyed badgering his sister by resisting her suggestions, he also respected her Danger Cap. You didn’t screw with her when she was wearing it. He squirmed through the gap provided by the partially open door and crawled over the gear stick.

  “Stay down!”

  Again Luke did as ordered, sliding downward in the seat.

  A taillight exploded.

  Ben shouted in mounting alarm.

  “Everybody inside!” Mira said. Whether or not they listened to her was irrelevant. She was Athena, wisdom in one hand, war in the other, and she was damn sure getting her brother out of here alive. She pulled herself into the driver’s seat.

  Behind her, Gabe got the rear door open and yelled at Ben to get his ass in the truck, just get in the truck, just get in. Ben barked back about Jonah’s chair.

  But Jonah was having none of it. “Do as the man says, Benjamin! I’ll worry about my goddamn self!”

  Ben got in and then spun around, ready to assist his brother. Jonah tipped forward in his chair, clasped Ben’s waiting hands, and, with Gabe providing a bit of lift, transferred himself into the SUV’s backseat.

  Mira panicked briefly: Shit. Stick shift. She’d driven one only a handful of times. One of her mother’s boyfriends had owned a Camaro with self-applied window tinting and speakers that crackled when the bass was too heavy. He’d taken Mira out on a dirt road when she was twelve and gotten his father-figure fix by letting her drive.

  She pushed the image from her mind and twisted the key in the ignition.

  Once Jonah was inside, Gabe jumped in after him.

  Something thudded against the vehicle’s steel and ricocheted with a hi
gh-pitched whistle.

  Mira shifted gears with a sound like a millstone grinding rocks. She kept her head down so that she could barely see over the dash. The others did the same, huddled as low as the seats allowed. She glanced at Luke. He looked like a model of a schoolroom tornado drill, head between his knees, hands clasped behind his neck.

  She released the clutch too quickly. The engine died.

  A bullet skimmed the hood, blazing a trail of sparks and leaving a silver gouge in its wake.

  Ben struck the back of the seat. “Mira, please!”

  “Pedal to the metal,” Luke whispered. “That’s a big 10-4, good buddy.”

  Mira turned the key, let off the clutch, and pressed the accelerator as hard as she dared.

  The big radials bit into the sand. The Land Rover bolted from a standing position to warp factor six, dispatching a smoke screen of dust to cover its retreat. Wind whistled through the hole in the glass.

  Mira didn’t bother to look where she was driving. She shifted gears as best she could. Then, head down and foot on the floor, she used her shirt to wipe her face, frantically scouring the blood from her cheeks.

  “He’ll follow us,” Luke said softly. “Martians never, ever give up.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Dawn cracked the iron shell of night. Gabe was the first to notice. The eastern stars faded and pink daylight appeared, as if to remind him that, despite everything, the universe was still functioning as intended.

  Body count: four.

  The scientist named Eduardo was the fourth and most recent ghost to lend its voice to the chorus in Gabe’s head. He was too weak to fight off their song. Other than the nap in Vicente’s truck, he hadn’t slept in over two days. He so wanted to let sleep drop a black sack over his head and drag him away like a victim.

  “Everybody more or less okay back there?” Mira asked.

  Gabe met her eyes in the rearview mirror, though he knew it wouldn’t do any good. For a moment they stared at each other. He wondered if she was beautiful. “As good as can be expected.”

  “Ben? Jonah?”

  The brothers shared the backseat with Gabe. Jonah rode in the middle, his hands resting on his useless legs. He’d said nothing over the last hour, only stared blankly from the window.

  “We’re hanging tough,” Ben said.

  Speak for yourself.

  Gabe wasn’t sure if he was hanging tough or not. The cops would arrive at Mentiras to find half the town burned down. The rifleman had surely turned his underground warren into a furnace by now. Perhaps he’d knocked out the supporting timbers and buried everything under tons of rock. Gabe had no way of knowing this—unlike Fontecilla’s grandmother, he wasn’t psychic—but he wagered it was true. The rifleman’s objectives now were to obliterate all signs of his passing and to eliminate the witnesses.

  How did he follow us?

  Gabe’s weary mind had no answer for this. Maybe the man had supernatural tracking skills or satellite imagery at his command. Hell, maybe he was the psychic. It didn’t matter. He was coming.

  But why?

  The rifleman’s motivation remained a galaxy beyond Gabe’s grasp. It was the astronomer’s eternal and most bitter lament. Looking was the best you could do. Touching would be for a generation farther down the line.

  “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Micha Lepin,” he said.

  Mira again looked at him in the mirror. “That’s not anyone I know. Why?”

  “I’m not sure.” He twisted in his seat enough to liberate the dog tags from his hip pocket. Though the morning light wasn’t strong enough to reveal what was embossed there, he felt the name when he ran his finger over the letters.

  Alban Olivares, the Midnight Messenger’s secret identity, the persona he assumed when he wasn’t alone in the Atacama, rescuing chewed-up children from hell.

  Gabe sucked down more water, afraid to give the desert air any opportunity to dehydrate him. Foolish hikers died out here every year, and he’d learned to be wary. As he drank, he thought about the two names as well as he could, given his fatigued state of mind, and it took him a moment to realize that Luke had spotted a town. He was tapping his thick index finger against the window.

  “What is it?” Mira asked.

  “Lights. Lights and lights and more lights.”

  Almost as soon as he said it, the Land Rover thudded across a strip of blacktop. The two-lane road drew a perfectly straight line across the desert. Mira corrected course to get them moving in the right direction down the highway, though she didn’t bother staying in the proper lane. No traffic challenged her from either direction.

  Gabe’s eyes throbbed in their sockets, and the names started to blend together: Eduardo-Alban-Micha … these foreign-sounding monikers made no sense to his weary American ears. Why couldn’t the ghosts take care of their own problems? Who among them had decided to draft an inexperienced astronomer for the task of settling their debts?

  “We need to call somebody,” Mira said. “The police or someone.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. My good buddy Fontecilla in his damn trilby.”

  As they neared the town and whatever waited there, Gabe slid closer to the edge of sleep, his head resting on the window. When he heard Jonah weeping softly beside him, he offered no commiseration. At least Eduardo hadn’t died in pieces.

  * * *

  Sweet melon juice ran down Ben’s unshaved chin.

  The wrinkled woman behind the crates offered him a rag and explained in Spanish her secret for always knowing when a melon was ripe.

  Ben listened as if she were explaining religion. Through the years, he’d tapped with his thumb, sniffed the rind, and shaken the things next to his ear. Everybody had a different method, just as everybody had a different path to God. Ben had spent his life wondering equally about those topics. Perhaps if he could unlock one he’d learn the secret to the other.

  They’d discovered a town on the desert’s edge, one apparently self-sustained by family farms that received water from the only spring around for miles in any direction. The people here were likely descendants of the nitrate miners who once ruled this place but now were only memories.

  A few feet away, Mira and Luke were talking about shoelaces while the sun came up behind them.

  “Just try to be more careful,” Mira said. “If you hadn’t gotten out of the car so quickly, you wouldn’t have been tangled up in your laces, and if your laces had been tied—”

  “IknowIknowIknow! Double knots!”

  “Yes, double knots.”

  “Gretel?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Why did the Martian kill that man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he aiming for me? I think he was aiming for me. I zapped him with the ray gun.”

  “I said I don’t know. Let’s just worry about being safe, okay?”

  They’d been in town for twenty minutes. There was no sign marking the city limits, only a single wooden post that might once have borne the name of the place but was now a perch for a blue-hooded Sierra finch. It was the first wildlife Ben had seen since his arrival at Jonah’s facility yesterday evening. The finch implied the existence of an ecosystem, which the area around ACEF entirely lacked.

  He looked over his shoulder. The highway ran on forever.

  Satisfied that they were still alone, he returned his attention to the woman and reluctantly interrupted her lesson on knowing a melon by the texture of its skin. “I better just pay for this one and be on my way.”

  His smile convinced her, pesos changed hands, and Ben returned to the SUV. It sat in a patch of suspiro de campo, purple wildflowers that bloomed in places where other plants would shrivel for want of water. Ben offered a melon half and a plastic fork to his brother, who sat silently in the backseat.

  Jonah stared at him with reddened eyes. “Don’t start, Benjamin.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “A man is dead. A friend of mine. He … he
died right in front of us.”

  “Lay off. I was there. You think I’m not upset? You think I’m immune somehow?”

  “Immune? Sure, I’ll buy that. It’s always been that way. While I work my black paraplegic ass off and get hit with whatever God decides to blow off the fan, you just breeze on through, immune.”

  “It’s just a goddamn cantaloupe. I ain’t forcing it down your throat.”

  “Everything all right?” Mira asked, making her way back to the car.

  “Not in the least,” Jonah said.

  Ben felt the barbs of his brother’s eyes as he turned to Mira. “The Cable siblings will be just jim-dandy. What about the Westbrooks?”

  Mira had bound her hair behind her head and had used the corroded restroom behind the market to wash her face. “One of us is fine, more or less. The other is … well, she’s kind of freaked out at the moment, if you want to know the truth.”

  Jonah clucked his tongue. “See there? One gets to be immune, and one gets bloody.”

  “Don’t be a shitheel,” Ben told him.

  Jonah spread his hands. “I’m just saying…”

  “Yeah? Well, quit just saying. We’re all in this together.”

  “Nice cliché, but it’s not so easy to swallow when you don’t happen to be—”

  “Don’t say it, Joe.”

  “—bulletproof.”

  Ben bit his lip. He hadn’t hit his brother since they were kids. But to everything there was a season, and all that. For the time being, he managed to keep himself in check.

  “What’s that mean?” Mira asked. “Bulletproof? I don’t understand.”

  Ben’s thoughts swirled. A man had been gunned down. The killer was chasing them. Gabe hadn’t yet emerged from using the phone, maybe because there was no help on the way and he didn’t want to break the bad news. And now Jonah was poking at the ground, once more exhuming the oldest and most troublesome secret between them.

  “It means,” Jonah said, “that some of us are blessed. Or lucky. Or whatever you want to call it. Some of us aren’t even afraid of guns. And it’s always the rest of us getting rattled. Why do you think Luke wasn’t afraid to follow Traylin down that hole? He’s probably like Benjo here, immune.”