Night Of No Return

“I spent the summer before my senior year in college mapping and cataloging the tiny caves used as cells by religious hermits in the Byzantine period. One of my professors was keen on tying some theories of his about the period to the hermitage movement.”

“Students do make good cheap labor.”

“Exactly. Let me tell you, I got very good at spotting caves. Put me anywhere near a good-sized heap of rock and dirt, and I automatically look for caves.”

“What made you decide to investigate this one, once you spotted it? Especially if you aren’t into caving. It would have been a difficult climb.”

“A dream.” She laughed at the faint skepticism that crossed his face. “I’m not claiming psychic powers, but the unconscious mind does notice things the waking mind misses. See along here?”

They’d reached the scaffolding at the base of the cliff. She pointed up at the cave’s entrance. “There used to be a path along there, a ledge. It came down recently—maybe only two or three hundred years ago. You can see that the edges of the rock where it broke away aren’t worn, and there’s a lot of the rubble here at the base. I didn’t notice all of this consciously, but some corner of my mind did. I dreamed about finding a cave here, so naturally the next day I checked to see if my dream had any basis in reality.”

“Not everyone has such confidence in their dreams.”

She shrugged. “It made me curious, that’s all. We knew they’d used one cave as living quarters, so it seemed possible they might have used this one for something, too.”

“I should have known you’d be a dreamer.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aren’t all archaeologists dreamers?” His eyes were opaque now, the light blocked. It made them unreadable. “Caught in the romance of the past, more fascinated by the traces left by people who lived and died long ago than by the lives being lived around them in the present.”

“That sounds more like criticism than a compliment. I could have sworn you were an archaeologist yourself.”

“I don’t claim to be immune to the disease. Don’t look so worried,” he said, reaching out to tug lightly on her braid. “Archaeology may not be curable, but it’s seldom fatal. It just causes those of us afflicted to do strange things…like live in a tent in the Sinai during Al-kez.”

She grinned, recognizing the Bedouin name for the hottest of their five seasons: Al-kez, ‘the terrible summer.’ “Since you’re among the afflicted, you’re probably eager to have a look at my hole in the ground.”

She turned, grabbed the ladder that led to the top of the scaffold, and started up.

“I don’t see a generator.” His voice told her he was following, several rungs below her. “Is it inside the cave?”

“Yes. I thought it best to move it after the thefts started. It was a real pain getting it in there, too.” She was halfway up, moving automatically. “We had to—hey!”

With a quiet crack, one rung of the ladder gave way beneath her. Off balance, she tightened her grip on the rails and got that foot down onto the lower rung, where her other foot rested.

It broke, too.

She slid. The rough wood of the rails shredded her palms, slowing but not stopping her. Acting instinctively, she swung her feet up, connected with something solid—and pushed off. The world whistled by.

She landed hard.

Years ago, Nora had had the breath knocked out of her during her one and only attempt to ride a horse. She’d forgotten how terrifying it felt. She lay on her back, darkness fluttering at the edges of her vision, and tried desperately to breathe.

She couldn’t. Stunned muscles refused to work, her lungs refused to inflate, and panic flooded her, breaking the next few moments into disjointed impressions.

Alex’s grim face appeared over hers. He was speaking, but she couldn’t hear him for the roaring in her ears. The light was getting dim. Hands ran over her arms, her legs, her sides. At last, just as she was sure she had killed herself, that her body was broken too badly for breath, things started working again.

Her chest heaved. That first lungful of air tasted sweeter than any she’d ever had. She sucked it in gratefully, then gulped down another.

“Where do you hurt?” That was Alex’s voice.

Her own voice was more of a gasp. “Everywhere.”

Even as she spoke, the pain came flooding in—her chest, her shoulders, her back. But her legs moved easily enough when she shifted them slightly. “I don’t think anything is broken,” she managed to say, her voice rising all the way to a whisper. “But my chest hurts. And my hands.”

“You had the breath knocked out of you. No, stay flat.” His hands on her shoulders kept her from sitting up when she tried. “I didn’t feel any broken ribs,” he said, but he ran his hands along her sides again, then moved them to her front.

He was feeling the front of her rib cage now—right below her breasts. She wanted to protest, but something about his expression stopped her. Or maybe it was his lack of expression. His face was hard. His eyes were…strange. Dark. Focused. Empty. “I’m okay.”

If he heard her, he ignored it. His hands continued their businesslike exploration, moving now to her collarbone and shoulder. He pressed here and there, then manipulated her arm. “I don’t think you’ve dislocated anything, but you shouldn’t move. Your back—”

“I really am all right.” She summoned the energy to push his hands away and tried again to sit up. This time he helped, sliding an arm behind her back. The position left his face very close to hers.

His gaze flickered to her mouth, but his expression didn’t change. Her heart was beating hard—which was only natural, she told herself. Under the circumstances.

“What in the hell,” he said in a low, controlled voice, “did you think you were doing? Why did you shove off into thin air like that?”

Her eyebrows went up. “In case you didn’t notice, the ladder broke.”

“So you pushed yourself backward.” Now there was something in his eyes. Anger. It made them lighter, the color of dark honey.

Her tongue came out to lick her lips nervously. “I didn’t want to slam into you and knock you off, too.”

“Hell.” He pulled away. “Stay there. Don’t move.”

She didn’t much feel like moving yet, so she didn’t argue. She watched as he went up the ladder quickly. “Be careful. If any of the other rungs are loose—”

“Shut up.”

Her eyebrows went up again. The man had an annoying way of reacting to an accident.

Alex stopped just below the broken rungs. After a quick inspection, he came back down just as fast as he’d gone up. “The rungs weren’t loose,” he said tersely. “They were cut.”

On the third morning after Alex’s arrival, Nora woke up much as she had on the first two. Aching. Restless. With the edges of a dream slipping away the moment her eyes opened, and the evidence of that dream still throbbing in her body.

Alex had been naked in her dream. So had she. That much she remembered.

No point in trying to recall the details, she thought as she blinked at the darkness in the tent. Her subconscious couldn’t conjure up more for her in the way of experience than she’d actually had.

She glanced at the luminous dial of the battery-operated clock on the folding table near her cot. Thank goodness. It would be light enough to run in another fifteen minutes or so. She threw back her covers and sat up, sliding her feet onto the canvas floor. Various bruises protested, but not as severely as they had for the last two mornings.

She would stretch out thoroughly, she decided. But by damn, she’d have her morning run. She needed it.

Nora hadn’t been able to run since her fall. She’d missed it. Sexual frustration, she reflected wryly, was an excellent reason to enjoy running. And a woman who was still a virgin at twenty-nine years, eleven months and twenty-eight days of age might not know a lot about sex, but she knew a great deal about sexual frustration.

She stretched, yawned, and lit the small oil lamp next to the clock. The main tent had electricity, but none of the others did.

Her bare arms and legs were chilly. Though the temperature didn’t dip much below seventy at night at this time of year, that was a drop of forty degrees or so from the daytime temperature. To Nora’s heat-adjusted body, anything under seventy degrees felt pretty nippy.