stuffed them in his pockets.
As they marched toward the dark opening in the ground, something diminutive emerged from the space. Something human. A small child, shouting.
“Renard, Renard, Renard!” the child cried. “Alice said you weren’t coming back but I knew she was wrong and I told her so a thousand times and now she’s going to have to—”
Abruptly, the small boy stopped running and shouting some ten or twelve meters away. He stared at the strangers. “You’re not Renard.” For a brief moment his body language suggested tears. Then he placed tiny fists upon his tiny hips and demanded, “Who are you?”
“Friends,” replied Harpreet. “Or, rather, we hope to become friends. Is there an adult about, child? With whom we might speak?”
The boy turned tail and dashed back to where he’d come from. Pavel beheld a rough-hewn set of stairs leading belowground, looking much as though they had been carved by winds. Wallace strode forward, calling out a halloo which went unanswered.
“Well, I suppose it’s wait outside, then?” asked Brian Wallace.
“That would be our least-threatening course of action,” replied Harpreet.
A moment later, the small boy reappeared mid-way up the stairs. “Come inside,” he shouted before disappearing below once more.
Pavel took a step toward the entrance and the others followed. They seemed to have entered a residence, but no one appeared to greet them. Pavel was at the point of asking aloud if anyone were home when Wallace cried out.
“Well, isn’t that hospitable?” he asked with delight. A basin of water sat upon a counter, surrounded by small drink cups.
“No,” called Dr. Zaifa just as Brian prepared to dip one of the cups into the basin.
“Nay?” asked Wallace, his hand halfway to the water.
“It’s not ours,” she said simply. Turning to Ethan, with whom she’d been forming a sort of friendship, Dr. Zaifa asked, “Where you’re from, would it be bad manners to take a drink from someone’s home?”
“It would be unthinkable,” murmured Harpreet.
“Wet rations are assigned per person,” added Ethan. “One does not simply drink a ration belonging to someone else. It would be considered theft.”
Pavel restrained Wallace, shaking his head. “We don’t drink. Not unless it’s offered. This is a desert, man.”
A woman stepped forward as if emerging from the wall. Dressed in the same tans and browns of the desert, she might have been standing there all along.
“You’re not thieves, then,” she said. “So what are you?”
“We’re visitors,” said Pavel.
“Greetings, friend,” said Brian Wallace.
From a shadowy corner of the room, a man emerged to join the woman.
“I see no friends here,” grunted the man. “I see intruders—two young, one old, one fat, and one cripple.”
Wallace chuckled softly, patting his belly.
Pavel, however, took offense at the man’s use of cripple to describe Ethan. “This is how you greet strangers? With insults?”
“There is no offense in his descriptions,” said Ethan. “They are accurate, however incomplete.”
“Sir, we apologize for entering your dwelling without permission,” said Dr. Zaifa. “There was a child—”
“It ain’t my place,” said the man. “It’s hers.”
“Where’d you come from?” asked the woman.
“Here and there,” said Wallace, smiling pleasantly.
“You’d best see the Shirff, then,” she responded. “C’mon. Follow me. Roy? You just make sure as they do.”
Roy grinned, placing one hand upon a knife stuck through his belt. The boy, emerging from under the table where the water rested, stared at the strangers with wide eyes.
“What’s a cripple, Roy?” asked the young boy, skipping alongside the man.
“It’s when a feller can’t pull his own water-weight,” replied Roy.
Pavel was on the verge of snapping an angry retort, but Ethan placed a hand upon Pavel’s arm and shook his head no.
Pavel contented himself with clenching and unclenching his fists instead. It had been two years since he’d thrown a punch, and that had been a mistake, but he felt as though this situation warranted one. He’d met some intelligent people working in hospitals, and Ethan outsmarted any of them. The Marsian could more than pull his own water-weight.
“I saw them first,” said the boy, skipping ahead to stare at the strangers. “I thought it was Renard coming home.”
“Hush, Samuel,” said the woman. “It’s not proper to speak of him.”
“I know,” said the child, head hanging to one side. “But I’ll still think about him, even if he decides not to—”
“Hush!” said the woman again.
The “Shirff” being apparently out to parts unknown for the morning, the five visitors were invited to bide their time awaiting him in an underground chamber similar to the one they’d left, but with a gated passage.
“We didn’t