It only felt like they were going to be stranded here forever.
"Ordinarily, in a situation like this, I'd pull out my com pod and call for a mobile recharge. We can stop the next vehicle and ask the driver to call it in for us."
Almost any driver, and any professional trucker, would stop for a stalled vehicle.
"We can't," said Raven. "Even the bikers have seen those newscasts. We don't dare let anyone get a good look at us."
"So change your face again. I don't look a lot like the picture they're showing, and if I were traveling with, say, my grandfather, most people wouldn't look at me twice."
Raven's silence lasted too long. Kelsa was turning to face him when he said, "I can't shift. Trying to warm that lake, with half a dozen strong molders working against me ... I won't have enough power to change my shape for days."
He sounded cross, almost arrogant. Kelsa was beginning to suspect that was how he dealt with fear. She was plenty scared herself !
"Couldn't you ... I don't know. Use some power from the ley to do it?"
"I'm not your stupid battery," Raven snapped. "It doesn't work like that."
"Then how does it work? I'm sick to death of your not telling me things!"
Raven sighed. "To use the power of the ley, you have to use your own power to call it forth and control it. Exhausted as I am, I couldn't begin to touch it. And a power drain isn't like physical weariness, either. Mostly, if you retain some part of your magical energy the rest comes back pretty quickly. But when you drain it completely it takes a lot longer to return. Unlike your battery, resting will restore me, but it will be three or four days before I can shift shape."
Kelsa remembered other times he'd become tired, how shifting had taken him longer and longer. And he wasn't the only one who was exhausted. A tear ran down her cheek. She fought to keep her voice steady.
"How come you could do the opening spell on the bike's storage box?"
"That was only a nudge for the compartment to do something it wanted to do anyway. It didn't take more than a wisp of will. Molecular manipulation takes real power."
"So no money either?" The tears were falling now. Her breath began to catch.
"Not for days," Raven confirmed. "Though that doesn't need as much energy as changing a whole body does."
"So we're stuck here. We're fracking stuck here, and you're helpless, and those bikers are coming, and ... and..."
"Are you crying?"
"Of course I'm crying, you moron! I don't want to be murdered by bikers! I want..."
She wanted to heal the ley. She wanted to heal the whole world, and her relationship with her mother, and -
A pair of warm arms came around her from behind. How could this grip be so different from the one that let him hang on to the motorbike?
"I can't do it," Kelsa wept. "I don't want to get killed! I can't save the world. I couldn't even save ... save..."
"Save what?" he asked.
"My father."
She was crying so hard, she barely felt him lifting her and turning her so she sat sideways on the bike. Leaning against his chest she cried for fear, for exhaustion, for her father, for the whole damn mess.
He held her till her sobs began to subside.
"I can't do everything, either," he finally said. "I'd never have gotten this far without your help. So if you're finished, could we get moving again?"
A giggle interrupted the sobs. No matter how solid and warm his body felt, he wasn't human. And she was beginning to accept that. Even to be all right with it. Some of the time.
"Get moving how?" Kelsa fumbled in her pocket for at issue.
"Didn't you once say you could charge these things with sunlight?"
"Maybe." Kelsa blew her nose. "Assuming that pack holds solar charge sheets. And that the sun comes out. And that you're willing to wait a full day - a sunny day! - for a charge that will take us about a hundred miles."
"Do we have another choice?"
They didn't.
***
Thrusting her hand past various lumpy objects to the bottom of the bike's storage compartment, Kelsa's groping fingers finally encountered the crinkly mass of solar sheets. By the time they'd walked the bike past the swamp, to a place where they could pull off into a drier stretch of forest, the sun was rising.
"We can't stop here," Kelsa said. "We've got to find