a sunny place that can't be seen from the road."
On the assumption that the bikers would be at least several hours behind them, they pulled the bike onto the road's shoulder and set out exploring. It didn't take long to find a place where the denser woods gave way to bog once more.
By day, the mop-topped pines Kelsa had noticed before appeared even more sickly. Not only scraggly, but a yellowish color that looked like the early stages of tree plague.
"Are they supposed to look like that?" she asked.
"What? Oh yes. The Russian settlers in this part of the world called that kind of boggy forest taiga, 'land of little sticks,' because the trees are so spindly."
"They still call it taiga," Kelsa said. "I didn't know it looked like this."
At least the thin trees that covered the ice-bottomed bog would let light through to the solar sheets.
They wheeled the bike through the woods, swearing as they rammed it over humps of grass and tree roots. To Kelsa's amusement Raven muttered "carp" several times, as well as "consarn it!"
When they finally reached the grove they'd selected, she looked at Raven with concern. His pale face was covered with sweat, and there were dark circles under his eyes.
The storage compartment also held several gallon jugs of water, and some energy bars that Kelsa was hungry enough to dig into immediately, and without complaint. She even wished the gangster who'd owned this bike had carried peanut butter, but no such luck. There were also three bottles of beer, which she set aside without comment, and a sleeping bag, which Raven promptly appropriated and rolled out on the ground.
"You don't need me for anything else, do you?"
"No." Crying had left Kelsa tired, but strangely at peace. "Why are the solar sheets always on the bottom?" She lifted out a big leather satchel with a magnetic seal, closed by a DNA lock pad. "I wonder what they've got in here?" She set it aside. "Probably their - aha!"
She did need Raven's help to unfold the flimsy black sheets and spread them over the open ground, angled toward the sun. Kelsa plugged their thin cords into the small ports on the bottom of the battery. Raven, who had found the charge meter on the bike's display, stared at it impatiently.
"It's not going up," he said after almost a minute had passed.
"It won't even start going up for over an hour," Kelsa told him. She wished the bike had carried another sleeping bag, but if she unzipped the one Raven had taken and spread it out they could both lie down on it. She might not feel as tired as he looked, but it was close.
"We'll have to wait at least half a day before it charges enough to give us any chance of reaching a town."
Surely there would be some sort of charge station in the next fifty miles, even in the Yukon.
With a resigned expression, Raven watched her take over half his bed. "So what's in that leather bag? It looked heavy when you dropped it. Food maybe? Or some blankets?"
"Not with that kind of lock," Kelsa said. "That's the kind of lock you see on briefcases full of diamonds or top-secret documents. It's programmed to open to only one person's DNA."
"Why would bikers carry diamonds?" Raven asked.
"They wouldn't. I'm afraid it's illegal drugs," said Kelsa. "And that's something I want no part of."
"We should see what it is," Raven said. "There might be something useful in there."
Kelsa wasn't surprised when he knelt beside the bag, examining the lock and seal. Excessive curiosity was one of his many bad habits.
And who knew? There might be something useful in there.
"Can you open it, like you did the storage box?"
"No." Raven ran one fingertip down the magnetic seal. "This is designed to stay closed, not to open. Its energy is all wrong."
"Then we can't open it?"
"I didn't say that." He pulled out the big knife, and before Kelsa could do more than open her mouth to protest, he punched through the leather beside the closed seal and slit the bag with one expert swipe. He opened it, and his brows rose.
"Drugs?" Kelsa wasn't sure she had the energy to go over and check it out herself. That sleeping bag looked really good.
"No." Raven sounded amused. "But now I see why they go to so much trouble to sell them."
He lifted the bag and tipped it so Kelsa could see. It was crammed with neat bundles of money.
"Oh