Treason Page 0,50

again.

That night I slept in the sand, with no insects buzzing around my head because no insects were foolish enough to try to survive where I was.

I surprised myself. I woke up, and walked on. My point of death was farther off than I thought. But surely not much farther. My shadow was still on the morning side when I reached a place where the sand gave way to stone and a rough outcropping of rock. Whether it was a shoulder of a mountain I was too incurious to care. It gave shade. And as I lay down in the shade my heart stopped beating and I gasped for breath and discovered that death was not so bad after all, if only it would come quickly, if only it wouldn't linger, if only I didn't have to be there for an eternity before I was free to go.

Chapter 6 Schwartz

He leaned over me, and my eyes could not focus. But he was a man, not a nightmare of Dinte or the Turd or even myself.

"Would you like to die?" he asked in a young voice, a serious voice. I considered the alternatives. If living meant another day on the desert like the ones I had already spent, the answer was yes. But then, this person, this whoever he was, was alive.

One could live on this desert.

"No," I said.

He did nothing, just watched me.

"Water," I said.

He nodded. I forced myself to rise, to lean on two elbows as he took a step away from me. Was he going for help? He stopped and squatted on the rock. He was naked and carried nothing with him-- not even a water bottle. That meant water was close. Why was he waiting? It should be obvious I couldn't pay him. Or did he consider me, in my monstrous shape, not human? I had to drink, or I would die.

"Water," I repeated. He said nothing, didn't even nod this time, just looked at the sand. I could feel my heart beating inside me-- beating vigorously and well. It was hard to believe that just a short time ago it had stopped. Where had this boy come from?

Why didn't he get water? Did he plan to watch me die, for sport?

I looked at the sand where he was staring. It was moving.

It shifted sloppily to the left and right, then caved in in small patches, falling down, slipping into something, splashing softly, collapsing, until a circle about a meter and a half across was filled with softly swirling water, black water that blinded me with reflected sunlight.

He looked at me. I awkwardly lifted myself (every muscle aching except my strong, youthful heart) and pulled myself to the water. It was still now. Still and cool and deep and good, and I plunged my head in and drank. I came up for air only when I had to.

At last I was satisfied, and I lifted myself and then let myself drop on the sand beside the water. I was too tired to wonder why sand should come up water, or how the boy had known it would. Too tired to wonder why now the water seeped down into the sand and left a dark stain that soon evaporated in the sun. Too tired to answer clearly when the boy looked at my body and asked, "Why are you like that? So strange?"

"God knows I wish I weren't," I said, and then I slept again, this time not expecting death but expecting somehow, through a coincidence of having been found right beside a spring in this waterless desert, to live.

When I woke again it was night, and I had forgotten the boy entirely. I opened my eyes and saw his friends in the moonlight.

They were silent, sitting around me in a circle, a dozen sun-blackened men with sun-blonded hair, as naked as the boy had been. Their eyes were on me, unmoving. They were alive and so was I and I had no objections.

I would have spoken, would have asked them to shelter me, except that I was sidetracked. I noticed my body from the inside. Noticed that there was nothing to notice. Something was terribly wrong.

No. Something was terribly right.

There was no pulling on my left side where three legs tried to balance two. There was no odd arching of my back to compensate for all the limbs resting awkwardly under me as I slept. There was no pinch of air painfully being drawn in through