Mathématique: Chapter 16

“You ever driven a real car, hotshot? Something with more than two ponies worth of horsepower?”

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Pain.

Text iteration: Midnight

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 16

He’d cut out his subcutaneous transmitters. Young and Vala had done the same, cleaning the knife as best they could as they passed it between them. In the end, they’d pooled their bloody chips and their phones and pitched them into a ravine. The phones hit rock and shattered into glittering ballistics.

And now? He drove.

The wind blew through his hair, hot and dry, while he downshifted and upshifted as dictated by the sinuous road that led northwest, off Route 25. His left arm throbbed. His ribs ached. Even with Jackson’s shades, the sun was trying to split his skull.

“Yeah so.” Young shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat, blanched with pain, drenched in sweat. “This makes The List.”

“Y’don’t strike me as a terribly gifted concatenator, but, by all means, explain.” Rush fought the way infix notation was twisting into his consciousness with the ease of any mathematical concept that by its nature, construction, or connotation suggested a pair.

The Venn diagram. The Cartesian product. The focal points of an elliptical orbit. The—

“List of Worst Getaway Vehicles,” Young said.

“This is a list that you have.”

“Yes.” Young hissed through clenched teeth as Rush took a switchback a bit too fast. “Yes it is. And a 1976 Dodge Dart with no air conditioning during the height of summer is a shit getaway vehicle. I’m gonna open the floor for comments.”

“It’s the pits,” Vala called from the backseat. “Management will be hearing from me, I guarantee you that.”

“I don’t mind a manual transmission.” Rush upshifted to illustrate his point. “Is this a cultural preservation project, do you think?”

Young snorted. “You ever driven a real car, hotshot? Something with more than two ponies worth of horsepower?”

“Fuck right off.”

“That’s a no.” Young smirked through his pain. “I’ll find you a real car.”

Rush squinted into the sun, tried to ignore his building headache, and wondered what a “real car” would consist of.

“You know how much civilians make at the SGC?”

“Yes,” Rush cautiously felt his way into the non sequitur, “seeing as I am a civilian consultant?”

“Then,” Young replied through clenched teeth as he shifted in his seat, “you know it’s enough to buy a nicer car than a 1976 Dodge Dart. A Dodge Dart. Rush. Even you—”

“I don’t understand your preoccupation with cars.” Rush adjusted his rear-view mirror to get a quick view of Vala. Her face was pale despite the heat. Her good hand pinned her injured arm to her side.

“You should not be in a Prius. You drive,” Young growled, “like a pilot.”

Hang on.

“Was that a compliment?” Rush asked.

“No. Pilots are idiots.”

Rush glanced again at Vala.

“Vala, you still with us back there?” Young picked up on Rush’s concern. He angled his head, but couldn’t turn his body enough to see her.

“Oh absolutely, handsome.” Vala’s voice flowed like water. “I’m invincible, you know; it’s just a flesh wound.”

Rush glanced back at her again, caught Young’s eye, and shook his head.

“How’s the shoulder?” Young asked. “You bleeding at all?”

“A bit,” Vala said, a breathy note in her voice. “It’s mostly cauterized.”

Young lowered his voice. “Next overlook you see, pull over.”

Rush nodded.

“Let’s go to Vegas,” Vala said, without any of her usual energy.

“Vegas?” Young echoed.

“Well, we’ve got to go somewhere, right?” Vala continued, determinedly flirtatious. “I see no reason why it can’t be Las Vegas.”

“Um,” Young said.

Rush felt the man grasping after a rational counterargument. He wasn’t inclined to assist.

“Don’t think we need to go that far,” Young settled on. “We’ll drive for a few hours. Give them time to get the situation under control, then use a pay phone to check in.”

“And if things aren’t going well?” Vala asked. “If no one answers?”

“Then,” Young said, “we make a new plan.”

“This bucket of rust is memorable,” Vala said. “It’s traceable by license plate to Daniel, and from Daniel to the SGC.”

“At the moment,” Young said, “our biggest concern is cloaked ships. We dumped our phones, we cut out our chips; we’re getting distance. The situation’s under control. We should be fine.”

Rush Moonlight Sonata’d his fingers over the narrow torus of the steering wheel and tried not to feel the weight of Young’s gaze. It wasn’t apparent to him that “the situation” at the SGC was now or had ever been “under control.” (Admittedly, he had no validated metric by which such a thing might be assessed.) Even if one could’ve (previously) made an optimistic assessment regarding digital security on base, it appeared unlikely it would stand up to repetitive assaults by the Lucian Alliance.

They would get what they wanted, given sufficient time, patience, and resources. It was a fundamental truth of information security.

Young watched him.

Rush kept his eyes on the road.

“No one ever wants to steal cars and go to Vegas,” Vala pouted.

And. They hadn’t told him. They hadn’t told him any of it.

“Vegas is gonna seem pretty tame by your standards,” Young said. “Cheap lights, cheap booze. A fountain here and there.”

The math was secondary. It was secondary.

“I’ve heard that in Vegas a game called ‘poker’ is played?” Vala said. “I’m very interested in learning the rules.”

“Nice try,” Young said. “That kinda thing work on Jackson?”

“More often than you’d think,” Vala replied, her voice tight with pain or regret or some other application-layer emotional constraint.

A muscle in Rush’s cheek twitched. Given the math was secondary, what was primary?

“Hey.” Young shifted in his seat. He winced. Wiped sweat from his brow. “Rush.”

Genetics. Obviously the genetics were primary. (Never a good sign, when genetics were primary. Literally, he couldn’t name a single example where such a thing had gone well. To be wanted for one’s mind required the functioning of said mind. To be wanted for one’s genes, well—that was a different story.)

He swept his fingers over the steering wheel in a mockery of a descending chromatic scale.

“Rush,” Young growled.

This was what Jackson had known. What he’d finally managed to communicate. This was what Telford had known and concealed. Who else knew? Lam knew. She must. Landry knew. Mitchell seemed to know at least part of it.

Did Vala know? Did Young?

“RUSH.”

“What.” He broke the word off with so much viciousness that Young flinched.

“Damn it,” Young breathed. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed a hand to his back. “You need to hold it together. We’re nowhere near outta of this yet.”

Who was ‘JS’?

Jackson would know.

“I realize that,” Rush replied.

“We need to find a place to pull over and take a look at Vala’s shoulder.”

“I’m aware.”

Young took a slow breath, not letting up one iota on his scrutiny. “What were you doing in the infirmary?” he asked. “I thought you were meeting with Dr. Perry.”

Rush swept an abbreviated arpeggio over the wheel. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Vala looked directly at him, her eyes serious and full of import he couldn’t parse. “Reading my medical file.”

Young shifted in his seat, pale with pain, damp with sweat. “Anything interesting in there?”

Rush glanced again at Vala. Her eyes gleamed with warning—but of what, against what—he couldn’t say.

She knew something.

Young seemed to be in the dark.

“Possibly,” Rush said.

“Oh?” Young said. “Possibly. Great.”

Rush exhaled, short and testy. “I’m not obfuscating, I said ‘possibly’ because I meant possibly.”

“Fine. What was was ‘possibly interesting’?”

“Gorgeous, I wouldn’t,” Vala said quietly.

Young glanced at her, short and sharp and too trapped in his body to see anything but the back of the driver’s seat.

Vala knew what was in his medical file. But she didn’t think Young knew. Interesting.

“It contained a genetic analysis,” Rush said, gambling who the fuck knew what for opaque stakes. “Specifically—” he hesitated, opened a hand against the steering wheel, and closed it again. “Specifically, it contained information on expression levels of three genes. ATA. LTA. NRA.”

In the rearview mirror, Vala shut her eyes.

Young’s gaze swung back to the road. “Three genes.” He turned the words in the rock grinder of his cognition. “Three?” 

“Yes,” Rush said. “It’s a number. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It comes after two and before four. I was hoping for something useful.”

Young shot him an affronted look, which the other man had the gall to draw out for a few seconds, taking what was probably visceral pleasure from his own methodical deliberation.

Bastard.

“Well,” Young said finally, “it would explain a few things.”

“Specify.”

“Why you’re at the top of the LA’s list. Why Jackson wants to send you to Atlantis. Why Sheppard and McKay want you there. Why they put you on a cryptography project already fully staffed by a team of math guys. Why you were aggressively recruited even though you’re—” Young trailed off.

Rush narrowed his eyes behind Jackson’s sunglasses. “Even though I’m what?”

“Maybe like—“ Young trailed off again. “Kinda—”

Rush said nothing.

“You’re not really a team player and the SGC is a very team-based organization,” Young finished, deficit spending against his own cognition, no doubt.

“What are they?” he asked.

“The genes?” Young replied.

“Yes,” he said, his irritation hissing in the word.

“Never heard of the last one. NRA. The other two are Ancient genes. They’re necessary to operate a lot of the tech we’ve found. Not sure how that works.”

The import of that particular piece of information was enough to torque the trajectory of his thoughts into something so twisted by its own internal tension that he couldn’t contain—

“The Ancients built a genetic requirement into their technology?”

Silence.

“You sound upset,” Young replied, aggravatingly slow, irritatingly careful. (A reply of this cadence was fast becoming highly correlated with a drop in Rush’s [emotional] barometric pressure).

“I’m not upset.” Smooth delivery. Still hands. Appropriate acceleration.

“Okay,” Young said. “Good. Maybe we should talk about something else right now.”

Unacceptable.

“I don’t see why the Ancients would impose a genetic requirement on the use of their technology,” Rush said in a polite and reasonable tone.

“Maybe this is something to talk to Jackson about,” Young said, trying to defer their conversation to a point when Rush wasn’t stick-shifting up a bloody mountain. “He’s gonna be a lot better at—”

“I don’t like what it implies,” Rush clarified.

“Which is?” Young asked.

“That an alien race has fucked about or is fucking about with human genetics? Specifically mine?”

“Uh, well, not literally yours, hopefully, but, yeah, at some point in your ancestral line—”

“My ancestral line?”

“I mean, presumably. Right?” Young glanced in Vala’s direction. “That’s where these genes come from? Back in the day? They’re passed down in human families, right?”

“You can’t be asking me that, handsome,” Vala said, cool and arch. “I don’t know a thing about human genetics.”

“Furthermore,” Rush continued, “the SGC didn’t hire me for the reasons they indicated.”

“I’ll give you that,” Young said.

The car was silent.

“So that’s it?” Rush demanded.

“Uh—”

“That’s all you know? These genes are ‘required to operate Ancient technology’? You’ve never looked into it any further?”

“It’s not my area,” Young replied, “an, even if it were, there’s a reason they haven’t told you, Rush.”

Rush glanced at Vala’s reflection in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were dark and serious. “Don’t look at me, gorgeous. They certainly don’t let me into their top secret briefings.”

He pulled out of a switchback, feathering the throttle, then upshifted at a linear stretch of road.

“Speed limits aren’t just for the amusement of the Colorado department of transportation, y’know,” Young growled.

“I like a fast driver,” Vala said, pained and breathy.

Holding the linear narrative of his thoughts was difficult in the face of an overwhelming desire to wrest everything he could find out of the SGC’s encrypted database. His hands ached for a keyboard.

“If I knew more,” Young said, earnest and unsettled, “I would tell you.” He glanced in Vala’s direction, unable to turn and look at her. “We would tell you,” he repeated, forming a tenuous verbal alliance.

“Would you.”

Implicit trust was everywhere: in peer-to-peer communications, within social networks, within machines that modeled those same connections. Those same networks. Had he trusted the SGC with their pseudo-enlightened, relatively-rational, scientific, entrepreneurial, industrial, intergalactic, colonialism?

He supposed he had.

(Idiot.)

“Yeah,” Young replied. “I would. I know it’s been a lot to deal with, this past week—”

Jackson was clever. Clever and risk-tolerant and playing with fire.

“—there were the two abduction attempts; even I can admit that’d be pushing it for anyone. Plus—”

It was staggering to him, staggering that the SGC thought they could keep anything from him. Did they not understand what he’d done? His work with the independent set problem? The way he’d already sliced through multiple cyphers they hadn’t even seen?

“—you passed out a couple of times—”

No. They’d no fuckin’ idea how far he’d taken the math. How far he could still ride it.

“—and there’s the math, which seems like it stresses you out more than firefights, weird as that is—”

And they wanted him for his genes? (Insulting.) The SGC had underestimated him in every parameter. Previously, he might have let such a thing slide. Previously, he might have complied with the debriefing Mitchell had threatened him with. Previously he might have—

He stared into the light, trying to burn his mind into temporary silence.

Previously, he might have done many things differently.

“You listening to me, hotshot?”

“No,” Rush admitted.

 

“Great,” Young growled. “Some scenic overlook bullshit is coming up on your left. Pull over, will you?”

Rush stopped the car. He killed the engine and pulled the keys from the ignition with a fluid twist.

He stepped into late afternoon light, filtered through irregular gaps in the parched pines. Beneath his shoes, a carpet of dead needles crunched softly. Far below, a hidden river ran in the space between peaks. He heard the roar of water pitting itself against stone.

Vala slipped out of the car, one hand tight on the metal of the frame.

He slammed the driver’s side door and stalked around the back of Jackson’s car, trying to keep his considerable anger at the SGC from coalescing into a definite plan. Time enough for that later.

Vala closed her car door and staggered.

“Shit.” Young shut his own door, already reaching for her.

Rush was faster.

“Don’t,” he snarled at Young. “Idiot.”

Vala turned into his approach, her good arm sweeping around his shoulders with suspicious grace. Instinctively, Rush reached for her as she pressed her weight into his shoulders and swung her legs up with the core strength of a gymnast. It didn’t take much effort on his part to finish the thing off.

The thing came together surprisingly well, and he ended up with an armful of Vala Mal Doran, held bridal-style.

Rush eyed Young with (what he hoped was) haughty neutrality while he tried to process what the fuck had happened.

He was, at most, thirty percent responsible for this state of affairs.

   

Young stared back at him, just as neutral, less haughty, seemingly torn between admiration and suspicion.

Rush looked down at Vala. Her eyes were closed, her forehead pressed against his shoulder.

“I’ll see if Jackson’s got a first aid kit,” Young said. “Put her on the hood.”

“Very dashing, gorgeous.” Vala’s breath was warm on the shell of his ear as he carried her away from Young. “Very well executed. If I ever make a break off this planet, remind me to take you with me.”

“Was there a point to this?” He pitched his voice low, so it wouldn’t carry. “Or are you amusing yourself?”

She winked at him, but her expression turned earnest. “ATA,” she whispered, “is projective and activates Ancient technology. LTA is receptive and allows finer calibration between device and operator. Not sure about NRA. No one is.”

He laid her carefully on the shaded hood of the car.

“Don’t you trust Young?” His words were nearly silent.

Vala smiled faintly. “Trust is a bad habit. Facts are gifts. Protect your sources, gorgeous, if you want to keep them.”

He nodded.

Young closed the trunk of the car.

“I suspect you’re a treasure,” she said at normal volume, with a dazzling smile.

Rush quirked a skeptical eyebrow at her and straightened.

Young limped toward them, supporting himself on the car, a first aid kit in hand.

“We’re in luck.” Young shook the first aid kit. It rattled as unseen pieces within impacted the hard plastic casing. “Jackson has at least some common sense. That, or Mitchell stashed this in his car.”

“Daniel can be quite practical at times,” Vala said, “his reputation notwithstanding.”

“Yeah.” Young drew even with Rush and set the kit near Vala’s hip, “but he’s got one hell of a rep at this point.”

“Do tell.” Vala winced as she helped Young ease her jacket over her shoulder. “I need some gossip for the next team bonding night.”

“So that’s a real thing?” Young asked.

“Oh yes.” The jacket came down, fully exposing the charred and sticky material of her undershirt, the glistening black and red of—

Rush flinched, trying to make sense of what he was looking at.

“Damn it, Vala,” Young breathed.

It was wet and it was deep and it was blistered and it was fused to her shirt. Rush blinked and looked away, watching sunlit dust particles ride eddies in the pine-filtered light.

“Don’t pass out, gorgeous,” Vala gasped, her chin angled up, her eyes fixed on the pines above them. “It’s bad for morale.”

“You should have said something,” Young growled. His fingers hovered at the intact edge of her shirt.

Rush blinked hard, willed his adrenaline away, and reached for the first-aid kit.

“Team bonding means Scrabble and beer. Can you believe that?” Vala asked. “Scrabble. Daniel always wins. Or he did, until I made it a point to memorize all the two letter words.”

“I thought you were clipped.” Young’s voice rose. “You said you were clipped.”

“I was clipped, handsome.” Vala gave Young a wan smile coupled with a sharp gaze. “Just ‘more clipped’ as opposed to ‘less clipped,’ if you know what I mean.”

“We could have left you,” Young said. “We could have dropped you somewhere. Anywhere. But now we’re in the middle of god damned nowhere with Jackson’s shitty 1990s first aid kit. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Rush rallied.

This was not illness, it was injury. This was not Gloria, it was Vala. (Who by all accounts had struck him as a sturdy, enterprising, absolute queen of an alien expat.)

 And so.

He inventoried the contents of the first aid kit, pulling out relevant items.

“I’m doing,” Vala said, low and cutting, “what I judge to be best.” She came up on her good elbow and lifted herself free of the hood of the car. The implication behind her words hung heavy in the air.

Rush kept his eyes on the first aid kit and tried not to react to the two gazes boring into the side of his head. Someone had to prioritize, since these two were currently incapable of it.

“Say it,” Young said. “Go ahead and say it.”

“It’s better with both of us.” Vala settled back onto the hood of the car, fixing Young with eyes the color of frosted slate.

“No mystery why you’ve still got probationary status,“ Young growled. “This was a bad call. Your shoulder looks like shit.”

He pulled a pair of scissors out of the first aid kit. They looked sharp. “Are the pair of you finished with your pissing-contest-as-trust-building exercise, or is there more?” He angled the scissors beneath the collar of Vala’s dark undershirt, but didn’t cut.

“You’re a lotta work,” Young said, with what was probably supposed to be irritation.

Rush quirked an eyebrow at Vala.

She gave him a brief tip of her chin, and he cut a line from her neck to the outer edge of her shoulder, the blades shearing easily through thin cotton.

Vala made a strangled sound in the back of her throat as he peeled the charred material back, cutting it free where it adhered to her skin, until he’d exposed the bleeding burn beneath.

“Apologies,” Rush said, appalled by the damage.

“Let’s tell Daniel about this,” Vala gasped, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

“Which part?” Rush asked. “The part where you stole his car keys, or the part where I cut your shirt off?”

“You are my favorite amongst all Earth men.” Vala blinked the tears from her eyes and offered him a sparkling smile. “Let’s go to the supermarket together.”

Young cocked his head, studying Vala’s injury with a practiced eye. “Start opening the gauze, hotshot. Try not to touch it.”

“Is this something they do on your planet?” Rush asked, peeling back the corners on sterile packets. “Supermarkets?”

“Who said anything about me not being from this planet?” Vala batted her eyelashes at him.

“It’s been implied,” Rush replied. “Heavily. Many times. By multiple parties. Including you. On separate occasions.”

“If you must know,” Vala said, “supermarkets are my favorite place to go. My favorite thing about this planet. They’re amazing, wonderful places, and this is coming from a woman who’s erected more than one pleasure palace in her day.”

Rush quirked an eyebrow.

“Okay,” Young said, iodine in hand, “I’m gonna clean this out and dress it as best I can.”

“Sounds like a plan, handsome,” Vala whispered, the muscles of her throat working as she swallowed, staring up at the sky. “Five minutes with a healing device will clear this right up.”

“Not if you get some kind of infection.”

“Right. Then it’ll be more like fifteen,” Vala replied.

“This is not something you wanna mess around with,” Young growled.

“So get on with it,” she fired back.

“You want something to bite on?” Young asked.

“Ugh, Earth men.” Vala rolled her eyes.

“Shoulder and elbow,” Young said quietly to Rush.

“Not necessary.” A steel edge came into Vala’s tone.

“Yes,” Young said, “it is. This’ll hurt like hell. You won’t be able to hold still.”

“No one,” Vala said coldly, “holds me down. No one.”

Right.

He could identify.

(And it fuckin’ showed, he was pretty sure.)

He swallowed, consciously. With difficulty. His headache asserted itself, full of painful confidence. “No,” he said, and the blue scatter of the sky bored down almost as hard as the two people staring at him. (Did it never rain here?) “Of course not.” He offered Vala his hand. Slowly, she interlaced their fingers, the gesture as terrible and familiar as he’d known it would be. He didn’t look at her.

“I’m gonna start,” Young said quietly.

Vala said nothing, but through her grip Rush felt the moment Young began. Her arm, her entire frame, stiffened as she pressed herself down onto the unforgiving surface of Jackson’s car. The nails of her free hand slid over the metal with a faint screech. Her fingers pressed into the back of his hand, cold and strong and painful.

Not looking was too familiar to be a tenable option.

Rush turned his head and saw the subtle arch of her back, her clenched jaw, her hair, spread around her in a dark fan.

“Breathe through it, kiddo,” Young told her, and she inhaled, her nostrils flaring, her eyes squeezed shut.

Looking wasn’t tenable either.

“I’ve got the melted—” Young paused, his voice strained, “the melted shit out of it. We’re halfway there.”

What was melted?

Synthetic weave in her shirt? Her jacket? The velcro backing for an insignia patch she still lacked?

Rush focused on her shoulder, on the scrubbing of brown-orange disinfectant into a bleeding burn in repeated, widening spirals. Once. Twice. Three times.

“Almost done,” Young said, “you’re doing good. Real good.”

 

Vala’s free hand was at her mouth, her fist pressed against her lips. Her nails dug into the back of his hand.

Young covered the injury with antiseptic gel in a liberal, methodical series of intersecting lines, then peeled back paper casings to create a layer of gauze atop his antiseptic grid. “Taping,” Young announced, as he pulled a piece of tape out and away from the roll.

Vala’s shallow gasps beneath the quiet pines were too much for Rush to bear. He wanted to step away. But he couldn’t step away. She was holding his hand.

“Vala,” Young murmured.

Her head was turned away, her hand pressed to her eyes.

“Vala,” Young said again, louder.

She took another shuddering breath, then turned to look at them, her smile fragile and unfixed. “Plasma burns,” she breathed, her eyes full of reactive tears. “They hurt. Zero out of five stars. Do not recommend.”

“Yeah,” Young said, amused and gentle. He eased her damaged jacket back up and over the dressing he’d placed on her shoulder. He cracked and shook a chemical cold pack, then handed it to Vala. “Hold that over your jacket. You wanna dry swallow a painkiller?”

Vala nodded.

Young fished around in the first aid kit.

Rush made a halfhearted attempt to free his hand. Vala’s fingers tightened around his, then released. She cradled her hand at her chest with a grimace and shakily sat on the hood of the car. Young handed her a pair of reddish brown pills, and she swallowed them without water.

“Tape this in place for us, won’t you, gorgeous?” She held up the cold pack. “I need my free hand.”

As Rush obliged, he felt the pressure of his own anxiety, the pressure of everything that had happened, work its way into the open places in his mind.

“So.” Young leaned heavily into the car. “We’re doin’ good.”

Vala nodded, pale as a sheet, her eyes shut.

“Hotshot, you wanna see if Jackson’s got a road atlas stashed somewhere in there?” Young tipped his head toward the car.

The colonel, too, was pale. His skin glinted with sweat in the irregular streamers of sun that broke through the pines. (Right, and, fuck, Rush had no idea what the other man’s injuries were. Young could be bleeding internally, could be hurt worse than Vala, could be hurt much worse than Vala.) He hadn’t asked about the man’s injuries, hadn’t wanted to pry, hadn’t needed to know.

Now, however, he did.

“What’s wrong with you?” Rush demanded.

Young sighed. “Can you keep it together?” he asked, exhausted, not answering the question; instead addressing whatever he thought he heard in Rush’s tone. It was a wonder the man could function at all, preoccupied as he was with motivation, with things that were implied, with the primitive machinating of his own and others’ limbic system.

Rush recalibrated. “Are you hurt?”

Young looked back at him, doing his own recalibrating. “No.”

“Clearly inaccurate.”

“Dial it down a notch, hotshot.” Young raised a hand. “I’m fine.”

Apparently, he’d need to be exquisitely explicit about what he wanted to know. “How were you initially injured?” Rush asked.

“Car crash.” Young averted his eyes, overly casual. “A few pins, a few bolts, a few surgeries later—”

“A car crash,” Rush repeated.

Young sighed. “Fine. It was a propulsion-based, four-person, manually piloted, low-atmosphere alien vehicle that weighed about as much as a Ford Mustang. And it was shot down. So.” Young shrugged wearily. “Car crash. Broken hip, cracked pelvis, shattered vertebrae. All kinds of soft tissue damage.”

Rush waited.

“But it’s all fine now,” Young said. “Bolts and pins still holding.”

Rush nodded.

Wordlessly, Vala fished around in the first aid kit and handed Young an unopened packet of ibuprofen.

Young laughed, short and sharp. He looked at Rush and said, “Map?”

Rush stalked around the car, opened the passenger door, and began searching Jackson’s glove compartment. He found an expired insurance card, an owners manual from the seventies, a collection of rocks of uncertain significance, a plastic jar of highly melted chocolate-covered espresso beans, fourteen pens, a flashlight that didn’t work, an expired package of Claritin, The Pocket Guide to Sanskrit, and (thank god) at the back, a map. He stood and spread it over the hood of the car.

It became instantly apparent that it wouldn’t be helpful.

“Mmm,” Young said, coming to stand beside him like a connoisseur of useless cartography. “The Giza Plateau. Circa like, 1985. Great. Useful.”

Rush gave him an eloquent side-eye and began a more thorough search of the car as Vala eased herself off the hood.

The backseat contained several books (Description de l'Égypte, Antiquités, Descriptions. Tome Premier, The Tain, Kурс общей лингвистики, The City of God) but no road atlas.

Under the seat he found a second pair of sunglasses, which he placed on the hood of the car.

“Retro.” Vala eyed them approvingly from where she stood, trembling, one hip braced against the metal frame of the Dart. She slipped them on with her good hand.

A search of the trunk yielded no map, but instead a set of items that looked like they could have come straight from a disaster handbook prepared by a helpful federal agency.

“No map?” Young asked.

“Indeed not,” Rush replied. “Like the rest of us, Dr. Jackson has come to rely on his phone.”

“Could one drive to Egypt from here?” Vala studied the map. “I wasn’t under the impression that was possible.”

“No,” Young said. “No you can’t.”

“Then why would—” Vala began. “Never mind.”

Young ran a hand through his hair. “Right now we need water, about three more hours between us and the base, and a pay phone.”

Rush hooked his hand over his shoulder and pressed his fingers into the ache at the base of his neck.

“You good, hotshot?” Young asked.

Rush nodded.

They returned to Jackson’s mercilessly hot car. Young slid into position beside him with a pained slowness that was as difficult to ignore as it was to watch. When Vala and Young had fastened their seatbelts, Rush threw the car into reverse, backed away from the overlook, and sped north and west, accelerating into the setting sun, chasing the axial rotation of the Earth.