I froze, then turned to face him. He was staring at me with a look of mingled perplexity and understanding. Both expressions were so strange for him that it took me a second or two to place them.

"Decker, you really are losing your mind. Nadia is not the Voyeur!"

Decker shook his head. "I never said she was. Never thought it. You were right in what you just said about her, only you got your tenses a little confused."

I didn't want to think about that, about what it meant, and so I said, "No. You're lying. It...she just saved our lives, Decker!"

"No she didn't," Decker corrected me. "I didn't trust her enough to let her hold the lever, and if I hadn't pulled you out of the window, you'd now be pinned there with a broken back."

That was true, although I didn't buy into Decker's reasoning behind it.

"Alright. You've admitted Nadia isn't the Voyeur. Why don't you tell me exactly what she is, if you've got it all worked out?"

"For god's sake, think about it!" Decker snapped. "We were always on edge, but Nadia was calm throughout the whole thing, as though the traps couldn't touch her. She scrambled over a series of barbwire fences and her clothes didn't even snag, yet yours—" Decker nodded toward what remained of my pants— "got torn to pieces. You got a lungful of whatever that gas was and it knocked you out for some time; Nadia was exposed to the same gas and she wasn't even out of breath. And you're an Army officer! You learned to climb barbwire and deal with gas as a matter of course and you were almost killed in there, yet neither of those things had the slightest effect on Nadia. In that room after the crawlspace, we were both on the verge of hypothermia and Nadia wasn't even shivering. Do you get it now, Peck?"

I backed away fast, shaking my head. But that was a lie. I did get it. I'd got it the moment he stopped me going back to that window.

"No!" I held up both hands, palm outward. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Decker, I don't get it, as you put it, because the it that you want me to get is just too damn crazy! And you know, coming from Murdock's best friend, that is really saying something! Besides, I wasn't the one who tried to leave her in that barbwire room just because I wanted to arrest her friend!" I finished, a little confusedly.

He stared at me, then his face cleared. "I see. You thought I was talking about you, didn't you?"

I blinked. "What?"

"When Nadia told you I'd dropped her and I said I'd had one hell of a shock. You thought I was talking about seeing you."

I frowned, trying to puzzle this out. "Well...yeah. You can't have been expecting to find me there."

Decker snorted. "No. Seeing you was a shock, but not enough of one to make me drop a kid that I was doing my best to save! I made the mistake of looking down at her and I saw what I was holding. That was enough of a shock for anyone."

I stalked away, stopped as something new occurred to me, then turned and stalked back again.

"Right. Well, how come you saw her? I mean, no offense, Decker, but I wouldn't exactly call you psychic!"

Decker pondered this for a few minutes, then said, "Best guess?"

I nodded.

"She wasn't banking on my being there. That time in the barbwire room, I saw her as she really was. Just for an instant, but it was there. Either that or she wanted to frighten me off."

"But—" I began.

"I thought I must be hallucinating. Especially after seeing you there," Decker added.

"Yeah. That's because you were."

"Peck, I was holding a corpse,and don't even think of telling me that I don't know what one of those looks like!"

I didn't. Soldiers were people too, which means we could make mistakes like anyone else, but the one thing every soldier knows is what a dead body looks like. If I had that rather dubious ability, I was certain Decker did as well.

"When I asked you if you thought someone was stalking us—" I began.

"Tell me something, Lieutenant," Decker interrupted. "When did you first start feeling that you were being followed by something unfriendly?"

I licked my lips, wishing like hell I'd thought to get a drink of water out of that bathroom we'd been in, and shrugged.

"I don't know," I said. "When I first arrived?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Really?"

No. Not really, now that I thought about it. The first time I'd had that feeling had been just before I entered that barbwire room, a few minutes after I met Nadia.

"But you felt it too, right?" I said.

Decker sighed. "Yes, Peck, but not until you and Nadia showed up. You and I took the same route – not that we had much choice – but there was no sign of that girl. I saw the timber slicer—"

"There! You see?"

He took a deep breath. I got the oddest feeling he was begging someone for patience. "Peck, that slicer was useless. There was rust and cobwebs all over it. I know. I took a good long look, just in case it was going to fire a spear at me or something, and some of the insides were rusted away. Now I'm no mechanic, but even I knew there was no way that slicer was going to slice up anything again, least of all a fifteen year old kid."

I shook my head. In spite of the desert heat, I was feeling very cold.

"No," I told him. "You're wrong, Decker. I helped her off that slicer! I pulled the blindfold off her! And then she slapped me," I added, remembering that first encounter. "I...she was hysterical. I comforted her."

Decker shook his head. "Peck, I don't know what you released from that slicer or what you comforted, but whatever it was, it had been dead for a long time. I saw it, back in that barbwire room!"

"Ah!" I pounced on this. "But you said yourself, you thought you were hallucinating because of the gas. Remember?"

Decker curled his lip. "You got far more of that gas than I did. Did you hallucinate, Peck?"

I swallowed hard, then said, "It might still have been, I don't know, stress or something."

To my surprise, he nodded. "Yeah, I thought that at first. Then I saw it again."

I dreaded asking the next question, but forced it out of myself, part of me already knowing the answer.

"Where?" I asked him.

Decker pointed toward the building, at where the window had slammed closed. "Right there. You must have wondered why I pulled you out like I did, instead of leaving you to wriggle out by yourself."

I hadn't, until he mentioned it. I'd been too occupied with saving Nadia to wonder why Decker had taken it into his head to hurry my exit.

"She looked at me, Lieutenant, and when she did, she looked like she did back in that barbwire room. I saw her starting to release the lever. Even if I was hallucinating about the way she looked, I wasn't hallucinating about that."

I shook my head, trying to clear it.

"Why?" I demanded, although I don't think Decker knew the answer to that question any more than I did. "I wasn't responsible for what happened to her! I tried to helpher! Why the hell would Nadia want to kill me?"

Decker shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe the dead get lonely."

That was a truly horrifying thought.

And then, as we stood there looking at each other, something shifted between us. Gradually we both remembered that we were mortal enemies, that he was in charge of hunting me and the others down and that I was a fugitive with a hefty price on my head. At that moment, I wasn't sure what he was going to do. I don't think he was either.

We stared at each other for what seemed like a long time, then he spoke.

"January, huh?"

"January," I agreed.

Pause.

"I could take you in right now," Decker said.

I didn't have the strength to argue with him. I just nodded in agreement. We both knew that while I wouldn't make it easy for him, I couldn't make it hard enough for him to let me go. We were both pretty rough, but Decker was in far better shape than I was.

He took a step forward and cleared his throat. "Lieutenant Peck, I arrest you in the name of the United States Army and order you to come with me. However, right now we have no water, so we'll stay here until nightfall. After everything that bastard did, I'm feeling a little tired, so I intend to get some rest in the shade, maybe even sleep, and I advise you to do the same thing as soon as you can. And..." he hesitated, then said, "Face?"

I looked at him oddly. Decker had never called me by nickname before. There was something more going on here, even my tortured mind could figure that much out.

Never taking his eyes off me, Decker said in a quiet voice, "If I were you, I wouldn't be around when I woke up."

I felt the grin appear on my face as if from nowhere. "Right."

There was another moment between us, when we could have said something – what, I've no idea – then Decker went and sat down in the shade, leaning against the wall.

I suddenly realized that I didn't want to take off on my own. Not because of any tender feeling on my part, but because he was older than I was, more experienced...he'd know how to survive in the desert better than I would. And in a crazy kind of way, I felt a bond with the guy. Decker had run the gauntlet from hell, same as I had, and I found I didn't like to think of him dying in the desert after all that.

Maybe the game wasn't over yet. We had no food, no shelter, and most importantly, no water. Was this the final challenge, crossing a desert with no more than the clothes on our backs?

Don't be an idiot, Face, my Hannibal-Voice admonished me (hopefully I'd trade it for the real Hannibal soon). He's given you a way out; take it. Or would you rather spend the next thirty years of your life in jail?

I swallowed. No, I most definitely would not.

Silently, I wished Decker good luck and goodbye, then turned away from the building toward the desert and started walking.

Well, this is pretty much where you came in ;) One final chapter will be up next week, and then this is finished :D