Page 69 of Locked and Loaded

He checked the horizon again. The blue had spread, pushing back the dark.

"Watch," he said.

She followed his gaze.

The first color bled into the sky like water soaking into paper. Gray, then purple, then a streak of orange so pale it was almost pink. Sand dunes rose out of the darkness fully formed, as if they'd been there the whole time and the world had simply decided to reveal them.

Lennox stopped breathing.

He pulled the car to a stop and killed the engine. The silence that rushed in was total. No traffic. No voices. No generator hum or distant music. Just the whisper of wind over sand and the slow, steady rhythm of his own pulse.

He got out. She followed, still wearing the jacket, her bare feet silent on the cold sand. The air was sharp and clean and dry. It tasted like nothing. It tasted like the Sahara.

They stood at the edge of the track and watched the sun rise.

"Most people see it for the first time and don't know what to do with it," he said. "They've seen pictures. They think they know what sand looks like. Then they stand here."

"It doesn't look real."

"It is real. That's the problem. The pictures try to capture the color, but they can't. The sand changes every minute. What you're seeing now won't look the same in an hour. It moves like it’s alive."

The light spread across the dunes like a slow fire. Gold deepened into amber. The shadows retreated. Ridges went from sharp to soft as the sun found new angles. It wasn't a landscape. It was a living thing.

"You've been here before," she said.

He didn't answer right away. "A long time ago. Before I went to work for the Callahans. Before a lot of things." He leaned against the hood of the car. "I spent almost a year here. Not this spot. Different camps, different parts of the desert. I was running from something I didn't want to catch me."

"Did it?"

"Eventually." He'd made peace with it. Mostly. "But not here. Here I was safe. The desert does that. It strips everything away until there's nothing left but what you actually are. Some people can't handle that. Other people find out they're stronger than they thought."

She pulled the jacket closer, her eyes still on the horizon. The dunes had gone from copper to gold, and the sky had shifted to a blue so pale it was almost white. "Which one were you?"

"I'm still here."

She didn't push. Good. Pushing would have meant she had energy to burn. She didn't. He could see it in the set of her shoulders, the shadows under her eyes, the way she held herself like every movement cost something she didn't have.

"I haven't been cool since I got to Morocco," she said quietly.

"First good sleep I'll get in a week," he agreed.

"You haven't slept at all."

He didn't deny it. "I'll sleep when this is over."

She looked at him then, really looked, and he knew what she was seeing. The dried blood on his sleeve. The exhaustion he'd stopped bothering to hide. The bandage at his bicep that had been white when she wrapped it at John's and was now dark with fresh blood.

"Your arm is still bleeding."

"It's fine."

"You said that at John's. Then you bled through before we hit the highway."

"We're almost there. Over that ridge. Ten minutes."

She looked toward the ridge, then back at him. "You stopped to watch the sunrise."

"You needed to see it."