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.Sunk into the sidewalksof Hanoi, every forty feet, had been little round air-raid shelters to climb into when the American planeswere thirty kilometers away and alarm two sounded, and in Las Vegas she had her amphetamines to gulpwhenever her wakefulness-spells began to weaken.She was fasting just because the sight of any food, and particularly the prospect of putting it into hermouth and chewing it up and swallowing it and assimilating it, now revolted her; it wasn't a consciouslyadopted measure, as the wakefulness was; but she was uncomfortably aware of a mythological parallel.In an English translation of the thirteenth-century French Morte Artu, the Maid of Astolat, who becamethe Lady of Shalott in the Tennyson poem, offers herself to Lancelot and then, when he refuses her, killsherself by refusing to eat or sleep.Her body is put in a barge and rowed down the Thames.On Wednesday night she had offered herself to Scott Crane, and they had more or less refused eachother.Could this involuntary starvation be a consequence of that?With a sudden splashing and clatter of wings, the ducks all took to the air.Startled, she looked up atthem in alarm to see which way they would fly, but they just scattered away into the empty blue sky in alldirections, and in a few seconds she was alone beside the choppy water.She stood up lithely.He's here, she thought, realizing that her heart was pounding and her mouth wasdry.Ray-Joe Pogue is here somewhere.He found me, way out here in Henderson.Her gaze darted around the green hills visible from where she stood, but there was no one in sight.I should run, she thought, but in which direction? And if he sees me, he'll be able to outrun me,weakened as I am from hunger.I should run, I should run, I should run! I'm wasting seconds!The sky seemed to be bulging down at her, and she was afraid that just the sight of her halfbrother tall and slim and pale, dressed like Elvis Presley, another King who was not allowed to bedead, striding over the crest of one of these hills would rob her of the ability even to move at all.Her back was against the rough bark of the cottonwood tree, and abruptly she turned around andhugged it she had not realized that she meant to climb it until she found that she had shinnied severalyards up the gray trunk, probably ruining her wool jacket and skirt.The tree's foliage was a dense mass of round yellow-green leaves, and she hoped that if she could getup onto one of the nearly vertical branches, she would be hidden.Hot, fast breath abraded her throat,and rainbow sparkles swam in her vision, but she didn't faint, though she was afraid that even picturingany face card right now would land her back on the grass, unconscious and ready for him.She got her scraped hands into the crotch of the lowest branch, and then she swung a leg up, tearingout the seam of her skirt, and got her ankle in beside her left hand, and with an effort that wrung a groanout of her she pulled herself up into the tight saddle.She didn't rest until she had stood up and braced herback against the trunk and her feet high up against the branch, and then she held still and workedsavagely on slowing her harsh panting.At last, though she still had to breathe through her mouth, she was breathing silently.She could hearthe whisper of traffic on McEvoy Street, sounding to her now like nothing so much as suitcases draggingaround the coping of a luggage carousel at an airport, and the leaves that surrounded her rattled faintlylike a lot of very distant castanets.Through a wedge of space between the leaves she could see theyellow square of a Kraft Slice rocking gently on the surface of the pond. She tried to believe that she had been mistaken, that he wasn't here, but she couldn't.And when sheheard feet swishing through the long green grass, she only closed her eyes for a moment."Bernardette," he said softly below her, and she had to bite her lip to keep from answering, fromshouting at him the way a child in a hide-and-seek game might yell to end the terrible suspense when Itwas so close."No ham," he said now.His words had been clear, she hadn't misunderstood him, but the nonsensicalstatement made her want even more strongly than before to cry out.Surely he knew where she washiding, and was only torturing her!"Cheese," he said."And bread.That's good, you're still staying away from the meat, that's my girl.Still hanging in there as Mrs.Porter's daughter."Nardie remembered Ray-Joe telling her once about a very old song that still survived today thoughin the current version "Persephone" had been phonetically debased to "Mrs.Porter."She looked down and felt her earring fall out of her pierced earlobe.In the same instant she pressedher elbow against the tree trunk, catching the little ball of gold awkwardly between the trunk and thefabric of her jacket.She could feel it pressing into the flesh above the point of her elbow, and, almostobjectively, she wondered how long it would be before the muscles of her arm would begin to shake."Then up he rose, and donned his clothes," he said happily,"And dupped the chamber door;Let in the maid, that out a maidNever departed more."He was reciting some of Ophelia's insane singing from Hamlet.He had read the play to her frequentlyduring her imprisonment in the shabby parlor house called DuLac's.In her head, rather than aloud, sherecited a following couplet:Young men will do 't, if they come to 't;By cock, they are to blame.She wondered if she would even be able to try to fight him off, if he were to see her up here.He laughed."Ray-Joe active!" he said to himself in a pep-talk tone."Ray-Joe Free Vegas!"Nardie Dinh could see him now, below her, his duck-tail haircut gleaming over the bigrhinestone-studded collar of his white leather jacket.He was holding an air pistol, and she knew whatkind of dart it was loaded with, a syringe-tipped tranquilizer dart with the CAP-CHURE charge like theone that had brought her down on that December morning in the Tonopah desert, the bright red fletchingof the tailpiece standing out like an eccentric decoration on the sleeve of her blouse.Her arm, the same arm that had taken the dart, had now started to shake.Soon it would lose itsawkward grip on the earring, and the earring would fall.Looking down, she estimated that it would landby his left foot.He would hear it, look down and see it, and then look up."I wonder if you can hear me, somehow," he said quietly, "in your head.I wonder if you'll come backhere to this tree, if I wait.We both know you want to.You met him Wednesday night, didn't you? TheKing's son, the prince, the genetic Jack of Hearts.And you became trackable.And I'm pretty sure youwouldn't be trackable if you'd screwed him.What does that tell you?"That I'm saving myself for you? she thought.Is that what you imagine?Her shoulder was aching powerfully.Am I saving myself for him? she wondered.Has allthis stabbing Madame DuLac, running to Las Vegas, using the powers he gave me to avoid sleeping been nothing but a show of defiance, a gesture, a sop to my self-respect before allowingmyself to sink into the secure zombie-Queen role he has planned for me? Maybe I was afraid that ScottCrane could still defeat his father, and I just seized a plausible excuse to run away from him.Maybe I do want to give in to Ray-Joe Pogue.No, she thought.No, not even if it's true.Even if I've been living a pretense for the last three months, Ihereby declare the pretense real
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