Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 by Nevada Barr Page A

had in one of its

myriad forms: ice falling away under her hand, anchors ripping out as she hurtled past. In dreams the fall was endless and, with a knowledge of the future, all the fear she'd not had the leisure to feel at the time, she now enjoyed at length and in heart-stopping detail each time she closed her eyes.

This time Sean, her climbing buddy, caught her hand and, for a moment, she believed herself saved. As always, fingers slipped and she fell. This night she was caught a second time. A fist closed tight in her short thick hair. Even while the dream had her trapped in its repetitive reality, some part of her brain registered change from the usual pattern. There on the cliff-face of nightmare she found herself muttering, "This is a new twist," as she waited for the monsters of her id to tire of mocking her with false saves, the fingers to loose, the inevitable crash, then the happy ending where she awoke in a wheelchair.

The grip in her hair tightened, pulled at her scalp. For the first time since the dreams began she was being pulled up, not down.

Tugging continued until Heath was pulled out of the dream com-pletely. Beth had a fistful of her hair and was tweaking it.

"Are you asleep?" the girl whispered, as if afraid the sound of her voice would bring down the Mongol hordes in their dull green scrubs.

"No," Heath whispered back for the same reason. "I was, but you saved me from a bad dream."

"I had a real bad dream," Beth said. Heath didn't know if she referred to a sleeping dream or obliquely to whatever she'd been through over the last weeks.

For the first time since they'd stumbled upon one another in the woods, Beth spoke, not in broken fragments, but in a whole and responsive sentence. Her eyes were different as well, haunted still and mostly empty, but a little person had returned behind them. She no longer looked like a child from Village of the Damned.

Heath was staggered by the force of the joy she felt and terrified by the sense of responsibility. This wisp of a girl, nearly lost in all that dark-ness, could be frightened away all too easily, maybe never to dare come forth again.

"I dreamed I was falling like I did when I broke my back. That's why I can't walk," Heath whispered. "What did you dream?"

"I dreamed Candy was with us and we were all going to Denver to shop for winter coats." This, too, was whispered. Without vocal cues Heath had a hard time reading much into it. Beth had rolled onto her side and curled down till her face was only six inches from Heath's, who still rested her cheek on her folded arms. Each of the limpet's expressions was as clear as a fish in shallow water. And as hard to pin down. Within the one short statement, it seemed Beth lived a lifetime of angst. Behind the innocuous words Heath saw conspiracy, confession, horror, shame-or thought she did. Maybe, having imagined these things, she projected them onto the smooth skin of this child.

"How come the dream was real bad?" she asked.

"Because Candy wasn't really with us. And we weren't going shopping." Her whisper trailed off to the merest distortion of air. Had Heath not been so close she wouldn't have heard it: "We were going somewhere else."

Heath's brain flooded with questions. Where was Candace? Where was somewhere else? Who was taking them "shopping"? What the hell had happened? The most pressing was where was Candace, but that had been asked and answered, though the answer had satisfied no one.

Heath decided to leave interrogation to rangers or cops or whomever. She was Beth's climbing partner. Others could worry about the rest.

"Somewhere else sounds like it sucks big-time," she whispered back.

Because Beth was twelve and Heath a grown-up, the word "sucks" won Heath a ghost of a smile from her young friend.

"Sucks big-time," Beth said.

"You want to tell me about it?"

Heath feared she'd pushed too hard too soon. Silence flowed between them, pooling and spreading till the air in the room grew thick with