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the basic protein chains that made up her body were the same as those found in most of the things the snake ate.
    Her two-day trek out of the base designated “Area 51”
    had not been an easy one. The actual escape from the base had been much easierthan she expected, but she put that down to security having been arranged to keep snoopers out instead of people in. The guards directed all their attention to things happening outside.
    Emerging from the depths of the mountain, she had managed to steal the flight jacket to ward off the cold. She initially took finding it as a grand stroke of luck: It had been packed away with other warm clothing in a trunk. The barracks room was obviously used for storage—she sensed no impressions of anyone having visited the room within the last three months. She could not understand why such a valuable coat would remain forgotten when it was so cold.
    She took it, a smaller pair of boots and a boonie hat into which she stuffed her hair. Looking in a mirror in the room, she imagined seeing herself through the eyes of a human and concluded, because of the way the clothes draped her so completely, she would easily be mistaken for a juvenile wearing an adult’s clothing. The benefit of the oversized clothes was that they deemphasized the fact that her head was a bit disproportionately large for her body.
    The most difficult part of her escape came as she attempted to leave the secure portion of the base. Luckily for her, two black, bat-wing planes swooped low for tandem landings on the long airstrip. As they touched down and raced along the dry lake bed, the two air police manning the gate turned to watch.
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    She took that opportunity to telepathically add in the image of a spaceship, one of the ships on which her parents had arrived on Earth, to the tableau. While that addition clearly interested them, they accepted it far more readily than she had expected. She sensed no surprise from them, and no anxiety, which is what she had largely recalled a ship’s presence creating before.
    “Looks like they’ve got the F-42 out for night maneuvers.”
    The African-American guard pulled off his cap and scratched his head. “Wonder if that thing can see the Stealths?”
    His partner laughed aloud. “C’mon, my kid’s got a radar gun that can spot those antiques on the wing. The tech those onion-heads have can read it molecule by molecule.”
    “I guess.”
    Rajani raced out into the Nevada desert With the term onion-head had come an undercurrent of fear and hatred.
    That immediately sparked a bitter memory of the fights Dr. Chandra used to have with his research assistant, Nicholas Hunt. Whenever the little man with a lopsided head had looked at her, she had sensed the same fear-based hatred, and it abated only slightly when his focus of attention shifted from her to Dr. Chandra.
    He called itprejudice. On an intellectual level she had understood how fear of the unknown and uncertainty about the future can fester into a knot of hatred for anything different and possibly superior. Because of her empathic abilities, however, Rajani had experienced the virulence of the hatred in a way that Dr. Chandra never could, and she wondered if its strength had been what warped Nicholas’ features and head, instead of the childhood accident he claimed.
    The gentle tickle of the snake’s rattles against her side brought her back to the present. At first she thought the snake had been picking up on the emotions triggered by the memories, but then the night breeze brought the sound of the whimpering dog and a sobbing child to her.
    Though faint, she knew the sounds came from very close by. Pointing her face into the wind, then turning her head left and right in two scans, she located the source of the sound and headed toward it.
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    She used a dry wash to make