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dream.
    Adam had said there was no evidence of any animals in the area and she had trusted that he knew what he was talking about. She was aware that there were plenty of snakes, birds, lizards, and scorpions in the Sonoran Desert, but she sensed that these things that she was listening to, whatever they were, were much larger than that.
    They were coming closer. It almost seemed like they were arguing. She would hear the low hiss, it would rise in volume—its tone becoming more belligerent—and then it would be cut off by the staccato clacking. Perhaps the two animals were having some kind of territorial dispute.
    She went through a mental checklist of all the kinds of desert wildlife she knew of, trying to pinpoint what it might be. She needed to figure out if it was a threat or if it could be ignored.
    It wasn’t a bobcat or a coyote. They wouldn’t make those kinds of sounds. Predators would be nearly silent and solitary. They certainly wouldn’t have a prolonged interaction with another animal. It could be a mule deer or a javelina, just stumbling around up there, looking for food in the scrub, maybe. But somehow that didn’t seem plausible either.
    She moved slowly, deliberately, until her lips were touching Adam’s ear and her hand was on his chest. She jostled him and whispered, “Adam!”
    He shifted and turned his head, one eye peering at her. His lips smacked together like there was a bad taste in his mouth. “What?” he asked, full baritone.
    She shushed him harshly and then strained to listen for any sign that he’d been heard.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked, a little more quietly.
    “There’s something up there. Something big. Listen.”
    He grunted and rolled onto his back. “I don’t hear anything.”
    She didn’t either. Had they gone away or were they listening now, too?
    After a few minutes, he sighed and went for the zipper.
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’m awake. I’m going to pee. Is that okay?”
    She felt silly all of a sudden. She was acting like a hysterical person. She didn’t need him to protect her. It was probably part wild animals, part distortion of sound on the wind, part dark-night childish fears with a hefty dose of imagination fueling the paranoia she was feeling.
    Adam didn’t wait for an answer. He peeled back the zipper and crawled out. A rush of cold air snuck into the bag as he staggered away with a flashlight. She patted the bag down around her and huddled on her side with the bag pulled up to her nose.
    Then she saw the dark outline of something large skimming the rim of the gorge with its nose pointed toward the center, blotting out the stars. Nearly silent, it seemed bigger than a helicopter, but triangular in shape. She couldn’t see a lot of detail in the faint light of just a partial moon, but it didn’t look like any kind of vehicle she’d ever seen before.
    The nose of the ship swung around and pointed at her. It hesitated for a moment and didn’t continue its arc around the top of the canyon. It zipped to a new location, moving like a hummingbird, until it was very close, hovering ten feet above the floor of the gorge near the waterfall’s pool, the nose of the ship still pointed in her direction. Then it slowly lowered and touched the stone with only a whisper of sound.
    She hadn’t made any conscious decision, hadn’t even felt herself move, but she had scrambled out of the sleeping bag and found herself standing with her back to the cliff face.
    They were trapped. The ship had just landed between them and the ladder that, as far as she knew, was the only way out of the gorge.
    She couldn’t take her eyes from it. She backed up slowly, her hand gliding over the rough, gritty wall. She realized she was mumbling Adam’s name over and over again like a terrorized child and stopped. She turned her head for a second to call for him a little louder.
    The light from a flashlight blinded her and she panicked as it was almost certainly revealing their