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Jay? Where the fuck is it?”
    Jay shakes his head. “Don’t try to spin this on me, Huxley.”
    Huxley looks to the ground. “Did you walk off to take a piss and leave it unguarded?” he demands. His eyes fall on a set of tracks that lead away from their little camp. He points to them. “You did, didn’t you!”
    Jay stares at the tracks.
    â€œJesus,” Huxley kicks dirt. “You’re about to gut me with my own knife and it’s your own damn fault that the water got taken!”
    Jay is looking at the tracks hard. He holds up a hand. “I didn’t take a piss last night.”
    â€œWhat? You sleepwalk?”
    â€œNo,” Jay is following the tracks with his eyes. “Those aren’t my tracks.”
    Huxley goes quiet. He looks at the tracks.
    They are steady tracks, carefully tread when they are close. But as they get farther away, they get sloppier. Just general impressions in the sandy dirt as the person that made them began to run. How long ago? How old were they?
    The tracks lead up to a short pile of boulders, maybe fifty yards from them.
    Huxley points. “There.”
    Jay nods.
    In an instant, their argument is forgotten. They are both fixed on the boulders. Jay very steadily hands the knife back to Huxley. Huxley takes it, holds it underhanded.
    Huxley’s voice is quiet. “You think they’re still there?”
    Jay shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
    Huxley eyes the footprints in the sand again. It looks like only one set.
    â€œCome on,” Jay says, starting toward it.
    The second he steps foot in that direction, a short, dark figure bursts out of concealment behind the rocks, sprinting away.
    â€œShit!” Huxley leaps forward.
    â€œHe’s got our water!” Jay yells and hurtles himself toward the boulders.
    Huxley’s feet churn through the sand, but he gets his momentum up, and then he is flying across. This is the best-fed, most hydrated he’s been in weeks. He feels suddenly unstoppable. And Jay may be a stouter man, but Huxley’s strides are long, and they eat up distance.
    He is passing Jay in a few seconds, and already gaining ground on the running figure ahead of them. Huxley can see it is a man, a dark-skinned man. The thief’s clothes seem many sizes too large for his squat figure and they billow about him as he runs. He keeps looking back over his shoulder, and all that registers with Huxley is the way the man’s eyes are so wide, so white, so terrified.
    It makes Huxley run harder.
    â€œI’m gonna fuck you up!” Huxley screams at the man.
    The man looks back again. More ground lost. Every time he looks back, Huxley is closer, and the man knows it. His mouth is a wide O of fear. Huxley is closing in now, within yards. In another few seconds he will be able to reach out and grab the man. And he wants to catch him. He wants it so badly, he can feel the power of it, like a dog chasing a rabbit, he wants to get his hands on this motherfucker and rip the life out of him … 
    Suddenly the man stops and spins, holding up his hands. “No hay nada!” he screams, cringing away from Huxley. “Ten compasión!”
    Huxley slams into the man as hard as he can. The two bodies go sprawling into the dirt, the thief toppling head over heels. Huxley slides on his belly, then rolls. He kicks sand and dust into the air as he struggles to his feet, still gripping his knife, ready to gut this thief.
    The thief knows it. He jumps up from his hands and feet, trying to run again, but this time Jay tackles him, slinging him face-first into the ground.
    The thief rolls, eyes squeezed shut, the skin scraped off his face, dirt and blood mixing. He holds his hands up as Jay staggers over, looking like he is about to stomp the thief’s face into the dirt.
    â€œTen compasión!” he pleads again. “No hay nada!”
    It registers through Huxley’s