The wind blew and Ank didn’t say anything. At last he gazed down the tracks forlornly, thoughtfully, as if by doing so he might divine the likelihood of Will’s survival ... and then froze, fixated on something in the distance.
“What? What is it?” Will followed his gaze to where the watery-looking tracks met their vanishing point. He squinted in the sun. “There’s nothing there, Ank. Just some old tracks—they probably didn’t amount to anything even before ...”
But there was something. Just the smallest rectangle of color, yellow and red, wiggling amidst the convection waves. And when he realized what it was he very nearly fainted. “You’ve got to be f*****g kidding me ...”
At which instant he heard two things that he hadn’t heard in a long time: Ank’s laughter, which was a stranger thing t
