Free Kalahari by Jessica Khoury Page A

them. I hated my tears. Water was the most precious resource in this desert, and here I was pouring it out all over the sand.
    After a few minutes, I felt my grief begin to change. It grew hard and metallic and sharp, as if it had been forged over a bed of coals.
    “I’ll find them,” I said, hardly recognizing my own voice. “I’ll make them pay. I swear to God I will make them pay.”
    “You told us no confrontations, remember?” Sam’s brow lowered and he met my eyes. “You said we were only going to find your dad, that no way were we going after the poachers.”
    “That was before. Things have changed. They crossed a line.” My voice was steel. “Anyway, there’s no
we
.” I pulled my hands from his, stood up, and lifted my eyes to the sky. The stars had truly begun to blaze, their light strengthening in the darkness. “We’ll bury Theo, and then I’ll drive us back to camp in the Cruiser. We’ll get as many supplies as we can and then drive to Ghansi. You can go home, and I can go look for Dad.”
    “You can’t go after him by yourself.”
    “I have to find my dad, Sam.” I felt suddenly weary; the toll of a day of hiking coupled with the emotional trauma of Theo’s death was nearly crippling.
    “Then I’ll come with you.”
    “No, you
won’t
. I don’t need your help.”
    He didn’t press the issue but looked as if he wanted to. Instead, he stared at Theo and sighed quietly. “Does he have family?”
    “No.” Maybe a few distant relatives near the Namibian border, but no one close. He’d always said he’d been born in the Kalahari, and so he wanted to die in the Kalahari. It was his people’s tradition to immediately bury their dead and then move on quickly, never returning to the grave unless absolutely necessary. Theo had held tightly to these fading traditions. When we’d first met him, he was living in a hut in the bush outside Maun, having refused to move into the city with the rest of his tribe. And anyway, it was his last request of me. How could I say no to that?
    Sam left and I sat beside Theo’s body, trying to keep my eyes on the Bushman’s face and not the bloody cavity in his chest. I clicked on the flashlight and shone it on the area around me, dancing the beam over my dad’s footprints.
Where are you now? Are you safe?
    As my light grazed the surrounding sand, another set of prints caught my eye. I crawled on my knees to a patch of sand surrounded by flattened grasses and inspected it with the light held at an angle, to better throw the shadows of the impressions into relief.
    The lion.
    He’d been here too. Now that I had his track identified, I saw it all around. He’d prowled around the vehicle several times and seemed to have stopped to sniff it. Had he smelled Theo’s blood? Was that why he’d been following the Cruiser—in search of an easy meal? But his tracks turned to follow Dad’s, not Theo’s, which worried me immensely.
    Those questions opened the way for a whole slew of new ones. Theo had said Dad didn’t know he’d been shot, but even so, if Dad was free and able, he would never have abandoned Theo for so long. Why hadn’t he returned or come looking when Theo didn’t show up? Which told me Dad must still be on the run or . . .
    I unclipped my radio and murmured into it, calling for Dad. I heard my own voice, muffled with static, coming from the Cruiser. My heart sinking, I went to the truck and searched, noting with a sick twist of my gut that the satellite radio was gone, no doubt taken by the poachers. It was too bulky for Dad to have taken if he was in a hurry. I found the smaller handheld radio on the floor of the cab. The batteries were almost drained, probably from me calling so much.
    Sam managed to persuade Joey to help him begin scraping sand aside to create a grave. After a while, Avani helped, and Kase pulled himself away from Miranda to join the effort. Miranda was swaying a little on her feet, staring dully at the ground, her