"You saved me; you risked your own life!" She said it with a peculiar fervor. Lanny couldn't understand why she thought an element of risk had been involved. A hunter with half his skill and experience could have done as much.
"I won't try to run away again," she promised. Not much of a concession, Lanny thought, suppressing a grin.
Pendillo said they would have to spend the next day in the cottage, to give the missionary a chance to rest. She was suffering, he said, from something he called shock. Precisely what that was neither of his sons knew, but they supposed it was an obscure ailment that beset the enemy. The more they learned about Tak Laleen, the stranger it seemed that such a weak people could have conquered the earth.
During the interval of waiting, Lanny and Gill dried the two hides they had taken. They cut breeches and a jacket for Tak Laleen, to replace the uniform she could no longer wear.
After they resumed their trek north, it took them four days more to reach the pylon barrier south of the San Francisco treaty area. Tak Laleen became more and more exhausted. She shivered constantly in the cold air. Her nose began to run—a phenomenon Pendillo called a cold—and the wounds in her chest stubbornly refused to heal. When she saw the towered guns on the barrier, she dropped to the ground and wept hysterically.
"We can't pass that," she whispered.
"If you're afraid to run the guns," Lanny told her, "we can swim around them."
"I don't know how."
"There's no other way into the treaty area," Gill said brutally.