With a fraction of a second, Forrester was forming his own. But this time he took a little longer than he had before.
It wasn't the first time he'd had to run. For over a month now, he had been jumping from place to place, all over the world. He had gone to Hong Kong first. When Mars had traced him there and made a grab for him, Forrester had made a quick jump, via Veil, to Durban, South Africa. It had taken Mars all of forty-eight hours to find Forrester hiding in the native quarter, wearing the persona of a Negro laborer. But again Forrester had disappeared, this time reappearing in Lima, Peru.
And so it had gone for five full weeks, with Forrester keeping barely one jump ahead of the God of War.
And, in that month, he had achieved two important things.
First, he had begun to make Mars a little overconfident. By now Mars was fully convinced that Forrester was nothing but a coward, and he was absolutely certain that he could beat the newcomer easily, if he could only come to grips with him.
Second, Forrester had discovered that Mars' basic reflexes were a trifle slower than his own.
If Mars had been able to form his own Veil and step through it in time to sense the last fading glimmers of Forrester's Veil, he would have been able to follow immediately. Instead, he had to go to all the trouble of finding Forrester over and over again. That meant slower reflexes—and that, Forrester thought, might just give him the edge he needed.
But this time, Forrester was going to let Mars follow him—slow reflexes and all. This time, he waited that extra fraction of a second—and then stepped through the Veil.
He was in the middle of a great rain forest. Around him towered trees whose great trunks reached up to a leafy sky. The place was dark; little sunlight came through the roof of leaves and curling vines. A bird screamed somewhere in the distance, sounding like a lost soul in agony; the sound was repeated, and then there was silence.
Forrester was exactly where he had intended to be: in the middle of the Amazon jungle.