"Hell, I forgot.... Oh well." She jammed her sock-clad feet into her unlaced trail boots, opened the door, and stepped out alone. She shook herself cheerfully and stretched through some kind of calisthenic routine, then gazed across the landscape with one hand raised to her eyes, like a minor-league Sacagawea. To Alex, the view from the hilltop was dismally unimpressive; clumps of mesquite and cedar, sparse leathery grasses, and three distant, squalid little hills. The entire plain was ancient seafloor, flat as the bottom of a drained pond. The hills were tired lumps of limestone that, unlike the rest of the landscape, had not quite collapsed yet.