‘Kesia. You have to be brave now, all right?’ ‘I will be as quick as I can,’ said Paulo. ‘It will not take long.’ Kesia closed her eyes and Sisi squeezed her hand while Li took a grip on her other arm and held it down for Paulo. The bullet had only clipped the arm, carving a channel through Kesia’s bicep without hitting the bone. The entrance wound at the front of the arm was small and relatively neat, but the bullet had made a much bigger mess on the way out. It had blasted a splatter of flesh out ahead of it, tearing a large, ragged hole in the back of Kesia’s arm as it exited. Paulo had not dared to stop the Unimog until they were well away from the Scorpion. He had crossed the border into Algeria and driven grimly on through the night, with Kesia moaning and crying in the back of the vehicle. Amber and Li had bound her arm with strips of Amber’s headcloth, but the wound would not stop bleeding and soon the makeshift bandage was soaked through. Finally Paulo looked over to the eastern horizon and spotted the black outline of the sandstone bluff they had passed on the way in.
