Sora crawled under the jeep, opened the oil and drained about a quart of oil into a plastic bag. Using her knife scrapped a glob of axle grease from the inside of one wheel, adding that to the dirty oil.

Twice earlier, she’d stopped to complete, but both times the local dirt she had added to the mixture was too pale in color to be of any use. This time, Sora had found a russet clay compound, much darker and more satisfactory for her purpose. From the taste and smell of the soil, she could tell it contained clay, and definite traces of iron oxides.

Making herself more comfortable on the disabled jeep, she hiked up the hems of her trousers and dabbed handfuls of the goo up her ankles. She needed color and camouflage and she needed it quick, before the sun rose at 5:00 AM. Her hands were gooey and stained by the time her feet and exposed ankles were covered. It almost killed her to start rubbing the foul, vile-smelling concoction onto her face and neck, but it had to be done.

Since the sticky muck wasn’t going to dry, really, she patted it with a liberal handful of fresh dirt straight off the ground. She risked turning on the headlights to check her work. Her hands and feet were nasty brown, filthy beyond redemption. God help her if by some quick of fate, the desert decided to have a rainy day!

Her hair was in a very tight braids, coiled securely underneath a black turban. She had used mascara to darken her lashes and eyebrows and had found sunglasses under the seat of the jeep, a bonus for sure. The dark polarized lenses would keep people from noticing the color of her eyes.

Anyone who looked at her would see a filthy youth with a very swollen face. She had a wad of black plastic stock in , some of it pulled over to make it look as if she had missing and decayed teeth. That, she thought, was a of brilliance.

For the benefit of anyone who took an interest in her, she planned to pretend she had the worst toothache ever suffered. Hurting teeth made everybody wince and look away – she hope.

Necessity forced her to abandon the stolen jeep several kilometres shy of a set of halogen lights gleaming in the distance. The peculiarity of running out of gas next to the world’s biggest supply of gurgling-in-the-tubes petroleum touched the raw side of her sense of humour, but Sora was pretty satisfied with having covered two hundred miles in five hours.

She laughed at herself as she jogged to the arc lights in the distance. The lights turned out to be a nice little town of clustered at a desert oasis. She had the audacious look of arriving just in time to catch a northbound bus.

The bus driver handed her back a passel of crumpled riyals and coins after she gave him one of the bills she’d stolen from the desk drawer in the sheik’s office.

Her theory on the toothache proved true on a crowded bus, she only had to moan and pretended to be in agony to turn strangers away. Of course it helped to also look like a leper. No Saudi elected to sit by her.

The bus jostled up on the road in the building morning heat with a load of passengers, live goats, chickens and crying babies. Before noon, they came to a settlement. It wasn’t much of a town.