Ayaan had designed the wall to be impassible to hungry ghouls: two thicknesses of concertina wire wrapped all the way around the camp, creating a dry moat three meters wide between them. Inside the aisle between these two impediments the soldiers had dumped a jumble of broken concrete and rebar, the rusted iron turned outward to impale careless intruders. There was no gate in the palisade anywhere'you left the encampment the same way you came back, via helicopter, or you just stayed put. A smart human could get through the mess eventually if he had a pair of very sturdy bolt cutters and plenty of time. Even then he would leave obvious signs of his passage.
The first time Jack had come to her in Egypt Sarah had left him waiting in the desert for days while she figured out how to escape without being detected. She couldn't just ignore his call. He had taught her how to see the energy of the dead, her one true talent. Without him she would have perished long before. She couldn't tell Ayaan about her comings and goings either so she'd had to be crafty. She had volunteered for her current job of cleaning and fueling the helicopters. When the pilots weren't looking she had stolen one of the kevlar blankets they used to armor the interior cabins of the Mi-8s. Sarah had stripped the heavy blanket of its inset metal plates and then draped the remaining kevlar over the wire, then scrambled up and over her makeshift stile. It took impeccable timing to make sure she wasn't seen.
She had repeated the stunt many times since. Often enough to get away with it, even with the camp on heightened alert. Once she was out on the open sand, though, she began to feel a very familiar fear. Unprotected by Ayaan, unable to properly defend herself she would be easy prey for any wandering ghoul who happened to smell her on the wind. Anyone else probably would have been eaten years ago. Sarah's special relationship with Jack was something she hesitated to count on but it kept her alive.
'Sarah,' he called to her, his voice low and sharp. She had been moving carefully up the slope of a dune that ran parallel to the wire and she dropped to hug the sand, terrified. 'Sarah, hurry up. We don't have much time.'
He came to her as he always did, in the body of a dead man. It was never the same body twice but she could tell it was him because intelligence clearly guided its actions. This one was white and was missing the flesh from one side of its face. The body wore a blue jumpsuit with a striped blue-and-white shirt underneath. It looked like a sailor. It had to have been one of the Tsarevich's troops, she decided. Jack leaned down and offered her his hands but she shook her head and got to her feet on her own. She couldn't afford to smell like death when she went back to the camp.
'Jack, I don't know what you're doing here but this is a really bad time,' she protested. 'Fathia will make my life hell if she finds out I'm missing.'
'Oh, will she now? She'll make your life hell?' Jack's borrowed eyes glinted in the first blue rays of dawn. 'You know a lot about hell, do you? You can't know what hell is like, not when you still have skin to keep you warm and bones to keep you standing upright.'
Sarah bit her lower lip. 'I'm sorry,' she tried. 'I didn't mean''
'I'm the one who taught you how to see, girl. I'm the one who made you special. When those bitches in there thought you were too small and scrawny to waste their time on, I was the one who gave you magic. So if I call you out now you'd better come running.' He grabbed her face and stared into her eyes, his fingers digging into her cheeks.