There was a strength that ran in her..., something heíd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew--he remembered--as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with s alt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some strangerís memory, the drive held. She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall. (Pp. 239-240)

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