“Here, drink,” he said, and passed her the last half of his water bulb. She took it in her dirty fingers. Drank.
“I lied to you,” she said, and her face contorted again.
“Not the first time I’ve been lied to.”
“Inaya didn’t send me. Michel did.”
“That makes even less sense than Inaya sending you,” he said. “Why the fuck did Michel send you to Nasheen?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
+
Ahmed was on watch three days later when Eskander crawled out of her bedroll, stripped herself naked, and started doing a slow dance on the sand. She was remarkably flat-chested, and wore no breast binding. He expected her to at least keep on her dhoti, but that went too, and then she was just a whirling, stomping mad woman in the dark.
Ahmed woke Nyx. “I think Eskander finally lost it,” he said. Nyx got up and they stood together at the edge of camp, watching Eskander flail.
Nyx’s expression was impossible to read. She looked at everything the same way now, like she was attending a particularly distasteful funeral.
“Let it go,” Nyx said.
“Are you sure?”
“It saves me a bullet.”
“You’re all so generous,” Khatijah said. She limped up behind them. The pain in her face was obvious. Ahmed wondered how much longer she was going to be able to push through it. “I’ll talk her down.”
“Listen,” Nyx said, “I need at least one of you at the settlement. I can’t—”
“If you can’t wait, go on without us,” Khatijah said. “I’d do the same if it was your sister.” She pushed past them and started out after Eskander, dragging her bad leg behind her.
Ahmed went with Nyx to Eskander’s sleeping place. They found six notes, a dead locust in a traveling box, her gun, knife, and a copy of the Kitab with some pressed flowers inside.
Ahmed opened the Kitab. Flipped to his favorite passage. He could once recite the ninety-nine names of God, but when he tried it now, he could only get to fourteen.
“Are we going to die out here?” he asked.
“Not all at once,” Nyx said. “Wake everybody up. Give them an extra water bulb this morning. Then we get moving.”
He watched her face as she said it. He had followed a lot of women in his time. Strong, confident women who made decisions of life and death with the sort of expression he saw on her face now. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t gone to bed with some of them just to try and shake up that calm surety. He had a pretty face, and women appreciated that as much as men did. But what he found when he got close to them was that it wasn’t as easy as they made it out to be. He often wondered if Nyx would be the same, if he could put his hands on her and open her up and find some soft, vulnerable human being inside. It had become a challenge, later in his career, to sleep with all of his commanding officers. It wasn’t that he found them all that attractive. Most of the people he cared for in his life were the men he fought and sacrificed beside, not the women pulling the strings. But he did what he had to to survive.
Something told him that getting under this woman’s skin would require more skill than he possessed.
“What you standing there gawking for?” Nyx said. “We have a long way to go.”
Khatijah and Eskander followed at a long distance, Eskander still naked and babbling. When they settled down at dawn to camp and sleep out the heat, the sisters finally caught up with them. Both were much worse, but Eskander may as well have been a corpse. She was like something that had clawed up from a bug-ridden grave, covered in oozing sores that looked like they had harbored some kind of flesh-nesting insect, but seemingly uncaring.
Ahmed looked to Nyx for some kind of guidance. Eskander simply babbled along, nonsense words.
“Thanks for your vote of confidence,” Khatijah said to Nyx as she threw her pack down next to the fire.
“You’d do the same.”
Khatijah shook her head. “We’re not all like you. Not even us bel dames.”
Nyx just shrugged. “That’s what you say now. But we’re not at the end of the line yet. Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow we’ll see what everybody’s really made of.”
+
Nyx stumbled. The sun was up already, but she had forced them to carry on because this was the end of the road. They might make it another night, maybe less. She held the last bit of excess water they had in addition to their personal bulbs: a quarter-full bladder. As they finished the bandoliers of bulbs, she had them keep hold of them, promising to fill them at the next oasis.
It was just something to say, telling them to hang onto the bandoliers. Something grimly hopeful. If she started telling them to throw away the empty bulbs, they’d know she had given up.
Nyx clutched the bladder to her chest. Three times, she had nearly tossed away her scattergun. It was so heavy. Everything was so fucking heavy. She knew heat sickness. She had been dehydrated and sick many, many times. But recognizing a thing and doing something about it were entirely different problems.
“Nyx! Nyx!”
She kept walking. She was afraid that if she stopped, she wasn’t going to go on.
“Nyx!”
She glanced back.
Eshe knelt next to Isabet. She had crumpled on the sand. That surprised Nyx. She had expected Kage to be the first to go. But Kage was still trudging after them, maybe a dozen paces distant, plodding on.
Nyx turned and slogged back toward Eshe and Isabet. Walking across the crusted sand here was like walking through snow, something she had done only once and never wanted to do again.
“We need to stop and rest,” Eshe said. He had the girl pulled into his lap now. She was so dehydrated she wasn’t even sweating anymore.
Nyx shook her head. “Come on. We have to get up.”
“I’m not leaving her,” Eshe said.
Woman down. Never leave a woman down. God, there were some things she wished she hadn’t taught him. She gazed out at Kage, still struggling in the caked sand far behind them. When it came to the desert, Nyx wasn’t a total fool. She knew when to push on, and when to play her last hand. She was pissing a lot less these days, and the stone trick wasn’t keeping her mouth wet. Now Isabet had moved on to severe dehydration, which meant Kage and Eskander were next. Ahmed and Khatijah still struggled on ahead. Ever since she’d slogged her way back into camp, Khatijah had been pushing hard. She was a woman with something to prove. Nyx had to admire that.
Nyx pulled the strap of the bladder over her head, and pushed it at Eshe.
“I want you to drink deep.”
“No, not until Isabet—”
“Drink, then shift. I want you to shift and go north. Find an oasis. A settlement. Anything. Bring water. Or come back and point us in the right direction.”
“Once I shift, I can’t shift back unless we have enough food. If I try and shift back…”
“You’ll starve in a few hours. I know. Why you think I waited so long to ask?” She pushed the bladder at him again. “Drink. Let’s hope you find somebody.”
He gazed down at Isabet’s dry, reddened face. “Promise you won’t leave her.”
“I won’t leave her.”
He met her gaze. “Promise, Nyx.”
“You need to go now.”
Eshe shoved the bladder back at her. She was surprised he still had that kind of strength left. It made her decision easier. Aside from Isabet, he was the youngest of them. In raven form, he could fly faster and see farther.
“Promise,” he said.
Her insides twisted, and not from hunger or the peculiar mix of shit they’d been eating the last week.
“I promise,” she said.
He nodded.
How strange, she thought, that my word still means something to anyone, even after all this time. It’s because you’re such a fucking bad liar, she thought.
He took the bladder and drank.
“Slow,” she said. “Slow at first.”
He drank until he was sated, then gave a good deal of what was left to Isabet. She came around just long enough for him to tell her something in Ras Tiegan. Then he handed the water back to Nyx and walked away from the group.
“North?” he said.
“North,” Nyx said.
He shifted. It was not a pretty thing. Never was, watching a man shake loose from his bones. His body trembled violently, then began to lose mass, twisting in on itself. It looked the way her hunger felt—some dark, feral thing eating itself from the inside. In a few minutes he was free of his clothing, stark naked, growing smaller, sprouting prickly black feathers, his features narrowing, elongating.
Nyx finally turned away.
She portioned out the last of the water with Ahmed, Khatijah, Eskander, and Kage who had just caught up to them.
Kage drank deep. She didn’t seem much better than Isabet.
Eshe squawked at them from the air.
“Come on,” Nyx said. “We keep going north until we find some shelter. Need a good place to hole up.”
“There’s nothing out here, Nyx,” Ahmed said.
“There’s always something,” Nyx said. She crouched next to Isabet and pulled her up over her shoulders. Nyx grunted with the effort. Fuck, she should have been able to carry this girl like she was nothing. She wasn’t any bigger than one of Anneke’s kids.
Nyx plodded forward.
Eshe squawked one more time, then he was off and away, north. Ever fucking north. To the land of missing politicians and, possibly, nutty Ras Tiegans.
Nyx fixed her gaze just a few feet ahead of her. Dangerous thing, to narrow your vision, but so was falling down in the desert. They needed to find shelter. Two days back, they had passed through a voluminous field of giant calcified tubes three times Nyx’s height. She wished for some of those now, but the crunchy dunes ahead of her just went on and on. She could never see past the one ahead of her, and they seemed to get taller and taller.
Beside her, Ahmed trudged along. He was carrying Kage’s gun now, which meant Kage was either half mad or Ahmed had softened her up a great deal the last couple weeks. Nyx had caught them speaking in Drucian a few times—and look what it got him. A heavier load.
And what did it get you? Nyx thought grimly, acutely aware of Isabet’s soft bulk. Look what load you’re willing to carry.
They walked.
Nyx started to see things scuttling along the sand. Tattered blurs of light. Black tendrils licking at the corners of her vision. Easy enough to dismiss, for a time, though she knew what it portended. Her breathing was coming a little more rapidly now, and her heart beat a little faster.
I have done this before, she thought fiercely. One foot. Another foot.
Three hours later, Ahmed said he saw something. She raised her head. There were four or five figures moving along the dunes, about three hundred paces distant. They were dressed in the dusty crimson of the Khairian nomads, leading two caterpillars and a sand cat with them.
“Hey!” Ahmed called. “Hey!” He raised his arms, waved at them.
Nyx squinted. The group noticed them, but did not stop.
Ahmed moved toward them.
One of the Khairians opened her mouth, and began to sing.
There was a shushing sound in the sand between Ahmed and the nomads. He leapt back as the sand began to roil with foot-long desert worms. The air filled with sand flies.
“Come away!” Nyx said. She pulled him back.
“Fuck!” he said, and covered his head. “What the fuck was that?”
“Not sure I want to find out,” Nyx said. “But you should shoot one of those worms for dinner.”
They did, and then coughed and spat up sand flies for the next hour.
The body Nyx carried was getting heavier. Her dead sister Kine was getting heavier. Kine started saying things to her, which was funny, because Kine was dead on the other side of the world.
“You are safer on your own,” Kine said. “You are always better off alone.”
“I ain’t never been alone in my life,” Nyx said. But it sure did feel that way.
Getting burned up, coming back from the dead… they were all things you did on your own, but coming back from them meant relying on a whole host of others to bring you back.
She set her gaze on the sky, watching for Eshe the raven.
But the sky was still mercilessly clear, brilliant lavender, and if they didn’t find shelter soon she was going to have to just burn Kine and be done with her. But burning her with what? She couldn’t bury her. She didn’t want her to come back as one of those massive rotting corpse beetles.
Nyx realized she wasn’t sweating anymore. A bad sign. She was in that bad place that you knew was bad, but were so fucking out of it you just didn’t care. It was a cozy place to be in, like having all your senses muffled with honey soaked cotton.
You can die now… the thought tugged at the edge of the shroud. The bug in her head was all used up. She’d die just as easily as anybody else in Nasheen. And fuck knew plenty of them died in the desert. What did she care for another dead politician? Truth was, she didn’t. But she wanted to know the real reason they risked summoning her from exile, and she’d only know that if she had Raine. Until she knew, she couldn’t be safe. Nobody in her life would be safe.
Somebody was wailing. She stopped. Let Isabet down off her shoulders. Tried to catch her breath. Turned.
Eskander had fallen in the sand. Far behind her prone body, Kage was still moving, but Eskander, the Nasheenian, the one who should have been able to take this desert best, was already down.
Nyx waded past Ahmed and Khatijah and crouched next to Eskander. The woman’s eyes were sunken. When she took Eskander’s wrist, the skin was dry and loose. She was mouthing some words, but no sound came out.
They had not given Eskander a pack, or weapons, just a burnous to cover her ruined body and a single water bulb. Nyx’s movements were slow, uncoordinated, as she reached behind her for a dagger. She concentrated very hard at each little thing. It was like being drunk. She took Eskander’s water bulb and pocketed it, then removed four empty water bulbs from her bandolier.
She heard Ahmed stumble up behind her, asking, “What are you doing?”
Nyx pushed Eskander’s head back with one hand and jabbed open her throat with the dagger. Blood spurted over her hand and started pumping out rapidly, in time with Eskander’s heartbeat. Nyx shoved the water bulb against the wound to collect the blood.