She looked at me, and her face was absolutely open and perfectly calm. “You need a route, I need him to take you, and he needs a shaper.”

I hid my face in my hands. “He does not trust me.”

“Well, no. You’re a shaper. Can you count?”

“I suppose we’ll find out together.”

I tried to brush past her, but she grabbed my arm. She pulled me towards her, pulled me close. She had in her an inescapable authority. “You can’t count if you’re high. In the badlands, we’re never safe. Not when we’re on the camels and not when we’re camped. Be Semadran just for a little while.”

“I will feel everything.”

“You have been trained.”

I sighed. I looked out at the badlands. “All right. You have my word.”

I made a move to leave, but she held me in place. Her free hand drifted to my other arm. She caught my eye and smiled. “I trust you.”

“You trust me? Trust me to do what?”

“I trust you not to get us killed.” She grinned. “Don’t crack under the pressure, professor.”

* * *

We picked our way through the badlands very slowly. The tension rattled the air and shattered any sense of direction I might have had. I have no clear memory of what the badlands looked like, just what they felt like to me. There was the drain: an appalling emptiness, a vicious, needling lack. It sunk into my bones and crouched there, eating me from the inside. The drain makes magic unstable. With no ambient magic to draw from, something goes wrong with our minds. The control I’d worked so hard to develop in Alamadour leeched away into the mundane sands.