He rolled on to his side and patted the blankets. “Well, curl up. Get some sleep while you can, eh?” When I didn’t immediately fall in beside him, he looked over at me. “Something eating you, Ariah?”

“Are we all right?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to ask it, or planned on asking it, but it came out anyway. The thing about trust, with Sorcha at least, is that it pulls things to the surface and lets them run wild.

“Sure, yeah. Always are. Been thinking about the Empire, and you know, it won’t be so bad given there’s working showers. Alamadour had a good music scene, sure, but showers I have missed.”

“No,” I said. “No, I mean are you all right with me? With us? That we haven’t, uh…”

He laughed. “Oh, sure. Told you true back there. I’m red enough to take what I can get. Besides, you wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with me if you had the guts to go for it.” He took my hand and pulled me into the blankets. “Get some sleep.”

* * *

There was a morning in the desert where I woke, startled into consciousness by nothing I could see or hear. I woke with a deep, urgent foreboding. It was a panic brewing in my bones, but one with no obvious source. We were well into the desert; by Tamir’s estimation we were perhaps five days of decent travel out from Iyairo. It had been an uneventful morning following an uneventful night of travel. I’d skipped smoking and bedded down as soon as the tent was up. I’d spent the day before at the mercy of Shayat’s sharp-sweet attentions, gotten no sleep, and was too tired to see straight when dawn broke. I had fallen into a deep, black sleep as soon as I’d had the chance. And then, all at once, I was awake.

Sorcha slept beside me. I poked my head through the tent flaps and found an empty, silent camp biding its time through an empty, silent desert day. Tamir and Shayat were in their tents as well, both sleeping. The air was still and crisp. The sky was a span of endless blue. The camels knelt on the sand with their long necks stretched out, their large liquid eyes closed. The only movement anywhere that I could see was the occasional flick of a camel’s tail to drive off an insect.