“I’ve seen more appetizing food hanging off the arse of a mule.”

“They’re very tasty.”

Very tasty, very tasty, just try it to see . . .

Alishia was a virgin. She was used to thinking about sex in the privacy of her own company, using her imagination, pleasuring only herself because the world she lived in was lacking the highlights she could imagine. Now suddenly it was a force, a powerful drive that had reared from nowhere and grasped her insides, sensitized her skin and tongue and her own secret parts to such a degree that she found it hard to sit still.

“Excuse me!” Alishia said, standing and rushing away. She shook her head to shift the thoughts and felt something loose in there. Perhaps the knock to the head really had damaged her.

Trey called but she ignored him, still trying to shake the image of their rutting from her mind. And yet, as she stepped from rock to moss to earth, the idea pleased her. And deep inside in that place where the experience sat waiting to happen, it burned to be set free.

She sat in the shadow of a huge boulder, out of sight of the fledge miner, and stared northward across the plains. As her hand stole between her thighs she could not shake the feeling that she was watching herself from afar.

“I THINK WE should go that way,” Trey said, pointing west.

“Why?”

He shrugged, keeping his eyes downcast to avoid the sun. Yet he so wanted to look. “It just feels right,” he said. “Behind us are the mountains, and beneath them are the Nax. I don’t want to be near them—I can’t be near them! To the north is the city you’ve just left. I don’t think I could be in a city, not with so many people, and not . . . not north. That feels wrong.”

“This is your first time ever aboveground. How can anywhere be right or wrong for you?”

“I’m only saying what I feel,” Trey said, and in truth, deep down he was scared. Behind him was death and the destruction of everything he had ever known—everything—and before him, laid out like legend brought to life, the plains and mountains and a sky so huge that it must surely crush him down. The horizon to the west was wide and low and smothered with sky. How could there be so much light without scorching him, so many plants without choking the land? There was little opportunity for darkness to hide now that the sun was climbing high.

The ghost of the death moon was hanging in the north like an echo, pale now in daylight.

“I don’t mind where we go,” Alishia said, and once again Trey thought that she was teasing him. One minute she was quiet and concerned and vulnerable, the next confident, brash, eager to move on and meet whatever was coming next.