SHE FOUND THE stranger just before noon of the next day. She had left the plains behind, heading up into the foothills of the Widow’s Peaks and wondering just where to go next. Fifty miles west was Pavisse, the old mining town that was known to be a haunt for criminals and undesirables. East lay the steam plains of Ventgoria. These were usually passable with care if the traveler kept to the marked routes, but Alishia had heard of markers being moved—although it was never clear who was to gain from leading travelers into steam pits—and the steam vents themselves were becoming more and more unpredictable. She had read a book not a dozen moons ago, a travelogue published on cheap paper with a print run of less than a hundred, which told of ventings the size of the largest buildings in Noreela City, great explosions of toxic steam from deep within the land as if it were sighing at the way things were going.

So Alishia had chosen the Widow’s Peaks themselves, and upon making that decision she had almost been overcome with a sudden, delicious realization: she was an explorer! She had always wanted to see a fledge mine. Perhaps if she was daring enough, she would even try some of the freshly harvested drug.

Still, finding a fledge miner dying out in the open air was not the introduction to mining she had expected.

She saw him from a distance, a pale yellow form slumped on a hillside. She paused, looking around for danger, aware that trickery like this was a bandit’s favored lure. The landscape was quiet but for the lonesome cry of a bird of prey, circling high overhead as it called to some distant mate. Birds hopped from rock to rock on her left, seemingly undisturbed. A group of sheebok grazed farther up the hillside, too far away to see her but near enough to the body to be startled away should it stir. She kept her eyes on the sheebok and birds, and edged the horse slowly forward.

Twenty steps from the fledger, she knew that this was no trick. His pale yellow skin was stretched from the sun, displaying how strange daylight was to him. Even unconscious he had one arm resting across his face, shielding his eyes. Yellow eyes, thought Alishia, yellowed from the drug. I can’t wait to see them.