I want to go home. Back to Estobanse. Please, come and get me, before it’s too late.

Suffering could be borne. But even her unhuman flesh was failing. Each morning, she looked upon the survivors of yet another night and trembled with disbelief. She watched them drag the corpses close and she watched them pick the bones clean and then split them to greedily suck at the marrow.

‘Children are quickest to necessity. They can make any world normal. Be careful, daughter, with these humans. To live, they will do anything.’

She looked upon Rutt’s world and saw the truth in her father’s words. With Held cradled in his arms, he called the stronger ones to him and examined the floppy bags of human skin they now used to trap Shards whenever a swarm found the ribby snake. These fleshless, de-boned bodies, flung into the air as the locusts descended, drew the creatures as flames drew moths, and when the seething mass struck the ground the children pounced, stuffing locusts into their mouths by the handful. Rutt had found a way to turn the war of attrition, to hunt the hunters of this glass wasteland.

His followers were hardened now, all angles and flat eyes. Badalle’s poems had turned cruel, savage. Abandonment honed sure edges; sun and heat and crystal horizons had forged a terrible weapon. Brayderal wanted to scream to her kin, there in the blurred haze of their wake. She wanted to warn them. She wanted to say Hurry! See these survivors! Hurry! Before it’s too late!

But she dared not slink away—not even in the deepest of night beneath the jade spears. They would find out. Badalle had made certain that she was watched. Badalle knew.

She has to die. I have to kill her. It would be easy. I am so much stronger than them. I could snap her neck. I could unleash my Holy Voice for the first time ever and so force my kin to come to my aid when Rutt and Saddic and all the others close on me. I could end this, all of it.

Yet, the Inquisitors kept their distance. They must have a reason. Any precipitate act by Brayderal could ruin everything. She needed to be patient.

Huddled beneath layers of rags, ever careful to stand in the way that humans stood—so limited, so bound by physical imperfections—she watched as Rutt walked out ahead of the snake’s head, the flicking tongue, Badalle would say, before snapping open her mouth and sucking in flies, which she then crunched with obvious relish.