“I’m on your side,” he insists. “If I know anything about this gods-forsaken world, it’s that you don’t turn away help. That’s how you end up a vagrant, wandering the wastes, hopeless. Please, Delta. You can trust me.”

“I don’t trust anyone. Not even Asher.”

“But he knows how to read the map. You trust him enough to travel to the Verdant with him.”

I can see the hypocrisy of it, and if I stand here letting Reed fill me with more doubts, I’ll come undone. I’ve got to trust my intuition. It’s the only thing left that seems to guide me true. That and my lodestone.

I glare at Reed. “You can come with us, and I’ll share what I want to share, when I want to share it. Or we leave you here, anchored to a boulder for the vultures to pick apart. Your choice.”

He stares for a long beat, then says thinly, “It’s not a choice when you hold all the power and I can’t win.”

I said these same words to him at Bedrock, only about the General. I almost smile.

“If you’re thirsty, there’s a well that still pulls a little water. Asher will show you to it. Then you’ll help us with the wind wagon.”

He doesn’t ask what a wind wagon is, just nods.

“I’m sorry about your falcon,” I add, and slip from the shanty.

Chapter Thirty-One

I didn’t ask about my father much when I was a child. Most of our pack was female, and it was odder to have a father in your pack than not. Men ran goods and traded. They came into camps often, but they rarely stayed.

Ma said she knew my pa would never stay—the day she met him, she sensed he was too wild to be rooted anywhere. “He had a far-off look in his eyes,” she once told me. “Like he was always thinking ahead, like he was already halfway to whatever place he’d rather be.”

Everything I know about him, I learned in pieces, in fragments of memories Ma shared and I stitched together. They met at midsummer the year after Indie was born. Our pack had invited one of the neighboring groups to celebrate with us at Alkali Lake, and he’d arrived with them. The way Ma tells it, laughter floated across the lake and a star shower rained in the night sky. They shared a drink of moonblitz, and she was in love with him by the morning. When the visiting pack rolled out, he didn’t saddle his horse. Not until a few moons after I arrived.

“He wanted to see you born,” Ma once said, half lost in a memory. “I was right that he wouldn’t stay, but he lingered far longer than I expected.”

“Did you ever see him again?” I’d asked.