“You trusted me enough to show me your map,” he says, “and then I didn’t help you. You were right to call me a coward. I’m sorry, Delta. I spent so long trying to find you—to find the pack—that once I had you again, I was afraid to let go. Afraid to lose anything. There’s so little good in the wastes, it’s hard not to keep a death grip on the few bright bits. You know?”

“I know.”

“I was trapping you, just like you said. But I don’t want you to feel trapped. I want you to feel . . .”—his eyes search mine—“whatever it is you want to feel.”

He seems closer, suddenly. Or maybe it’s the wind wagon’s side rails that have constricted, or the sky lowered, the air thickened. Everything is closing in, shrinking. He touches my hand. I feel that same pull I did in the saltpeter changing rooms, an energy tugging between us, quivering, like my lodestone finding north. I wonder, briefly, if it’s always been trying to lead me back to him.

“I want to trust you,” I whisper. “It’s just hard.”

“I get it,” he says. “I trust you so much, and that’s why everything is difficult.”

But trust should make things easy. Trust should be as simple as breathing.

He lets go of my hand, nods at the tiller. “You go lie down. I’ll take over.”

I fall asleep feeling uncentered, wondering what I have failed to understand.

The next morning, our sixth day on the wind wagon, we wake to find a storm chasing us. Big wall of dust drummed up by the wind current we’re riding. Billowing and churning and sparking with lightning.

“We should be able to outrun it,” Harlie says. “For now.” But she keeps looking over her shoulder, squinting. Eventually she asks Asher to climb up the mast to try to get a better gauge of its distance.

This is bad. We’re in the middle of nowhere, supplies dwindling, and if a storm hits us—if we tip or wreck—we’re dead. I twist in a circle, scanning the horizon, but there’s nothing but the same bone-bleached, rock-hard earth we’ve seen since leaving Harlie’s Hope.

The first tendril of real fear unfurls in my gut.

What if I’ve doomed us all? What if the map is wrong? What if we never reach the Verdant—or worse, what if the Verdant is gone too, dried up, turned to dust, vanished with the gods?

I join Reed at the starboard rail, needing a distraction. “Where did he go?” I muse aloud.

“Who?”

“The trader with the lodestone. Our father.”

Reed blows out a breath. “Probably somewhere he could avoid the General. People say there’s a town across the ocean.”