Back at camp, Silla said I was overreacting, that it could have been traders. One was due, after all. But traders don’t move in groups, and they come towing rickshaws or wagons. Folks started to get worried. Asher was just soured that I’d tattled.

“Remember that trader who came through a few months ago?” Ma said around the bonfire that night. “Strange guy. Had a pet falcon with him.” A few people nodded. “He would only trade for maps. Odd, no? Who turns down jars of the wastes’ best baking soda to demand maps? He thought we had one. Maybe even knew we did. Word could’ve gotten around, and now more folks are looking for it.”

“People have searched for the Verdant for as long as they’ve prayed to the gods,” Silla argued.

“Maybe someone heard we branded the kids.” Ma’s gaze cut to me and Asher. He was sitting beside me—even in his anger he wouldn’t leave—but he hadn’t spoken a word to me since I told our mas about the men. “We should move, just to be safe,” she added.

“We’re safer here, together,” Silla insisted. “A move would leave us exposed. And Delta’s not even sure what she saw.”

“I said I wasn’t sure who they were,” I squeaked out. “But I saw them. Four of them. They were working together.”

The pack dissolved into bickering and arguing. Two days later, Ma rounded up a group that wanted to move. Silla had her people wanting to stay. The pack splintered, and I never saw Asher again.

A week after settling in Dead River, a trader brought word of the massacre at Alkali Lake. Dead bodies everywhere. Blood and smoke.

If we’d just stayed, maybe it would have been different. We could have held our ground as a group, fought them off. Maybe, if we’d valued the gods over the security of the map, the raiders never would have come. It was our punishment for leaving, losing so many we loved.

I look across Zuly’s tanker now. The deck is crowded with pack-members seeing to chores. Someone waters the crops. A woman works at the loom. Laughing children knock stones across the deck with brooms, sending the chickens scattering.

I can see what Asher meant when he said this place felt free. At least on the deck, beneath the open sky, it has a sense of possibility I’ve never felt on the desert wastes or in Dead River. Not even at Alkali Lake. It feels truly secure, lifted above.