Something juts out of the earth ahead, and I pause. An Old World graveyard, left over from a time when the dead were buried in the ground. I can make out several rows of wooden crosses rippling in the heat. When I’m upon the site, I find each grave overturned, dirt flung about, long-dead bodies disrupted.

The bones are as white as ash, threadbare rags clinging to some of the remains. Anything of use that was buried with the dead has been claimed by scavengers. Most Old World tech comes from graves. Or sometimes from abandoned rovers with their rusted-out bodies, or the rare skeleton half buried in sand while a fraying noose sways from a tree overhead. I’ve never seen a tree, just heard about them from Flint. You have to head far north before the scrub gets any taller than your knee, and even there, the trees are sickly and weak.

I didn’t know there was a graveyard so close to Dead River. I wonder when the scavengers found it. Sometimes the sands shift, covering or revealing. Could’ve been fifty years ago. Could’ve been five days. Only thing that’s certain is the plot is old.

I’m about to move on when I notice the skeleton in the grave before me has a crushed skull. I peer into the next shallow grave, a third, a fourth. A new row. Another. Broken skulls. Every skeleton in the plot.

They checked our dead to see if they were gods touched, Old Fang had said while looking at Astra’s and Cobel’s crushed skulls.

A shiver travels up my spine.

There’s an old well near the graveyard, and I check it on a whim. Bone-dry. Sheltered in a sliver of shade, I lean against its bricks and feed Baby.

By noon, there’s a trickle of liquid running down the center of the riverbed’s wide girth, and the scrub along the banks looks less like tumbleweed and more like actual scrub. Maybe Flint wasn’t lying. By Powder Town, I might see a real, proper tree.

But that won’t be until tomorrow. Powder Town is fifty clicks from Dead River, and I’m not even at West Tower yet, which marks the halfway point. Like the rig near Zuly’s Ark, it’ll be raised above the dirt—a good place to stop for the night. Away from scavengers and raiders. Sheltered in case a storm blows through. And I’ll need shelter. Far to the east, between Dead River and Alkali Lake, you can find a few settlements where the land is fertile enough for planting. Then Zuly’s Ark to the south and Powder Town to the north.