“You’re the General,” I spit out, “and I want to know why your men attacked Dead River and abducted my pack.”

He puts a hand to his chest. The slender, thumb-size pendants on his chain clink beneath his palm. Some are rusted, but newer additions gleam in the candlelight. “I would never authorize such actions,” he says. “You saw this happen?”

“Well, no,” I admit. “Old Fang did.”

“I believe my troops were near Dead River during a silent storm. Is this Old Fang elderly? Is it possible the storm influenced his grip on reality?”

“He’d been shot,” I practically snarl. “Silent storms don’t shoot bullets. And our midwife and her son were killed too, had their skulls smashed in.”

The falcon hops onto the table, and the General strokes the bird’s cream-brown feathers. “There’s been a misunderstanding, clearly. Come. I’d like to show you something.”

He stands and moves to the window.

This is the General. His men attacked my camp, killed some of my pack. I should want to claw his eyes out. If I had my knives, I’d be throwing them into his back, but I lost them to Bain days ago and all I can do is stare at my cup of water, thinking about how good it would taste. Because I don’t trust myself to sit within an arm’s reach of it any longer, I stand wearily and join the General at the window.

Up close he smells of clean linen—a smell I have only encountered during the actual act of washing laundry. As soon as our sheets and clothes are thrown onto the line, they begin to gather dust. Dirt is the scent of a person in the wastes. Dirt and sand and sweat. Dirt is in everything, and the fact that the General doesn’t wear it just proves the wrongness about him.

“What do you see?” His falcon jumps from the ledge and spreads her wings, gliding in the open air beyond the window. I look past the creature, down to the land, and nearly lose my breath.

We must be at the very top of the residences I saw built into the mesa. The General’s haven extends far below, a jumbled blanket of green and brown. The green is so startling, so foreign, it takes me a moment to realize that I’m looking at crop fields and not a patchwork quilt. From this height, the laboring workers are no bigger than small beads as they weed and harvest. I search for Ma and my pack, but it’s pointless. Everyone is too tiny.

Bisecting the fields is a dirt path that leads from the General’s towering mesa residence to the dam that corrals his kingdom. Gunners move along the rim, guarding the ramp that provides access to and from Bedrock and pacing between large wooden contraptions that must serve as some type of defense mechanism.