We’re both standing. I don’t know when it happened, but I’m off the mat, my chin jutting up so I can look him in the eye. His gaze dips to my neck, where the cord of the lodestone is visible.

“I’m here,” he sneers, “because two guards got into a fight over a game of dice and now one of them’s dead and I have to load him onto the burial wagon. That’s all. Coming here was a mistake.” He snatches the waterskin back. “Enjoy the ilked-up water tomorrow.”

He strides for the door.

“What were you going to say the other night?” I call out. He pauses, but doesn’t twist to face me. “When you came back to my room and found the inverted well, you were going to say something.”

His head turns just slightly, so I can see his profile. “That I was sorry about your mother.”

“Oh.” It’s not at all what I was expecting.

He shoves out of view, Rune flaps after him, and I stand there, dumbstruck, rage and confusion battling in my mind. It’s only when I’m settling back onto my mat that it slams into me.

You got the right idea, though. Only way out of here is with the dead.

I lurch to action, the fresh water rolling in my belly as I gather up my goggles and throw on my outer layers. I pad to the door and look back only once. My pack sleeps like the dead. Some of them will be dead if I do this. But all of them will be dead if I stay.

Before I can change my mind, I slip from the shanty.

Sticking to the shadows, I steal between the ramshackle residences, moving toward the only sounds I can make out—muffled chatter coming from a few buildings over.

“Firing shots over a game of dice,” a Loyalist grumbles. “General’s gonna have a fit.”

“Just get the corpse on the wagon.” This from Reed. “It leaves at first light.”

I creep nearer, pausing at the edge of the next shanty. Beyond the dirt path that bisects the working fields is a stable. It doesn’t hold animals, but a wagon filled with corpses. I can make out the prone form of the deceased even from a distance. Reed holds a torch while two Loyalists heave the dead man into the wagon. Rune circles overhead, the glow of the torch illuminating her white belly. I push flat against the shanty.

“Still wish we could burn them here,” one of the men goes on. “Big waste hauling bodies out every week.”

“The General doesn’t like the smell of burning bodies,” the other says.

“And this is better?”