“Cristo, Nadin,” I snapped, fumbling with the tubes in frustration, “what would you do if you saw Mama D, have an aneurysm? This is ridiculous. All my life, people are telling me I’m too brown. Now you’re on my back that I’m too white.” My fingers tripped over each other, and I groaned and flung the breathing apparatus onto the ground.

A frown crept over Nadin’s face like a cloud. “I didn’t understand what you just said”—her voice sounded hurt—“but I didn’t mean to make you angry. I only wanted to help.” She pulled her own breathing apparatus on, then picked mine up off the ground, gesturing to me where to place the tubes over my nose and mouth.

I sighed. “It’s okay,” I said, positioning the plastic tube and taking in a deep whiff of the sharp, clinical-tasting oxygen. “It’s just… people where I come from have fought for a really long time to not be judged by the color of their skin.”

Nadin didn’t meet my gaze for a long moment; she just stared at the drawstring bags on the side of Thork’s saddle, as if thinking. Finally, she nodded her head. “All right,” she said. “I am sorry. I won’t do that anymore.”

“Thanks,” I said, my annoyance dissipating, a smile twitching involuntarily at the corner of my mouth. She’d been doing that a lot over the past several days—nodding instead of pulling on her earlobe like she used to. I don’t think she’d noticed. I wondered how much she’d been rubbing off on me, too, without me realizing.

Wind whistled between the hoodoos as we rode into the canyon, but we were relatively shielded here on the ground. The rocky trail was narrow, just wide enough in parts for one gurza to squeeze through. Thork led the way, Nadin perched on his back. A gust of wind whipped overhead, and the hood of her cloak slipped off before she could catch it. Her hair had fallen out of its braid days ago, and she’d finally given up on trying to tame it. Now it fell loosely around her shoulders in coarse, bushy ringlets, the once-pristine white streaked with red dust and dirt. She shrugged, letting it fly free in the breeze.

I patted Tuupa’s flank—she grumbled back at me, a gravelly croak in the back of her throat that sounded almost friendly—and looked up to the sky.

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