Or speculations.

For the next number of hours, her motives and his motives might both demand they get off the Lakht and stay alive.

For the next number of hours, if that was her thought, it was good enough.

Chapter Twenty-Three

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In the abyss above the sky, I saw death. Below the heavens, I have made all choices I could make not for lives, but for life itself.

—The Book of the Ila

They rested for two measured hours on the tribal clock, simply looking at the sun and trusting the sun, no matter the fate of the world, to stay on its course. They pitched no tents, only unrolled their mats. The Keran and the Haga drank very, very little, allowing the water to stay in their mouths for as long as possible. They gave sweet water to their beshti, as much as they could give, to sustain the legs that carried them. They sorted even the sparse goods that a tribe owned, paring down the weight the beshti carried to the least possible, while the sky above them was blue.

At that stop, the horizon of the world was closer than it ever had been. The drop into the rolling flat of the east was clear and distinct to see, seeming so close that Marak would have driven himself and his own to keep moving and to reach it, and to go down, but the distance in that vision was deceptive because of the scale. It was another long walk away, and desperate as they were, they had no choice but to rest—and to ask the Ila, through Memnanan, to be wise: to do as the tribes did, and to cast away anything that could be cast away. The tribes made a small heap of what they abandoned. Yet nothing from the Ila’s baggage joined it, and for the Ila, her servants spread a side flap as a canopy and a curtain for a wind-break: the Ila would not lie down in the witness of others, and what she owned, she would not cast away.

Hati had lain down with her veil pulled over her face, like the dead. Norit rocked Lelie… rocked sometimes, simply because she was mad, but it chanced to calm Lelie, all the same, while it calmed Norit.

“Soon, soon, soon,” Norit said to no one in particular, and exhausted herself, refusing rest. Marak saw how worn she had come to look, how the bones stood out in the hand that rested on Lelie’s back.