“You can’t hide in yesterday’s words,” Hezram’s fiends shouted. A lie. Hezram feared what he couldn’t understand.

Awa shouted, “Anawanama is today and tomorrow too.”

Djola clenched his lethal hand. “The Empire conquered the old ones. What good are their words?”

“That’s void talk,” Awa countered.

“I speak from the crack in my heart, not the void,” Djola replied.

She squinted a hundred hundred leagues through haze and dust, looking for clear sky. “Every language changes your mind.” Green Elder talk.

Hezram laughed. “I’ll find you two anywhere.” Priests and witchdoctors hunted smoke-walkers to use for gate- and weapon-spells. Hezram knew Djola’s and Awa’s blood rhythms. Tracking them in Smokeland and the everyday would be simple.

“Hezram can’t chase you to the winter region, no spirit slaves to serve him there. Kyrie’s Gates protect our breath bodies in the everyday.” Djola talked to Awa’s thoughts, one of his most irritating gifts. “So, drop me and fly on.”

Awa rubbed burning eyes. “The conjure woman said bring you—”

“Save one of us.”

“Does he tell you to drop him?” Hezram asked. “Listen to wise counsel.”

“We save each other.” Using a polyrhythm of dissonant voices, Awa sang over the single voice coming from a hundred mouths. She wasn’t as skilled as Bal, yet the fiends clutched their ears and Hezram’s chorus of one disintegrated into cacophony.

“Smart conjure.” Djola almost smiled.

Awa touched her forehead to Djola’s like a good daughter to a wise father. “Every soul a miracle, every maggot, every rotten leaf.” Green Elder jumba jabba, saying who you mean to be.

A fierce wind twisted along the riverbed, painting the horizon black and red. Djola jerked and spit at the storm charging toward them. “Hezram is not our only threat. The Amethyst River and Holy City chase us too. No mercy.” Poison sand from the storm spiraled up the fiend tower and blasted them. Djola’s eyes rolled in their sockets.

“Stay with me.” The crown of bees in Awa’s hair grew silent. The sentinels were dead—nobody left to protect them. A wound on her belly opened, and blood oozed through cloud-silk bandages. Many old wounds split open. Her leg was on fire, as if a Zamanzi woman had smashed her bones again. Survive! What choice but to abandon Djola? Awa curled in a ball around him and pulled his cloak over them and the bees. In the darkness, Yari’s favorite song dropped from her lips:

No one owns your heart

We can give love away

Stolen love tears you apart

For no one owns the trees

If Hezram conjured his way through Kyrie’s thicket of haints and stormed the elder tree, Fannie would stomp their breath bodies before she let the witchdoctor near. No living death in Smokeland. Awa filled herself with warhorse ferocity: