But as the gun tugged free, the weight of it pulled her down. She stumbled. The gun was tumbling into the sand. Her stomach clenched. Sand in the gun. It would need cleaning. It would misfire. She went down in the sand with the gun. Clutched it against her. Tried to keep it away from the sand. Her vision blurred, and her tongue felt large in her throat.

“Kage?” Ahmed’s face appeared above her. Black spots juddered across her vision.

She moved her mouth, but no sound came out.

“Water!” Ahmed said. It sounded like water.

But the world was going blissfully black now. Black as her warm little cave at home. It was strange how you didn’t realize how much you loved a place until you had lost it so completely. Everyone believed the world outside was better. But it wasn’t. It never was. If things had gone differently, she would be home now. Curled up in the dark, wrapped close with her loved ones, with her children. It was near the Festival of the Ancestors now. She would be walking down into the bowels of the world with her family, carrying bug lights and singing old songs about death, rebirth, and new worlds. They would tread softly down into the murk, and through the doors of the re-spun wreck of their star carrier. They would light lamps at the base of their ancestors’ rotting metal coffins, their bones long since turned to dust by the strange bacteria of this world. What was left of their people was what the few survivors could patch and piece together from the still-living tissue of those who had died in the descent. Shot out of the sky, abandoned by their own ancestors, denied the world they were promised, this was their purgatory. They had subsisted on thin hope, these many centuries, the same thin hope that sustained her now. As the world went dark, she felt her mind float up and away. It was lovely. She hoped this was death, that she was finally ascending to the world they were promised each year in the guts of the dead starship—the world that lay on the other side of the eternal blackness of Umayma’s western sky. The world they had been forever denied.

She woke to a splash of cool water, and a dusky blue sunset.

Eshe and Eskander leaned over her, their faces blotting out the bruised sky.

“She’s awake,” Eskander said.

Kage averted her gaze from their faces, and looked past them, into the dusk.

“Keep drinking,” Eshe said, and pressed a water bulb to her mouth.

She drank. It tasted good… but not as good as the darkness.

After a time, she was able to sit up. She saw Ahmed sitting just behind Eshe, and a flickering fire-beetle blaze popping a few paces away.

Eskander yelled at Nyx, “She’s fine, little maggot. Just dehydrated.”