The desert was so hot it ate the spit from stones. Nyx figured they had a day or two on the mercenaries—or whatever they were—maybe more if she could get Kage to push harder. Eshe and Ahmed had a mind to stay behind and simply shoot them, but Nyx didn’t know enough about who had hired them to take the risk. Best guess was it was the Families funding them, and mercenaries—especially Drucian ones—who dealt with the Families were a whole other sort entirely. Families didn’t muddy their business with bel dames, and no order keeper would agree to do work out here at the ass-end of nowhere. So that left mercenaries and bounty hunters, and not the kind who worked out of the Cage back in Punjai. Drucians were notoriously good at stalking people at night, and like Kage, most had great eyesight. If these two knew how to shoot like she did, though, Nyx expected they’d all be dead.

Nyx spent most of the long, dusky nights and mid-morning marches gnawing over her new team like a cat at a bone, watching what they ate, how they slept, where their eyes roamed. It was Ahmed she hoped to catch by watching his eyes, but he stared only ahead, always ahead, scanning the horizon for… what? Well, she knew, didn’t she? Bursts, enemy soldiers, sand vehicles, giant bugs, and maybe something worse, something more personal. The way Ahmed watched the horizon and slept with his back turned away from the fire each night made her wonder just what it was he expected to find there. Most boys she knew who got shoved home without proper decompression time blew right the fuck up. They jumped off bridges or walked naked into deserts or picked off people in the market with some patched-together weapon. He made her uneasy.

By the time they made camp, it was full dark already, and cold, but they were running low on fire beetles. It wasn’t cold enough to waste what was left.

“Three more days?” Ahmed asked as he took his rations from Nyx. As usual, he didn’t meet her eye. It was getting old. His averted gaze made him seem like some kind of house boy, or—worse—Kage.

“How far out are we from the next post?” Nyx asked Eskander.

Eskander was gazing back the way they had come, her face perplexed, as if she had dropped something along the way. “Maybe longer than three days,” she said.

Nyx followed her stare, squinted. Whatever she saw there, Nyx wasn’t privy to it. “That’s the wrong way,” Nyx said.

Eskander turned, frowned. “Yes, I know. It’s just… I thought I saw a light out there.”

“Lot of strange things in the desert,” Ahmed said.

“Eshe,” Nyx said, “you see anything out there? Our mercenaries show up again?”