There were two men in the vehicle—the driver and the man who was obviously in charge. He was a pale man like the charioteers, and at that awkward age where the muscular build of his youth had begun to thicken as he entered his middling years. A wiry beard hid much of his expression.

Behind the caravan, another ten men in dhotis and baldrics stood stiffly in the sweltering heat. Rhys wondered why they hadn’t passed out yet. And why in the world his captors wanted anything to do with these people.

The man in the vehicle gestured at Rhys’s captors, motioning for them to come forward.

One of the women closest to Rhys bent over and took hold of the front of Rhys’s robe. Apparently it wasn’t the women the man wanted a closer look at. It was him.

Rhys did not have the strength to struggle. He had been thirsty so long he forgot what it was to live without dreaming of water. The rations the women kept him on were barely enough to sustain a colony of dragonfly nymphs.

The woman hauled him up to the side of the vehicle. This close, Rhys could sense the pheromones that directed the ants, and some underlying stink that told him the vehicle was even more fully organic than he suspected. Was it made entirely of bug secretions? Molded by what type of insect? It was a massive, specialized job that would have taken years back in Nasheen.

The large man leaned toward him, and sniffed a little. He was younger than Rhys suspected—not even thirty. The lines at the corners of his eyes were deceiving. It must have been the desert. Did they have filters out here? He had yet to see one, but he couldn’t imagine that any society that could build this vehicle didn’t have effective filters.

The man said something to him. Like the strange prayers the women had made, it felt as if he should understand it.

Rhys shook his head, and said in Khairian, “I apologize deeply. I do not understand you.” The literal translation of “apology” in Khairian was “I will share my water with you when we meet next,” implying that there would be no water shared today, and that was regretful.

The man guffawed, as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

“You do not speak Yazdani?” the man asked, in terrible Khairian.

Rhys shook his head. He had never heard of anything called Yazdani. “Is that one of the Khairian dialects?” But he knew it wasn’t. To his ear, it was too different from Khairian.

The man turned away. He waved at the woman and shook his head. He said something again in the first language—Yazdani. Rhys noted that some of the words were the same as the first time, and guessed they likely had to do with understanding the language.

Rhys decided to take a risk.