She took it in her dirty fingers. Drank.

“I lied to you,” she said, and her face contorted again.

“Not the first time I’ve been lied to.”

“Inaya didn’t send me. Michel did.”

“That makes even less sense than Inaya sending you,” he said. “Why the fuck did Michel send you to Nasheen?”

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

Ahmed was on watch three days later when Eskander crawled out of her bedroll, stripped herself naked, and started doing a slow dance on the sand. She was remarkably flat-chested, and wore no breast binding. He expected her to at least keep on her dhoti, but that went too, and then she was just a whirling, stomping mad woman in the dark.

Ahmed woke Nyx. “I think Eskander finally lost it,” he said.

Nyx got up and they stood together at the edge of camp, watching Eskander flail.

Nyx’s expression was impossible to read. She looked at everything the same way now, like she was attending a particularly distasteful funeral.

“Let it go,” Nyx said.

“Are you sure?”

“It saves me a bullet.”

“You’re all so generous,” Khatijah said. She limped up behind them. The pain in her face was obvious. Ahmed wondered how much longer she was going to be able to push through it. “I’ll talk her down.”

“Listen,” Nyx said, “I need at least one of you at the settlement. I can’t—”

“If you can’t wait, go on without us,” Khatijah said. “I’d do the same if it was your sister.” She pushed past them and started out after Eskander, dragging her bad leg behind her.

Ahmed went with Nyx to Eskander’s sleeping place. They found six notes, a dead locust in a traveling box, her gun, knife, and a copy of the Kitab with some pressed flowers inside.

Ahmed opened the Kitab. Flipped to his favorite passage. He could once recite the ninety-nine names of God, but when he tried it now, he could only get to fourteen.

“Are we going to die out here?” he asked.

“Not all at once,” Nyx said. “Wake everybody up. Give them an extra water bulb this morning. Then we get moving.”