He watched her face as she said it. He had followed a lot of women in his time. Strong, confident women who made decisions of life and death with the sort of expression he saw on her face now. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t gone to bed with some of them just to try and shake up that calm surety. He had a pretty face, and women appreciated that as much as men did. But what he found when he got close to them was that it wasn’t as easy as they made it out to be. He often wondered if Nyx would be the same, if he could put his hands on her and open her up and find some soft, vulnerable human being inside. It had become a challenge, later in his career, to sleep with all of his commanding officers. It wasn’t that he found them all that attractive. Most of the people he cared for in his life were the men he fought and sacrificed beside, not the women pulling the strings. But he did what he had to to survive.

Something told him that getting under this woman’s skin would require more skill than he possessed.

“What you standing there gawking for?” Nyx said. “We have a long way to go.”

Khatijah and Eskander followed at a long distance, Eskander still naked and babbling. When they settled down at dawn to camp and sleep out the heat, the sisters finally caught up with them. Both were much worse, but Eskander may as well have been a corpse. She was like something that had clawed up from a bug-ridden grave, covered in oozing sores that looked like they had harbored some kind of flesh-nesting insect, but seemingly uncaring.

Ahmed looked to Nyx for some kind of guidance. Eskander simply babbled along, nonsense words.

“Thanks for your vote of confidence,” Khatijah said to Nyx as she threw her pack down next to the fire.

“You’d do the same.”

Khatijah shook her head. “We’re not all like you. Not even us bel dames.”

Nyx just shrugged. “That’s what you say now. But we’re not at the end of the line yet. Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow we’ll see what everybody’s really made of.”

Nyx stumbled. The sun was up already, but she had forced them to carry on because this was the end of the road. They might make it another night, maybe less. She held the last bit of excess water they had in addition to their personal bulbs: a quarter-full bladder. As they finished the bandoliers of bulbs, she had them keep hold of them, promising to fill them at the next oasis.

It was just something to say, telling them to hang onto the bandoliers. Something grimly hopeful. If she started telling them to throw away the empty bulbs, they’d know she had given up.