Nyx started to see things scuttling along the sand. Tattered blurs of light. Black tendrils licking at the corners of her vision. Easy enough to dismiss, for a time, though she knew what it portended. Her breathing was coming a little more rapidly now, and her heart beat a little faster.

I have done this before, she thought fiercely. One foot. Another foot.

Three hours later, Ahmed said he saw something. She raised her head. There were four or five figures moving along the dunes, about three hundred paces distant. They were dressed in the dusty crimson of the Khairian nomads, leading two caterpillars and a sand cat with them.

“Hey!” Ahmed called. “Hey!” He raised his arms, waved at them.

Nyx squinted. The group noticed them, but did not stop.

Ahmed moved toward them.

One of the Khairians opened her mouth, and began to sing.

There was a shushing sound in the sand between Ahmed and the nomads. He leapt back as the sand began to roil with foot-long desert worms. The air filled with sand flies.

“Come away!” Nyx said. She pulled him back.

“Fuck!” he said, and covered his head. “What the fuck was that?”

“Not sure I want to find out,” Nyx said. “But you should shoot one of those worms for dinner.”

They did, and then coughed and spat up sand flies for the next hour.

The body Nyx carried was getting heavier. Her dead sister Kine was getting heavier. Kine started saying things to her, which was funny, because Kine was dead on the other side of the world.

“You are safer on your own,” Kine said. “You are always better off alone.”

“I ain’t never been alone in my life,” Nyx said. But it sure did feel that way.

Getting burned up, coming back from the dead… they were all things you did on your own, but coming back from them meant relying on a whole host of others to bring you back.

She set her gaze on the sky, watching for Eshe the raven.

But the sky was still mercilessly clear, brilliant lavender, and if they didn’t find shelter soon she was going to have to just burn Kine and be done with her. But burning her with what? She couldn’t bury her. She didn’t want her to come back as one of those massive rotting corpse beetles.

Nyx realized she wasn’t sweating anymore. A bad sign. She was in that bad place that you knew was bad, but were so fucking out of it you just didn’t care. It was a cozy place to be in, like having all your senses muffled with honey soaked cotton.