Ahmed watched the other woman. She was, outwardly, composed, but there was something about the way she gazed at him that made him uneasy. He felt the first stirrings of fear.

When he worked in intelligence, he found out quickly that there was no actual way to determine if someone was lying to you—not any that was better than a roll of the dice, anyway. Instead, what you watched for were indicators of stress. If you figured you had the guy who planted an acid-frag mine, you first asked him about other things—blades, guns, bursts, and looked for indications of stress. If there were none, you’d ask about mines, and then the actual specific weapon itself. More often than not, you’d see a growing number of stress indicators the closer you got to talking about the actual incident. That sort of thing worked on typical grunts, but spies and special operatives were another matter. They were smart enough not to talk to you about anything. Your only leverage was in learning something personal that you could use against them.

He knew nothing about how this society worked. Khairians often had multiple husbands who raised children and—in some cases—were even able to nurse them. Umayma was a wild place, with incredible mutations. He wasn’t going to make any assumptions.

“You must be gone by dawn,” the woman said. “Tell your people to be gone by then. We cannot be responsible for what happens. The boy has paid us in blood. He can attend your sickness. But you must go.”

“We have until dawn,” Ahmed said.

“I can’t fucking move our people at dawn,” Nyx said.

Ahmed sighed and told the woman, “You can see that we are not well. We can’t be gone at dawn.”

“Then you will die here,” the woman said, and turned. She walked directly through the wall behind her.

Ahmed closed and opened his eyes, thinking he had imagined it. Eshe and Nyx were still there, staring at him.

“Did I just…? That wall…?”

“It’s an opaque filter,” Nyx said. “There are a couple dozen of them out here, all covered in sand. Fell into it myself.”

“And you… you dragged us all back here?”

“It was that or leave your sorry asses to bake. I considered it.”

He must have had a strange expression on his face, because Nyx reached out a hand, gripped his shoulder, leaned in. “I’m a lot of things,” Nyx said. “I do a lot of shit you might not like. But I’m not fucking stupid.”

“What happened to you?” Ahmed asked Eshe.

“I found the settlement. But I don’t know any Khairian, and when I got here I was pretty sick and starving for protein. They fed me, but wouldn’t let me leave. They took my blood. I bled out a pint of it for the food and clothes.”