“Do you know why they don’t want us here?”

He shrugged. “These are some kind of… I don’t know… mosques or something to them. We’re not supposed to be here.”

Nyx sat with her hands on her knees, watching Kage. “Ahmed, you get the impression there’s more going on than that?”

“Yes. I don’t know what, though.”

“They’re mutants,” Khatijah said.

Ahmed turned. The bel dame was sitting up, drinking from one of the bugs Nyx had offered Ahmed. She must have been awake long enough to see him drink from one.

“Mutants?” Nyx said.

Khatijah stared into the ass-end of the bug for a long minute. “Yes,” she said. “There are ravens outside, right? This is the last settlement. The last place we got any record of Raine. We employ one of their little ravens as an informer.”

“How are they mutants?” Eshe said.

“Haven’t you seen them? Those aren’t individual ravens out there. And these aren’t bugs. It doesn’t matter. My contact is here. She can help us.”

“What about all the yelling at us to leave?” Nyx said.

“She’s right about that. We do need to leave, or we’ll get eaten up into one of these places so they can use all our organic bits to create new shit.” Khatijah worked off her pack. Eshe moved to help her, but she waved him away. She pulled out her slide and tapped out some code.

Ahmed smelled peppery lavender. She was trying to send a message.

“Do you need—” Ahmed began.

She nodded. When she spoke, her voice was a little hoarse. “I need you to call a bug to carry it. Eskander would have done that.”

Ahmed glanced over at Nyx, but her expression was perfectly neutral. He called a small swarm of red beetles. They ate the message Khatijah had coded, then buzzed out through the opaque walls of the shelter.

“She couldn’t tell you where Raine was headed before now?” Eshe said.

“That’s not a secure way of sending information. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re not the only people looking for him. The only way she’d talk is if we came here. Somebody scared her bad.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “We need to get out of here. Can we set up our own camp? This is a bad place to recover.”

“You’re welcome,” Nyx said, but she stood, and began packing up.

The ravens still circled the sky above the settlement. Nyx walked across the hills with Khatijah to meet the messenger. They had camped several hundred paces from the settlement, but Khatijah worried it wasn’t enough.

“You know I can’t move anybody,” Nyx said. “We had to drag Isabet and Kage. I don’t even know if they’ll wake up.”