“No, thank you,” Khatijah said. “Unless you can convince the other people here to let us stay a few more days?”

“Oh, you don’t want to do that.” The woman stared at the cloud of ravens. “No, you don’t want to do that. Keep going north. It is much safer there than here.”

“Something tells me that’s not as comforting as it sounds,” Nyx said.

Khatijah reached into her burnous. She pulled something out and placed it into the woman’s outstretched hand.

“Thank you,” Khatijah said.

The woman nodded and turned away. She started back the way she had come.

“What did you give her?” Nyx asked.

“Nothing,” Khatijah said. “It’s an empty gesture. It’s just… what’s done out here.”

“You gave her nothing for that information?”

“You heard her. She has her own reasons for helping us.”

“This trip just went from fucked up to totally fucking crazy shit,” Nyx said.

“I expect it’s all about to get much worse,” Khatijah said, gazing north.

“What are we dealing with here?”

“I don’t know. Only Eskander’s been out any further than this.” She glanced back at Nyx. “But that doesn’t do us any good now, does it? You figured I was the real guide, didn’t you? That I was the only one you needed.”

“I figured your sister was insane. You were a safer bet.”

“You were wrong,” Khatijah said.

27.

Nyx had always wondered what lay at the end of the desert. Now she knew.

At the end of the desert was a wall.

She had never seen anything like it, not in half a hundred cities. The Wall was a black shadow. The sand pooled against it like weevils caught up in honey, the living crawling across the dying to the source of the desert’s darkness.

They entered the wall’s shadow sometime in the early afternoon, after two days’ walking from the as-yet-unnamed settlement. They had traded for what little food there was, and drank freely from the settlement’s water, but that was all.

Now they walked toward a massive red line that took up the horizon. They soon found that they could travel longer, though, because the suns tipped below the massive wall much sooner, and they could spend much of the afternoon plodding through artificial dusk.

Khatijah pulled out a glow globe an hour before the first sun set. “Looks like a fucking toilet hole out here,” she said.

And when the first sun set, it really did look like a hole. Sound was magnified. Every step across the sand sounded like walking over glass. The echoes got eerie. Nyx heard things beyond the circle of light. Bugs, beasts—not cats or dogs or ravens, parrots, no—but something more primitive; something made of the desert, as old as the world itself.

“Are we going to stop here tonight?” Eshe asked tentatively.

“Could be interesting,” Nyx said.