Ahmed snorted. Isabet said something mushy in Ras Tiegan and pulled closer to Eshe. Nyx rolled her eyes.

“The light might keep through the night,” Khatijah said.

“Light doesn’t always keep the dark things away,” Nyx said.

“It helps,” Khatijah said.

Nyx couldn’t argue that.

“They said there was a city near that Wall,” Ahmed said. “Maybe we just can’t see it yet. Further east, maybe?”

Nyx wasn’t so sure of that. She figured they would have seen or heard it by now. She wanted to camp at the base of the Wall, but when the moons came up, they were still a long haul from it.

“We’ll get some sleep now,” Nyx said. “I got first watch.”

“I can go a little longer,” Eshe said.

“It’ll be just as bad another kilometer ahead. I can’t see any lights. We need to sleep.”

“God knows we are not waiting on the light,” Khatijah muttered.

As they bedded down, Ahmed began drawing a circle in the sand around them. It was something the woman in the settlement had told them to do, if they insisted on going further north. Nyx had a good idea of what the sand would do out here without a circle. She had seen what it did back in Tirhan, when it was unleashed on a bunch of bel dames. She wasn’t looking for a repeat.

Nyx took first watch. The night had fallen some time before, and she could hear the chittering and moaning of some foreign thing bawling across the desert. Out here, the desert was a chunky ruin of scattered stone croppings, some twice as tall as her, others just large enough to trip over. Kage had knocked one of the protuberances over, and it had vomited a sea of green chittering bugs with triangular heads and soft, luminescent bodies.

Ahmed joined Nyx on an overturned outcrop, some broken thing long ago sheared off and gone dormant.

“You have any sen?” she asked.

“Not for a long time,” he said.

They sat in silence for a while. Something hissed, far off. Nyx peered off in that direction, but the sound didn’t come again.

“We’ll lose everything to the bugs eventually,” Ahmed said.

“I’d rather we gave them a run for it,” Nyx said. She glanced at him sidelong, considering. He was pretty, she’d give him that. And tough, for all his prettiness. It’d been a long time since she could say a pretty man was tough.

Ahmed caught her looking. “I’m not that man.”

“What man?”

“The one you’re always thinking about when you look at me.”

Ahmed hugged his knees to his chest. The night was cool, but despite the necessity, the gesture was surprisingly boyish. In the dim light, he reminded her of her eldest brother, Amir.

He peered at her. “What?”

“You remind me of my brother. Dead a long time now, with all the rest.”