Some part of Eshe felt Isabet’s pain was his fault. He knew it wasn’t true, but when she wept, it physically hurt him. He knew he was a fool. Felt like he was being played. When he flew into the settlement he hadn’t been in the best shape either, and he’d been worse after they sucked him nearly dry of blood. What they used all the blood for, he didn’t know. They stuck giant bugs on his arms and let them eat their fill until he passed out. Only then was he given water, and clothing, and enough food to bring him back from the edge of death after shifting.

Whoever those people were, he wanted nothing to do with them ever again. He’d been too weak to go after Isabet and the others, and he hated himself for it. Hated himself for no good reason. She was everything he hated about Ras Tieg. So why did he care so much about what happened to her? Why couldn’t he just turn it all off the way Nyx did?

The cat scat along the way got fresher, the path more solid, and by evening Eshe caught sight of their first fellow traveler, a tall, dark man wearing a purple turban and shiny robe whose surface seemed to move as he walked. Eshe assumed it was organic until he got up close, and saw that the bugs weren’t the usual tiny nits, bound together so small as to seem like one living skein, but thumbnail-sized roaches linked jaw-to-belly. The man led a small sand cat on a leash. The cat wasn’t more than knee high, but it hissed back at them as they approached.

Ahmed asked the man, in Khairian, how far the settlement was. The man glanced back once. He shouted something in some other language, then quickened his pace.

But it meant they were likely going the right way. By evening, there were others on the road, and Eshe began to hang back with Nyx and the team, less worried about desert creatures. Soon, he saw the first indications of the city. A dusty pall hung over the horizon, and as the suns set blue, green, and amber lights became visible.

Beside him, Isabet began to cry.

Eshe took her hand.

“I thought we would die out here,” she said.

He didn’t tell her he had thought the same.