Kage glanced back at him. She had not blistered like Isabet had—she’d been better protected from the suns—but her face was still pinched and hollowed. None of them were eating well.

Ahmed wasn’t sure how long Kage was going to stick with them. He figured she would bleed off into the city once they reached it. She wasn’t built to come out here in the first place, and things were only getting worse. He wouldn’t blame her for telling Nyx to fuck off. He’d thought about it himself. Many times. He told himself he stayed because of what he had done back in Nasheen. But in truth, this was the perfect place to get lost.

Kage called back down onto the street. “He’s awake!”

“Tell him to get down here!” Nyx’s voice.

“She wants you to help her,” Kage said.

Ahmed drank from one of his water bulbs, then moved past Kage and into the corridor set into the Wall. The room was three stories up, dug into the Wall with a score of others. He heard half a dozen languages he had no name for, men and women calling to one another, children playing, and a small group of people far down the Wall, singing.

He took a deep breath and swung over the side, gripping the handrails set alongside the deep grooves in the Wall.

Nyx waited for him below, arms crossed, impatient. As with any other weakness, she had shown no sympathy for his fear of heights.

“I found a place,” she said.

He didn’t ask for what. Asking her questions just made her more impatient these days.

He watched Nyx lurch ahead of him, and regarded her confident, big-hipped walk, and the way she kept tabs on the movement around them. He knew that there was something else driving him north now besides fear of capture. He had served under a great many women like her—literally and figuratively—but some part of him felt that all of them were striving to be exactly who Nyx was—and Nyx had achieved what they were pining for without any effort whatsoever. All dozen of them insisted they were tough women with big appetites and no regrets, but at the end of the day, they wept over their dead and fought over their lovers, like real people. They couldn’t deny their humanity the way this woman had. They couldn’t truly become monsters.