The room was surprisingly cool, a blessing after so many days in the desert. Eshe sat in the doorway watching Isabet sleeping in the far corner of the room. Kage was below, washing up at the communal well. They all needed it, but the water was costly. Kage had traded something of hers for it, but Eshe wasn’t sure what. Nyx was off with Ahmed speaking to the local authorities about shooting the bel dame, and Khatijah had gone with them. He was content to be alone with Isabet for the first time in many days.

Her tangled, dirty hair was knotted back from her blemished face. The salve had soothed much of her inflamed skin overnight, but she had gone too long without it. She wouldn’t have the lovely complexion of her rich parents anymore.

He knew what he needed to do back when they came to in the organic pods and he had seen her lying beside him, skin enflamed, face slack. He imagined she was dead, and the fear and loss that cut through him was so painful he thought his chest might burst. He was angry at himself for it, but it didn’t change how he felt.

Isabet opened her eyes.

“I’d like to take you back to Ras Tieg,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears again, but she did not shed them.

“We’ll get on with a caravan. A proper one. It won’t take nearly as long to get back if we’re with someone who knows where they’re going. Let me take you home. I can’t watch you die out here.”

Isabet sat up, wincing. “I told you I can’t go back.”

“Because you’re pregnant? What does that matter? Inaya won’t care about that, or anybody else. It’s not like Inaya’s kids were all born with fathers around. We can… we can say it’s mine.”

He had been thinking and praying a lot about it, and what it meant to offer her a way to return to Ras Tieg with some semblance of honor intact. It meant marrying her, he knew, or at least telling people they were married.

“You think that’s better?”

“Better than going back to Ras Tieg a whore, and getting stoned for it? Yes.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Tell me what I don’t understand. You just ran off here because you fucked some guy? I don’t understand why you all don’t have hexes on you like Nasheenians. I couldn’t get a woman pregnant without a lot of effort.”

“Nasheenians tamper too much with God’s will.”

“So it was God who got you pregnant, now?”