Isabet touched the unguent on her face, absently. “The voices were supposed to go away,” she said. “That’s why I did it. I wasn’t coerced or anything. You’re not supposed to get pregnant the first time. Everyone knows that.”

Eshe threw up his hands. God save him from ignorant Ras Tiegans. “That worked out well, didn’t it?”

“I wasn’t supposed to be able to channel God through my mother if I wasn’t a virgin. But… I still hear Him.”

“And what does He say?”

“I don’t know. Nothing you could understand.”

“Because I’m a half-breed heretic?”

“It was my choice to come here.”

“Just as it was your choice to fuck Michel, I’m sure.” Eshe stood.

“I never said it was Michel!”

“Why else would you have come?” Eshe said. “Why would he have sent you here? It wasn’t Inaya, was it? It was Michel.” He was done. He wanted to leave her here, so she could understand what it would really be like, to make it on her own. But if he did that, how would he be any better than Michel?

“You’re a bastard,” Isabet said.

“Every Nasheenian is a bastard,” Eshe said. “That insult means nothing to us.” He stepped out into the corridor. “I’m going down to wash up. Would you like to do the same, or lob more insults?”

He could see Kage making her way back up the ladder, mostly clean, lugging her massive gun with her.

For a moment, he thought Isabet would refuse. He almost hoped she would. Then she said, “All right.” And the hope fluttered up again, the hope that maybe he could build some kind of life after this. That maybe they weren’t all going to die for Nasheen.

Kage met him on the balcony.

“You leave any water for the rest of us?” he asked.

Kage moved past him without a word. How did people like Inaya get others to like them? Even love them? He seemed to fail at it, even when he said all the right things. Kage hadn’t spoken two words to him in more than a week.

“So what kind of work has Nyx found for us?” he asked Kage, hoping something that wasn’t rhetorical would get more of a response.

“We won’t need to hire ourselves out,” Kage said. “I found us a guide.”

“She’s a First Family,” Nyx said. “Is this supposed to make up for you fucking that giant?”

Kage sat with her on a cracked slab behind a string of temporary tents selling smoked cat meat and fried sand crawlers.

“I don’t know what that is,” Kage said.

“Families or fucking?”

“My business is my own. All you need know is that woman helped me find this one.”

“You’re all a slippery bag of trouble,” Nyx said.