Her mothers would have told her to breathe. To connect with the face of the Wall itself, to imagine she was part of it. A permanent, substantial thing. Not frail. Not fallible. Strong. Immovable.

She breathed, and took her next hold.

Below her was a stir of mad people who did not care whether she lived or died. Behind them, far to the south, her own family no longer saw her. Here, on this blighted mountain of a wall, she was alone. Totally and completely alone.

She caught her breath. Clung to the Wall. Suddenly rigid.

Breathe.

Live alone. Die alone. If she let go, would it matter? Nyx would not accomplish her mission. Perhaps the team would disband. No one would burn her body, or return it to the darkness of her family’s vessel. No one would sing over her. No one would care.

“It is the worst fate,” her mother Sokai had once told her, “to die alone, in silence, among strangers. Promise you will always come home.”

But she could not go home to a place that no longer saw her.

She glanced up. The gaping maw of the crevice was still far from her reach. She pressed her forehead against the gritty wall. She needed silence, but for the first time in many weeks, now that she had it, her mind wanted to clutter it up, use it to till up old sorrow.

Reach. Climb.

She moved up the Wall again. The sun was coming up, and at this height, it beat down on her exposed neck and shoulders, heavy as a winter coat.

She exhaled, and reached for the next hold.

Her fingers slipped.

The world broke then. Some carefully muted thing inside of her howled, and her children were screaming again.

The sun was blinding.

Her children were dying.

Kage regained her hold, and pressed herself against the Wall. The muscles in her legs and forearms were trembling violently.

The raiders were Ras Tiegans. They stormed through the settlement and smoked them out of the caves; picked them off one by one with pistols, and when the pistols jammed up, they used swords. Ras Tiegans had a longer reach, and better weapons, than any Drucian. The Nasheenians helped ensure that.

They were young people, always, and they laughed as they did it, as if it were some game, some adolescent rite of passage, to murder Drucians in their homes.

But Kage had seen them coming. She had climbed the sheer face of her family’s cave, her newborn twins strapped to her back, and hidden there as her people were smoked out and killed.

The Ras Tiegans drove X-shaped markers into the ground in front of every cleared cave, and tied purple banners to them.

Kage watched as two of them chased her cousin up the side of the hill just opposite her. One grabbed her cousin by the ankle and yanked her down.