“Who wants first watch?” Nyx said.

Silence. Blank stares.

“All right,” Nyx said. “Not like we can see shit out there anyway.” She took up a position near the staked entry, and listened to the wind yowl while Eshe broke out the rations. She kept her heat specs close. She emptied out her sandals, grateful for a lifetime of callouses so thick she barely registered blisters or bruises anymore.

The others bedded down after eating. As soon as the sun dropped, the desert got cold. Bitterly cold. Eshe started a fire with a handful of fire beetles. They didn’t have much to feed the bugs, so he used far too many to get a steady heat, even in the small space.

Nyx pressed her back against the rock, which still held some of the suns’ heat, and peered out between the flaps of the canvas. Eshe and Isabet argued about something in Ras Tiegan. Ahmed lay on the other side of the tent with his back to all of them. Kage and Khatijah methodically cleaned their weapons. Safiyah sat nearest the fire, talking to herself. On the one hand, Safiyah made Nyx increasingly wary. On the other, the realities of this place meant that relying on her knowledge of the area might be the only thing that kept them alive on this side of the Wall.

Nyx nodded off. When she woke, Safiyah was sitting across from her. Staring at her with big, dark eyes.

Nyx started.

Safiyah grinned. The cat’s-got-a-lizard grin that creeped her out.

“Do they teach anything of the heavenly bodies in the schools for grunts?” Safiyah asked. “I assumed that’s where you were schooled.”

Nyx glanced back into the tent. The others were mostly asleep, or trying to be. The fire beetle carapaces popped.

“Why?” Nyx said.

“Surely someone in your life taught you something of the stars?”

“No one in my life gave a shit about the sky,” Nyx said, but that was a lie. She thought of her mother. “I needed to know how to point and shoot. And not up there.”

“Ah, yes. So you learned to count bullets and calculate the trajectory of bursts. So quaint.”

“You’d have thought it was mighty useful when you were hip deep in a trench about to be overrun and trying to remember how much ammo you had left. Not that any of your people would get that.”

“Still, it’s a pity,” Safiyah said. “There are gravitational points between high-density planets called Damira’s points. It’s when the pull of one planet is no longer stronger than the pull over another body. At that point in the sky, debris becomes forever caught in these areas. So debris wanders through, becomes caught in the tide, and then is pulled back into the vortex in an endless rotation. Forever trapped between two great heavenly bodies in space.”