“What the fuck does this have to do with anything?” Nyx said. Outside, the wind had subsided. She donned the heat specs and surveyed the landscape. In the cold night, people would stand out like flares.

“Your team is like that, I think,” Safiyah said. “Just bits of debris. Rubble. Space junk. Right now they are circling you, but this desert, these people, they are a powerful force in their own right, and they have much to offer. Now your people will be caught between the two. But this impasse will not last forever. Eventually, one body is disabled, atrophies, is set off kilter. And when that happens, well… Everything falls apart after that, doesn’t it?”

“Know what I think?” Nyx said, lowering her voice. She looked over the top of the specs at Safiyah.

“I have not the faintest.”

“I think you should keep your fucking head out of the sky and back in the desert. If you did, you’d have seen there’s a fucking scout watching us from the next outcrop.”

Safiyah hissed and flattened herself on the ground. “God be merciful, woman, why didn’t you say anything?”

“I know how much you love to listen to yourself talk.”

“Menace.”

“You’ll learn to love it,” Nyx said, and slipped her scattergun from its holster. In the specs, the green, human-shaped outline merely held its ground. She expected others, so she waited with gun out.

“Just the one?” Safiyah whispered.

“She’s not doing anything.”

Then the figure moved. Not toward the camp, but away, back down or behind something so Nyx lost sight of it.

Nyx shook her head. “Gone now.”

The magician was shaking her head. “Not gone,” she said. “Going back to consult with her circle leaders to decide what to do with us.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not. We should start moving again soon.”

They didn’t wait for dawn.

Nyx kept Safiyah with her up front, and Khatijah and Kage made up the rear guard. The sun took a lot longer to come up here, and when it finally did, the roiling clouds kept the whole world bathed in lilac for the first two hours of sunrise. The light made the journey incredibly unreal, like pounding through some spectacular dream. The landscape here had a strange hush about it, expectant, like the creamy red sand was just lying in wait for things to happen. For blood to be spilled.

They walked through a forest of white structures twice as tall as Nyx, all of them twisted into a grotesque semblance of trees, or, in some cases—human figures. The structures oozed some kind of clear, snotty mucus. Nyx hated them.

“Have you heard of Bomani?” Nyx asked Safiyah as they walked.

“Ah, yes. It’s one of the major congregations here. Something like a city.”

“You can get us as far as Bomani?”