The woman held up her serrated insect leg, but did not advance.

“I, Shani of Jithra’s Circle, challenge you.”

“And I don’t fucking accept.”

“You’re on Circle Jithra land now,” Shani said. “You accept or I kill you the way I did your boy.”

Nyx regarded the scorched sand where Eshe’s blackened husk lay smoldering. There were more women nearby. She saw a few glimpses among the formations.

“Where’s my team? You fry anyone else?”

“Not if you circle with me. Put away your blade. You’ll call the sand with blood out here.”

“But burning up a boy is fine, is it?” Nyx said. She could smell the burnt flesh. Her memory roiled, and then everything just tumbled apart. She swung.

The woman had the sense to look startled. The blade came down on her shoulder, drew blood before she could dance away.

“Hold your blade!” the woman yelled at her. “You’ll call the sand! You fool!” And then she was nattering off something in her language.

Nyx leapt forward. She felt a dart of flame shoot up behind her, right where she’d been the moment before. She swung again as the woman danced behind more cover. Nyx’s blade cracked against the white structure. It trembled. The tip of her blade whacked the desert woman again, this time in the face. It opened another wound. Blood spilled.

Nyx kept on, relentless, moving among the formations in time with the desert woman. She was aware, distantly, of something hissing around her. And voices. The Aadhya were calling to one another.

A gout of crimson sand burst from the ground ahead of her. Nyx stumbled back. Shani screamed. A twisted, spitting tornado of sand erupted from the ground around Shani. Nyx watched it tunnel into Shani’s open wounds and fill her skin to bursting. Shani’s body became a bloated sack. Her eyes bulged. Then her skin burst, and the sand spilled out, darker than the stuff that went in. The bloodless shell crumpled to the ground. The bloody sand joined the rest of the stuff at Nyx’s feet. She felt it ripple beneath her. This was not like the sand she encountered before in Nasheen. It was the wild variety, eating blood alone, leaving baggy skin and bone corpses behind.

Nyx turned away before she could retch, and ran back through the maze of structures. She found Eshe by following the smell of burnt flesh. When she reached him, she threw down her blade and pulled him into her arms. His skin was blackened; his face, unrecognizable. The clothes were burnt away or seared to the skin. His eyes had melted. In death, there was nothing that marked him as being any different than any other Nasheenian boy, burned up and left to die at the front.