“You’re going to seriously leave me out here with the girl?” Ahmed said.

Safiyah shrugged. “I am being practical. But, of course, the final decision rests with Damira here.”

“Very funny,” Nyx said. She looked at what remained of her team. Her heart hurt at not finding Eshe there, knife at the ready. His sly walk, fast hands, and keen eyes were made for this part of the run. Instead, he’d be helping out as… something else. She grimaced. There was no way out of this hell for her.

You don’t go in with the team you dream about, Raine once told her, you go in with the team you’ve got.

Fuck you, Raine, she thought, but said aloud, “All right. Let’s camp out and wait for the bugs.” She pointed to a low ridge overlooking the hold. “No fires. Keep a low profile. We’ll scout it out once the bugs are up. Once we’re in, if we’re not back in two days, you head home.”

Ahmed snorted.

She held up a hand. “Come on. Let’s pretend we’re not all going to die out here, all right? I’m not living like a corpse. I don’t expect you to think like one. Got it?”

“Sure,” Ahmed said.

“Any other ideas?” Nyx said. “Because after the sun goes down, we’re going in.”

Ahmed had seen what men became when they were not beheaded or burned or shipped off to the containment centers for decontamination and deprocessing. He waited on the rise with a pair of specs, staring out into the white forest, waiting for the bodies to come back.

What Nyx proposed was dangerously haram—forbidden. It turned his stomach. He would have rather hacked them all apart and risked the wrath of that blood-sucking sand than see those people devoured from the inside and come back as lumbering, hulking wrecks.

Those people. One of whom was Eshe.

He gritted his teeth.

Nyx came up beside him, folded her arms. “Anything?”

“No,” he said.

“You’re not happy about it,” she said.

“It’s forbidden. It’s obscene.”

“I’ve done worse.”

“Not to your own kid.”

“Care that much, do you?”

“He was a good kid.”

“How good?”

Ahmed pulled the specs away, and glanced up at her. She kept her gaze on the long sweep of the forest.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Seems to me that all the fucking on this team has gotten us all into trouble.”

“That was Kage, not me.”

“Was it?”

He grunted. Fuck her. Fuck all the officers like her.

“You don’t have any respect for anything,” he said.

“What you did with Eshe was haram, too,” she said. “If you’re following the Kitab by rote.”

“Fuck you, Nyx.”