There was a low rumble in the sky. Then another, so loud this time that the whole desert really did shake. He’s going down there to die, Nyx thought, suddenly. He can’t be this stupid. He just wants to fucking die out here, and this is a way to do it.

“Rhys!”

He came to the edge of the broken desert and raised his hands. His dark arms spilled free of the white burnous. He was terribly thin and wiry, and the ghastly light flickered across what was left of him.

Another dagger of light lit up the sky.

Nyx slowed her pace, just a hundred paces distant from him now. Already, she was out of breath. She heard a low buzzing above the din in the sky. Then the ground beneath her trembled so violently that it knocked her to her knees. She gazed up just as another dart of light arced across the sky. There, rearing above Rhys like some half-forgotten bedtime monster, was a scaly arthropod the color of the night, banded in violet. Each of its undulating segments was half as tall as Rhys. As it reared above him, she counted a full six segments. It totally dwarfed him, and that was just what was visible. She had a grinding moment of primordial terror. It was the same puking feeling that had overcome her when Anneke’s kids showed her the globular monsters they called fish. It was like looking at some alien thing that struck some deep note of dissonance within her.

She sucked in a breath and started to sprint toward Rhys. But the desert had other ideas, and her sprint became a slog as the crust of the desert broke beneath her. She waded forward. The arthropod wavered above Rhys for a few more moments. She made three-quarters of the distance to him, cursing and snarling the whole way. And then it struck.

The massive head drove toward Rhys.

Nyx screamed at it. At the sky. At the storm. At herself. But most of all, she screamed at Rhys.

She had gone off into the desert expecting to die to save everything she cared about. But the deeper she got into this, the more it looked like she was going to lose everything and save nothing.

And she would be the one cursed to keep on fucking living.