They met the patrol escorting Mercia and her entourage just twenty kilometers out of Sameh. The three armored bakkies felt like overkill to Nyx, but then, she hadn’t been in Nasheen for a long time. Mercia assured her things were much changed. To Nyx, that sounded ominous.

Nyx sat up front in the lead bakkie with the patrol leader and a driver. Mercia followed in the second bakkie with her bodyguards.

“All this just to escort a diplomat?” Nyx asked. Not that she could judge. She wore a baldric bristling with weapons—a short sword sheathed at her back, the hilt sticking up through a slit in her burnous; a scattergun secured horizontally just beneath that; a pistol at her right hip and a dagger at her left thigh. She had also tucked three poisoned needles in her hair and slipped on a pair of sandals with razor blades in the soles. She hadn’t worn her old sandals in so long that she’d had to customize a new pair just for the trip.

The driver spit sen out the window. Clouds of pale dust spewed behind them. “There are boys on these roads,” she said. She was narrow-waisted, slim in the hips, with a bony hacksaw of a face. Her wiry arms were visible—her black organic slick was cut off at the shoulder, and again at the calf.

“There are…” Nyx tried rolling that around on her tongue, “boys on these roads?”

“Yup.”

“Since when are we afraid of boys?”

“Since they came back from the front, woman. What, you think they all put down their guns for babies?”

All the women in the caravan wore standard-issue military gear—organic black slicks and boots and utility belts. They were heavily armed for a patrol, too. Nyx had noted two side arms apiece, assault rifles, and acid rifles—the sort more often used to scare off bugs than melt people. It was gear she should have seen on folks at the front, not women patrolling Amtullah.

“How long you been away from Nasheen?” the patrol leader asked. The leader sat in the back, a broad, muscular woman who wore the simple green stripe of an officer on her arm.

“Six or seven years,” Nyx said. “Never thought stuff in Nasheen changed that fast.”

“It’s been changing fast since the boys started coming home. Everything’s a big shit pile. The breeding compounds at the coast are the worst. Nobody’s sure what to do with them now that we’re not churning out a war. Can’t even fit what we’ve got in the cities, and there’s still more boys out there stationed in remote posts.”

“You say there are all these boys,” Nyx said, “but where? I’ve been riding with you since the border, and I haven’t seen boys in the numbers you’re talking about.”