He crouched beside her. “I have a deal for you,” he said. “If you come with us, you need to do everything Nyx says. Everything. Maybe you’ve heard some stories about her. Maybe you know not everything we do is going to be good. But you do exactly as she says. Do that and when this is all over, I come back to Ras Tieg with you. Deal?”

“Where are you going?”

“We’ve got to bring in a politician who was kidnapped.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

“Yeah, well… you’ve never tried bringing in a bounty with Nyx.”

“Bounty?”

“It’s not like she’s doing it for free.”

Isabet sighed and squinted at the eastern horizon, toward Ras Tieg. “What does she want me to do? I have some experience in—”

“Just… do as she says. Trust me on this, Isabet.”

“Trust you? Well, I won’t go that far. I’m just here to bring you back, as Inaya told me.”

“She promise you a raise or something? Better quarters?”

“Michel said I need to prove myself,” she said. “It’s a test.”

It was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “You think you’re ready for that?”

“Of course,” she said, nose turned up, tone haughty.

He picked up her gun. Pointed it at her. Pulled the trigger.

Isabet jumped like a startled lizard.

He handed the gun back to her. “First tip. Get a new gun. As soon as a Ras Tiegan gun gets sand in it, it’s useless. They don’t work out here.”

Isabet’s hand was trembling as she took the gun back. “You seemed very certain of that.”

“Nyx unloaded it while we were arguing,” he said. “If you want to keep up, you’ll need to start paying attention.”

15.

At the edge of the white desert, a tangled forest of massive insect-tailored mounds littered the undulating landscape for as far as Rhys could see. He paused the thirsty caterpillar in the sand and tried to sense some life or movement from the mounds, but to his senses they were just dead things—relics of some vast termite-like colony that had once thrived here, the woody substances that had once sustained them long lost to dust.

As he led the caterpillar into the shadows of the mounds, he found that the mounds were so tall that they blotted out the sky. He kept the caterpillar headed north, pausing every few minutes to gauge the angle of the sun. In this desert, traveling at night was best, but he had pushed himself to go another hour in the early morning light so he could reach the cairn before he camped. Cairns marked the caravan route, Abhinava had told him, so if he kept moving south from the location of each, he should find water within five or six days from the one before. Abhinava had also shown him the secret to uncovering the wealth of water beneath.