She slept under the vast sky that night with a handful of other women, all of them older than her, if only by a few years. She felt completely exposed, vulnerable, for the first time in her life. Yes, certainly, she was small, even for someone of her people, but she was fast and limber. She knew where to hide in a fight. Knew exactly where to hit to land the most amount of damage with the least amount of effort. Her mother had taught her that—tricks she picked up from the Nasheenians she watched in the factories.

“When you’re old enough,” her mother told her, “you will do your time in the factories. Learn Nasheenian. Make enough money to earn the right to a spouse. Perhaps a pair of them.”

It was a rite of passage, of sorts, to go out into the factories and return with the goods and currency her people needed to survive. Everyone left, but not everyone came back. It was those who did not come back that made her most nervous. Where did they go? Did the sky eat them? Did they fall into it, explode like stars? Or was it the Nasheenians that ate them?

Now she traveled across a landscape so alien that waking to it each morning gave her vertigo. When Nyx asked her if she was all right as they rode along in the spitting organic contraption they called a bakkie, she half thought to claw open Nyx’s face and scream about how the sky was going to eat them. The feeling came over her most at dawn. It was a breathy, oppressive thing. Like holding on to a great flying beast that you knew you could not hold.

“You all right?” Ahmed asked. He sat beside her at the wheel of the bakkie, as unconcerned as the others about the limitless space as the suns came up over the desert.

She nodded, once, and gripped her gun a little tighter.

The bakkie ground to a halt the next day. Sunk deep in the sand. Nyx had them work an hour or so to try and free it. When that didn’t work, she told them to unload all they had and start walking. To where, exactly, Kage was not certain. All she cared about was that it was very far from her country, Dei Keiko, the country the Nasheenians called Druce.

Kage raised her head and stared at the unending landscape. She had not anticipated this. What she expected, she wasn’t sure. Maybe riding in a bakkie or caravan the whole way. Perhaps taking a series of trains. Or trekking up and about mountains—solid, massive hulks of stone to hide on and within. She had not expected this insecure place.

“Won’t we be exposed out here?” she asked softly as she pulled on her pack.