It wasn’t the only thing about the B’ors to surprise Evie, especially once their trek began. They started out with little food and virtually no drinking water. The state of the surrounding countryside provided no relief; Evie had yet to hear so much as a single bird chirping in the distance. Her only secret, desperate hope was that they’d come upon some small oasis, or even a small Sicclunan or Skrain force they could overpower and whose supplies they’d then raid.

Several miles before they reached the foothills, Evie realized she and the other Savages had left the B’ors behind. They’d all fallen out of the march silently, deftly, as they’d no doubt learned to exist in a world that treated them like wild animals fit only for the hunt. When Evie walked back to investigate, she found them standing in a circle around an unpleasant and wholly remarkable patch of land.

Though she was never a farmer, the surface of the ground there looked as sallow as scorched earth to Evie. She watched as one of the B’ors, an old man with a shock of hair as white as sea-foam but whose skin was still as tight and hard as someone twenty years younger, twisted a slender stick from one of the few fossilized trees standing dead amidst the landscape deep into the dirt. They’d passed a dry, cracked riverbed not far from camp. The old man must’ve plucked from it several husks that were once reeds. He removed the stick and threaded one of the hollow stalks through the hole he made, puckering his cracked lips around the end and sucking until it concaved the stony flesh of his cheeks.

It took several moments, but then Evie saw the liquid rise up and darken the inside of the reed.

It was water, fresh and nourishing from a place below the salt, where the earth was still alive.

Evie had called the Savages back with a joy she thought lost after taking in the sight of the camp slaughter. They all drank, not nearly their fill, but enough to keep going, and with a renewed hope that their B’ors companions possessed the knowledge necessary to survive this wasteland.

Now, standing atop a hill overlooking this sunken abyss created by her people, Evie stares down the line at Yacatek and the other B’ors with fear-swollen confusion clouding her eyes.

“What do you mean?” she asks the B’ors leader. “What happened before the war?”

“This is what you did to our land, long before you began claiming your empire of cities,” Yacatek says. “This ‘machine’ of which the nameless one speaks. We were its first victims.”

“You and I weren’t even born when that happened.”