Worse, he had caught a scent on the wind of someone following them. He suspected the only people who would follow them were those who thought the same about the girl as he did. And that meant invaders.

The girl looked up at him from her hands and made a moue. “What is it?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, and rose, somewhat painfully, from his crouch near the cold fire pit. “Let’s go through the songs again.” His gut churned. The twisting of his insides had begun. Already his male organs had tucked themselves back up into his body, and his chest had begun to swell. He hated the change, every time, no matter what he changed into. Soon he would retch and bleed, and then he suspected it would be time to switch his pronouns again. He was already thinking of himself as ataisa – someone in between. It still gave him some comfort to match his physical sex to a gendered pronoun, even if he longed for some term more unique to him and his constantly changing body. There was no word in any language for him, not truly. Sometimes he wondered if it meant he didn’t exist. If he lived outside history. His body was Oma’s to do with as it willed. Oma gifted him this unpredictably changing body and mind, which could not be killed and hardly aged.

He had yet to see how either gift served any use to anyone. Some things, he resolved, had no purpose, no matter what the seers said. Maralah needed omajistas who could open gates, but that was not his best skill.

No, all he was good at was not dying.

“I’m making good progress, aren’t I?” Lilia asked. Her mind was tangled with Saiduan songs. Taigan told her the songs were supposed to help her concentrate and build things with the breath of Oma, but they were just nonsense sounds to her.

Taigan grunted. He was grumpier than usual, and even less responsive, since they had trudged into the mountains. The air here was colder and drier. After two days of ascent, the plant life thinned out. The mountains were a rocky wasteland – jagged, sometimes porous rock shot through with hunks of twisted metal. When she asked Taigan where the metal came from, he’d looked at her strangely and said, “They don’t teach you that?”

“What would they teach me?”

“Ignorant parasites,” he had muttered.

When they passed far grander things – massive slabs of soap-slick stones as tall as Lilia, shaped like hands or mossy, grotesque faces – he did not even glance at them. Lilia stared a long time at them, though, and traced the spidery writing on their bases with her outstretched fingers.

“Do you think these are older than Faith Ahya?” Lilia asked.

“Who?”

“The first Kai. Do you think she saw these things when she came here from the slave camps in Dorinah?”