I shook my head.

Sievers put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll find no answers here,” he said.

I let him lead me back to the palace, but I stared down every person we passed, daring them to challenge me or say anything about my appearance, to give me an excuse to release the anger throbbing in my heart.

In fact, I was so focused on looking for someone to fight that I nearly clobbered Latia when she ran into me.

“Latia?”

She cast her eyes around the scene, obviously disturbed by what she saw. The note she’d been drawing earlier trembled in her hands, and her face was pale when she met my gaze. “I heard the soldiers call out that you’d been injured by the crowd. I came to help.” She lifted her hand up toward my scalp.

“I’m fine.” I shook her away and kept walking, fuming all the way back to the palace.

Though when the shadow of the palace fell over my body, a chill crawled across my skin. My heart was no longer throbbing with anger but with emptiness and regret.

And fear.

The only thing worse than letting the Desert Boys get away was having to face my father afterward.

CHAPTER

4

The palace courtyards were as different from the city as a desert night was from a desert day. A sea of green replaced the sandy stretch that led up to the gates. A row of cacti grew along the base of both sides of the palace walls. Chunks of sanded brick littered the base of the inner side of the wall.

I was told the walls had been beautiful once—carved by hand to mimic the scrolling vines and sagging flowers of the razmin plant that once grew alongside the lagoon. They’d even used dyes to bring the flowers and vines to life. But now the wall looked like it had been drilled into by countless colonies of assassin wasps.

Past the walls, palm trees curled around the natural lagoon the city had been built around, and ornate gardens sculpted out of shrubs with roots long enough to reach the water dotted the area leading to the doors.

Tiled terraces surrounded the lagoon, bright red-and-blue patterns zigzagging across the floor. Each tile had been handcrafted by the best artisans in Achra. But now so many of the tiles lay broken or were missing entirely. Even the snakes carved in loops around the columns across the back of the palace had pieces missing and holes worn through where sandstorms had hit them. The few artisans who’d survived the worst of the drought either didn’t have enough water to craft more or didn’t have enough skill to replicate what the master crafters had done.

Though the drought had started before I was born, I’d always been told stories of how the artisans were the hardest hit at first. They had no extra water to make their tiles and dyes and earthenware. And many of their skills had died with them, leaving Achra to decay as it continued its fight to not succumb to this new, harsher desert we weren’t used to.