I couldn’t admit that’s how I’d been planning to run away, so I merely nodded.

“Many men and women have lost their lives following replicas of this map.” He folded it and handed it back to me. “As you’ll see in the shifting hills, nothing in this desert stays the same for long. It’s a living, breathing creature that alters and moves. Maps are no good out here.”

“Oh,” I said, sliding the map back into my belt.

Couldn’t I see the wind reshaping and blowing the dunes even from my window? It didn’t occur to me that the whole desert didn’t stay the same.

“But thank you,” Cion said.

And even though we fell back into silence, the iciness of it had been broken.

We continued hiking up the dune in front of us, but just as we crested the top, Cion vaulted toward me. “Get down.”

We rolled down the side of the dune, spraying sand around us.

Cion landed on top of me, his hand clamped on my mouth. He held one finger to his lips, urging me to be silent.

“If she’s out here, she’s probably dead,” a voice said from somewhere not too far away. “And if she’s dead, the vultures and blood beetles have already picked her apart. We’re not going to find anything.”

“Soldiers,” Cion mouthed at me.

I swallowed, though my mouth had gone suddenly dry. I didn’t know how many were looking for me.

Sand ground into my exposed skin, but I didn’t dare move.

“At least we’d get promoted if we found her,” another voice said. “Rodric might even give us extra water rations.”

The first voice laughed. “That’s the only reason I agreed to come out here.”

As they moved farther away, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much these soldiers must really need the extra water if they were willing to come out here to look for me.

Cion waited until we couldn’t hear anything else before slowly easing off me and pulling me to my feet. He smelled like warm smoke. Maybe from all the torches he carried around.

“I haven’t seen guards in the desert in a long time and never this far out before,” he said. “Normally, they won’t chase us past the city gates.”

“Why didn’t you kill them?”

“We don’t kill just because we can,” he said.

“What about at the wells?” I countered.

“We only fight when we have to, when it’s a matter of survival. The water we get isn’t just for us. It’s for the survival of all the people who desperately need it.”

I eyed him. There was so much about the Desert Boys I didn’t understand, or that I was starting to admit I’d possibly been wrong about.

As the sun rose higher, we trudged onward, pausing to look for soldiers.

My stomach rumbled. One spiked kana fruit as a meal wasn’t enough, especially after barely eating anything since my fight in the arena.

I studied Cion’s movements again to distract from the hunger pains ripping through my stomach. He swayed with the sand the way other people swayed while riding a camel. It was a natural movement that anticipated the ebb and flow of the ground beneath his feet. He barely left a trail where he walked, like he was a snake skimming the surface. He was taller than I was by about a hand’s height, and his long legs allowed him to take one step for every two of mine.