I shook my head. If that child had any brains, he’d already ditched the cart and melted back into the desert like the loathsome creature he was. Those guards would never find him—especially since they were scared of venturing past the crumbling city wall. They’d seen too many of their comrades carried back in with the yellow-and-black veins that accompanied a bite from a yellow-spotted sand snake. Or they simply didn’t return at all.

No. If that boy was to be stopped, it had to be someone who wasn’t afraid of the desert. It had to be me.

I slowly backed away, tracing my fingers along the railing, hoping Rodric wouldn’t notice my path took me closer to the same door the boy had pulled the cart through. Once I was far enough away from Rodric and my father, it would be an easy leap into the arena and a quick jog across the sand. I was calculating my chances of making it when a shadow fell across my back.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Rodric said. He was standing so close I could feel the heat radiating from him despite the afternoon heat. “You plan on following that Desert Boy.”

I turned to face him, pushing my back against the railing. It shuddered under my weight, threatening to topple into the arena. “If you’re not going to do your job, someone has to.”

Rodric’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve already found one of their old hideouts. It’s just a matter of time until I find their current one.” He had tried several methods to catch the Desert Boys, like setting traps around seemingly unguarded wells to tempt a raid in the middle of a deserted square. He’d also tortured the few suspected Desert Boys he’d caught. But despite being hung upside down above the tiger cages or put in boxes with hundreds of raw worms, the boys never spoke.

“You think your two guards are going to follow him into the desert?” I retorted.

“And you would? You’re no Tamlin. You don’t know what’s beyond the city walls like I do.”

I forced myself to meet his gaze. He stood a little more than a hand taller than me, and his body was thick with muscle. “The desert doesn’t scare me. I am my father’s daughter, and Tamlin’s blood is in my veins just as it was in my ancestors’. He faced the desert and lived, and so will I.”

Unlike anyone before him or since, Tamlin had survived traveling across the entire desert on foot, emerging from the sands to be crowned king when he saved the people from an approaching army. But even before his trek, the Achran people had believed the desert chose its rulers. Endless plagues of sandstorms, incessant droughts, and ceaseless scorpion invasions were signs of weak blood on the throne. Although my father blamed the increasingly awful drought and run of sandstorms on the Desert Boys, claiming even the desert itself was trying to rid them from its dunes. And things wouldn’t get better until they were stopped.