It was time to let her go. She’d left me behind a long time ago.
Daral’s all in flowing white, a cotton scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose. He walks the desert with ease, the pack of gifts strapped to his back.
He’s not city-bred, nor from the plains. He’s slight, with browner skin than those from the east. He’s desert-born, I’d wager.
“Why you?” I ask him. “A bataur goes out and the only one who comes is you?”
“The scholars at the university were curious, but not enough to take on the rigors of the journey. As a junior scholar, I could hardly turn down the privilege of being their delegate.”
“And your familiarity with the desert made you a good choice, too.”
He assents with a slight nod of his head.
“Your coming was in vain, though.”
Daral’s gaze flicks toward the eerie men ranging on either side of us. “No,” he says, thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t say that. For a scholar, there is no situation that he cannot take something away from.”
That mild acceptance worries me more than raging or panic. I want to like him—he reminds me of Toro—but I cannot bend my mind toward him.
We’re into the Painted Rocks now, a series of hills splashed in rainbow colors. Bands of pink, green, and blue stand out against the bright sky, like a petrified sea. Narrow valleys snake their way through the hills, overhung with red and orange rock. Scrub covers the rock.
Leap jumps down from an overhang. “Not far now!” he says, showing pointed teeth and metal fillings. He bounds away, followed more slowly by Grip.
Still wasting energy. I decide not to waste mine by calling after him. I heft my water skin. About a quarter full, and there’ll be water at the nomads’ camp.
We climb yet another slope. Leap’s already at the top, scenting the air. He shouts down at me. “… sniff scent… flesh rot…”
Daral looks at me, uncomprehending.
My face has become a stone mask.
“He says he smells dead flesh.”
They’re dead, the nomads on the other side of the hill. They lie in a sprawl of limbs, men and women and children all, vacant eyes turned up toward the sky. The kiln-baked wind stirs their robes and the entrance flaps of their pale animal-skin tents. A piece of laundry, freed from under the rock that weighed it down, tumbles through the silent camp.
A desert canine sniffs around a corpse. Leap pounces toward it, and it skitters away into the thorn bushes. A carrion bird pecks at another body; Leap catches a handful of feathers before it flies away.
I squat next to the nearest body—an older man, with a face browned from sun and seamed with hard living. His face is untouched by violence.
I examine his body. Rows of small holes pinprick his chest. Tiny rust-colored spots stain the cloth.
“Eldritch guns.” I sit back on my heels. “Highwind was here.”
Daral takes a quick breath. “Highwind. But why—?”
“They helped Sera. They gave her an army, funded her research, equipped her with weapons and supplies. They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts.” My mouth is a twist of bitterness. “They wanted something.”
“But what?”
I point to tracks in the thin soil—parallel diamonded treads leading away from the camp.
Daral looks as well. “The only thing that way is…”
“Yes. Makai Crater.”
We fill our water skins from a tiny stream gurgling out from a crack in the rock, sheltered by an overhang. The eerie men lap at it, water spattering over their faces and clothes. Daral and I heave corpses into a narrow crevasse. Heat shimmers above the rock; it sucks both water and strength out of me, leaving me light-headed.
The eerie men could’ve done the job, but it feels wrong to let them.
These are our people. We bury them.
Daral murmurs itauri prayers over each body. I make the ritual gestures, but the words are stuck in my throat.
Leap and Grip help roll stones into the crevasse. We cover the bodies as best we can, to keep the scavengers from getting to them.
By the time we finish, it’s past midday and the sun is burning in a sky bleached white as bone. I tell the eerie men to wait for us in the encampment; both are subdued and make no protest. Leap throws himself down in what little shade he can find, Grip sitting cross-legged beside him. Both pant harshly, their energy sapped.
I give them one last look. Is one of them a Highwind spy?
Daral and I follow the tracks of the Highwind vehicles, ground into the thin covering of dirt, across the broken landscape. Brown and yellow lizards drowse in the shelter of large rocks. Uprooted and battered thorn bushes bear silent testimony to the passage of Highwind vehicles.
“We can take a short cut through here.” Daral points to a narrow pass higher up. “Looks like these tracks are taking the long way, through the canyon. And we’ll be able to see more from up high.”
I nod, fatigued. My years in Highwind have weakened me. I can no longer bear the oppressive heat the way I used to.
I long for the plains of my childhood, for the wind that whistled through the grasses, turning them into a sea of emerald waves.
From the top of the pass, we see the Painted Hills whittled down to mere stubs, discolored broken teeth in the jaws of the desert. Canyons cut deep through the hills and across the rocky plain, radiating out from the great crater that scars this corner of the desert.
Makai Crater. Angel Crater.
The site of a mythic battle between angels and demons, back in a past full of mist and darkness. All the surrounding land slopes down towards it, hills pitching forward, the plains rolling down to the center. The crater walls form a cracking, crumbling bowl. At the bottom, surrounded by rubble, is a small dark lake, reeking of
