There were no landmarks that would not disappear.
The tallest sand dune would become the smallest, given enough time.
And this moon had nothing but time.
Ikmal prison would be buried beneath the sands too if the supervisors didn’t keep the area around the prison clear.
It’d been six months since I memorized that map.
But how old had the map been when they showed it to me?
They must have made sure to find the most recent map they could, didn’t they?
The sands couldn’t have changed that much…
Unless there had been a storm or two that completely rewrote the map…
My stomach fell through the soles of my feet.
What if the shuttlecraft was buried beneath a deep and impenetrable mound of sand?
There was no way for me to know where it was, never mind how I might dig it up.
We rounded another corner.
My breath caught in my throat at the sight of a statue carved into the shape of a Desert Flower.
I ran to it and ran my hands over it.
“What is it?” Agatha said. “What is it?”
“My crew left this here for me to find.”
“They did? Then where’s the shuttlecraft?”
I didn’t know but it wouldn’t be far away.
I moved behind the rock, circled it, and then ran to the top of the nearest sand dune.
Agatha remained below in the valley.
All the way here, we’d avoided the tips of the sand dunes to ensure we didn’t run into any Desert Flowers or drones.
Now, I flaunted that rule.
I peered at the rolling dunes and the valleys that sawed between them.
I knew any moment, I would see something, a flickering of sunlight off the pristine white roof of a shuttlecraft.
It would be right there.
But I saw no shimmering white rooftop.
I saw no isolated chip of modern technology.
Only the empty rolling hills of endless sand dunes.
My shoulders slumped.
It wasn’t here.
We were trapped on a prison moon with no way to escape this damn rock.
Fuck.
The walk down the sand dune was a lot harder than the one up.
I needed some time alone and I wasn’t up to the task of having to tell Agatha she’d teamed up with a loser.
How could my crew have left me out here in the middle of nowhere with no way of escape?
They gave me their word.
Maybe they had a change of heart and decided the best option was to keep the ship and the booty we’d amassed for themselves.
They were pirates after all.
Maybe we had more in common with the human pirates than I realized.
Or maybe they assumed the ship would only have gone to waste if they left it here for me.
Or maybe they never thought I would escape Ikmal in the first place.
My good for nothing crew.
I’d been certain they would help me, certain they wouldn’t leave me high and dry like this.
Instead, they left me on a desert planet with nowhere to run and nothing to cling to.
Almost nothing.
I had Agatha and in a slightly better setting—a secluded island out in the middle of nowhere, for example—it might not have seemed so bad.
But here and now, while we were trapped on a Creator-forsaken desert rock in the middle of nowhere?
Agatha waited patiently at the bottom of the mountain dune, hand raised over her eyes to block out the worst of the sunlight.
“Well?” she said expectantly. “Did you see it?”
I growled under my breath, unable to tell her the news.
I wasn’t sure even I believed it.
If it was true, I didn’t know what we were meant to do now.
I stalked past her and fell into the shadow cast by the Desert Flower statue.
I ran a hand over my face, having begun to perspire from the descent down the sand dune.
I wiped my palm on the leg of my pants.
Agatha stood over me.
“Well?”
I didn’t say a word and didn’t look up at her.
Agatha’s arms flopped to her sides.
“It’s not there, is it?”
There were so many ways to respond to her, so many things I wanted to say.
But only one word could form on my lips.
“No.”
Agatha fell to her knees and stared at the shadows between my feet.
“Then what happens now?”
“Now? Nothing. That’s what happens now. A big fat nothing.”
“I thought your crew was supposed to leave a shuttlecraft here for you?”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t,” I snapped.
“Maybe the guards found it and took it away.”
“If they had, they would be all over the place now, knowing we would come here looking for it. We would already be in their custody.”
“Then what happened?”
“My crew lied to me,” I said, biting off the words one by one.
“But you said they were a good crew.”
“They were. At least, I thought they were.”
Agatha was on the verge of tears and the sound of her being so upset—because of me, no less—drove a spear through my heart.
“I’ll find another way,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.”
“We’re on a desert moon in the middle of nowhere,” Agatha said, heat rising to her cheeks. “You said this would be our chance to get away from here!”
“I was wrong.”
I reached up to run my hand through her hair.
She slapped me away.
“You forced me through the door! You grabbed me!”
“You didn’t have to follow me through!” I spat.
“I thought you were my ticket out of here!”
“That makes two of us!”
“Do you have any idea what they’ll do to me? Back at the prison? They’ll sell me to the lowest bidder and I’ll get sent to a pleasure house.”
She was afraid, scared.
She needed comforting.
But I couldn’t see that through the red mist that descended over my eyes.
I saw only her disappointment in me.
“Come off it,” I growled. “You’ve been working at a pleasure house ever since you arrived here.”
“It’s not the same,” Agatha said defensively.
I knew it wasn’t the same but my own sense of disappointment had dulled my mind.
“Nothing will happen to you,” I said softly. “You’ll tell them I kidnapped you and forced you to come with me. There will be no way for them to prove otherwise. I grabbed you, remember? So what’s to say I didn’t pull you
