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  She doesn’t even hide her shock. “You can’t mean that?”

  “Which part? The stalkers?”

  She looks away. “You know what I mean. You shouldn’t wish for that, not for anyone.”

  Vin grumbles and steps out the door. “You can’t pretend the journey won’t happen just by not talking about it. The inevitable is what it is, and you’d best get on with it while you have the time. We all make our final donation sometime.”

  The door slams and Bex clears the last of the crumbs from the plate before following him out.

  Bindo lows a happy greeting from the barn, stomping, impatient to get going. He senses it too. They should keep moving. Bex runs a hand along his flank, seeing the rough areas where the patch is taking hold. She hugs his thick neck as Vin opens the gate. Thick ridges of calcite crust over the wound forming a scab. There’s no infection, so that’s the first bright spot in her day. She turns to thank the Patcher, but he is already gathering supplies: a gun, a folded bag, what looks like camping gear.

  “The stalkers aren’t that far,” she says to him. “I could see the town from where we were attacked. I imagine there’s a den close by.”

  “Yep,” he says. “They live down in the gorge. Too many for us to flush out, and that’s why I expect we won’t see carcasses. They’ve probably been scavenged already, or eaten. We’ll need to tread deeper into the dens.”

  She stares at him in disbelief. “The dens?”

  “Yep.” He loads the pack, the gun and a few extra bags of supplies onto the aging orehorse in the adjacent stable. “We’ll get a better idea how many are breeding out there. It will tell me how many traps we should set, how many of the flocks we can expect to lose. If we’re lucky we’ll find something dead to sell. I figure between you and me we can bring back a dozen.”

  She can think of a hundred better and safer ways to earn the money back. “I can get a job.”

  He laughs. “No offense, but you don’t look like someone who’s used to working common jobs. Looking at your hands, I’d imagine you’ve never even been fitted for a digger graft. Pardon my skepticism, kid, but you do not have a farmer’s body.”

  It’s hard to hide the embarrassment as she looks down at her hands—soft, delicate. Extra digits sprout from the sides, ideal for tending. They are her birth hands. She’s never considered another way of life until now. She pulls them inward, wanting to hide them, wanting to chop them off if she could. What’s the point of having them if she has nothing to tend?

  “Stop sulking,” Vin says. “You’ll depress the livestock. Let’s go.”

  *

  It’s hotter today than yesterday and already Bex hates this idea. The desert is a vast featureless tarp of sand and rock, speckled here and there with desert flowers and scrub weeds (which Bindo makes every attempt to eat.) The sun burns through the Godcloud, nearly exposing the distant tips of the horns of the world.

  “How long were you going to keep traveling anyway?” Vin asks. Wobbly legs move in hindered strides beside the walking stick he uses for balance. His legs are all she can see, the rest of him hidden behind Bindo’s bulk—but what she does see reminds her of the oldest of the old. His knees are crusted in calcium scabs. “Isn’t normal to see a Tender so young around these parts. And without…”

  Awkward silence settles between them. Without a Ward, he was about to say. He knows and she knows.

  “Don’t know,” she says. “Next town. I guess.”

  “You would have had to walk another two or three days—”

  “It doesn’t matter now.” She doesn’t mean to snap at him, but it just comes out, some failsafe in her brain has no use for niceties anymore. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I was just trying to make you see how slim your chances were getting...”

  “I don’t care how slim they were.” She wants to make eye contact but he is hidden behind Bindo. All she can see are legs. “I didn’t know there was a stalker den.” It’s probably for the best he can’t see her face as she fights back the tears.

  “You hear the thunder last night?” he asks. It’s a welcome change of subject.

  She shakes her head then says, “No.”

  There isn’t a cloud in the sky and she figures the old man was drunk on jaqua weed.

  “Loudest thing I ever heard. You must have slept through it. Storm must have blown through. Or maybe some freak storm out along the Great Ridge. I can always tell when rain’s coming because of my knee. Last year we had an unexpected cold front move in and I couldn’t get my damn knees to lock no matter what I did. Made getting out of bed harder than ever…”

  But Bex isn’t listening. She stares down at the sand. Vin turns, his voice grouchy.

  “What?” he asks.

  It looks like a husk, and if she hadn’t been staring right at that very spot, she would have completely disregarded it. Now that she’s staring straight at it, Bex realizes this is no stalker husk, nor is it from any animal she has ever seen before.

  “Looks like a carapace.” Her fingers want to pick it up, but some animal part of her brain is spooked by it. Even Bindo won’t go near it and eyes it warily from a distance. She hears feet moving as Vin appears to her right.

  He huffs. “That’s no carapace, unless it’s some other stalker subspecies. Maybe a juvenile…”

  But he’s just standing there too, staring at it. It’s clear to Bex that he has never seen anything like it either. Wind whips past them and deposits more sand over the husk. She reaches for it, but Vin’s crusty hand stops her.

  “You don’t know what that is,” he says, and she can see the way he looks at her. He’s old and scared, terrified of things he doesn’t understand. He has a point, but if she doesn’t grab it now, the sand will cover it.

  She snatches it up. It feels lighter than she imagined it would, a thin membrane of what might be wood… maybe a wing. She hefts it in a hand—it weighs less than charcoal. She shows it to him and Vin just stares at it.

  “It’s not animal,” he says. “Maybe some sort of wood?”

  “How does wood get out here?”

  “If there was a storm…”

  “There was no storm,” she says. “If there was a storm we’d have smelled it… and there’d be rain.”

  He runs a finger along its surface and makes a face. “It’s smooth. Whatever it is, I imagine the market barons would be interested.”

  “How much do you think it’s worth?” she asks.

  He smiles at her. “Do you mean: Will this make us even?”

  She nods.

  Vin makes a face. “We’ll see when we get back. I’ll have to call a courier to the Ameer, and send a sample on foot…”

  The mention of the Ameer unsettles her. “I don’t want to go back,” she says. “I need to keep moving.”

  A slow sigh escapes from the old man’s throat. “Yeah, you do I guess.” He looks beyond her, over her shoulder to the horizon. “We’re more than halfway there now.”

  “So set some traps.” She slaps the weird bark husk against his chest. “Keep it. Tell them it’s from an armory… it’s part of a convoy shell. Tell them it’s a new species.”

  “It’s not from an animal.” He keeps an eye on the husk like it might leap up and bite him at any moment anyway.

  “So make something up,” she says. “You know biology. Tell them it’s something rare. Tell hem they can grind it up and snort it for fertility.”

  She’s already moving away from him, facing him with only half her body now. Wind-blown sand scratches at her skin. “I appreciate your help, I really do.” She starts to walk towards the horizon. “And thanks for the bullets.”

  “What?” He is losing some of her words in the wind. He fades into sand clouds and dust, a stumpy silhouette with a walking stick and a backpack.

  “I said thanks for healing my bull.”

  Vin doesn’t respond. He watches Bex turn away and becomes just another variation on the landscape. Soon he can no longer see
her at all.

  *

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she says to Bindo. “You should be thanking me. He stitched you up pretty good.”

  Bindo’s huge eyes follow her hand as she fishes out the “borrowed” bullets from her pocket. It’s an ancient, outdated technology. Few tradesmen even make these anymore, the resources to manufacture them too scarce and irreplaceable. She had left the Patcher half of the bullets… at least. And if he needed more he could buy them… from somewhere. She was in a hurry.

  A hurry to get where?

  Anywhere but here.

  And then what?

  They are weeks of travel from the next Tenders’ Guild, the Eastern Mountain compound hidden and reclusive. They might not even accept her. Bex looks back at the broken bulge in Bindo’s pouch, the dead thing in there, slowly being absorbed into his body.

  A Tender knows when to seed and when to reap. A Tender also knows when to walk away from a Ward that will not grow. But there’s no advice for what to do when you’ve failed your Ward, when you’ve so completely and utterly failed that there is little anyone can do to fix your situation. Normally a Tender would go on a probationary period, a new Ward issued to them after a time of observation, a second chance. There are simply no more chances for her now.

  Her foot lands on something hard and there’s pain in her leg. A startled squeak escapes her as she jumps back from the object there in the sand. It’s another one of those stupid burnt husks, just slightly bigger than the last one.

  Who the hell is leaving these…But she loses her train of thought as she scans the ground ahead.

  The desert is littered with them. It’s as if some massive tree has grown, shed all its leaves and died. They lay in groups and alone, each of them just as weightless as the last.

  She tries bending them but can’t—they are tougher than anything she’s ever held. She raps a fist on the edge. It sure sounds like wood. She sticks it into the pouch and picks up another. Bex opens the pouch on Bindo’s other flank and begins filling that one with the flaky lengths of wood. They’ll be fine in there until they reach the next town. Bindo doesn’t care; he chews on a scrub brush while she circles him, clearing the perimeter of the debris.

  At the very least, she could use some of this to fashion a lean-to or maybe use the smaller bits as armor. Her mind fills instinctively with uses for the salvage, plates, armor, roof shingles, water storage… When she is done, Bex has collected so many that Bindo’s pouches are bulging. It will be a little uncomfortable, but he won’t complain as long as there is food.

  The sun is past its zenith by the time she is done and the shadows are getting long. She remembers how close they are to the den and feels a slight twinge of regret. Stalkers are nocturnal, sluggish during the day, running from sunlight. She should be past the ravine by now. Instead she isn’t even close.

  “We’d better get moving,” she says. Bindo snorts in response.

  As they pass the gorge on their left she has to coax Bindo much harder. He protests, snorts and is just generally fussy about traveling this close to a live stalker den, but eventually they reach the halfway point. Even that has taken far too long. The sun is huge and red through the growing clouds over the horizon, the shadows in the ravine are long and dark.

  But no stalkers. By now she should be seeing a few scouting around for prey. But the desert is empty of movement. It’s odd.

  She knows Bindo can smell them because otherwise he wouldn’t be so nervous. She creeps to the edge of the canyon, interested now in what could be keeping stalkers from their usual routine.

  What she sees makes her inhale a tiny gasp of air. It’s obvious now why she hasn’t seen any of them. They’re too preoccupied with the large object in the center of the canyon. It’s impossible to get even a glimpse of it underneath the hundreds of writhing stalkers, swarming over it.

  It’s huge, whatever it is. They scrape and dig, but don’t feed. It must be tough to withstand all the attention. Huh.

  She can smell them from here, their scent rich and acrid. Bindo has decided he has seen enough and he pulls on the reigns, dragging her back from the ledge. Bex digs her heels in.

  “Stop it,” she says, yanking back on the rope. “What do you think it is?”

  She knows they should probably keep moving, but with the entire stalker hive swarming over that thing, she figures she has some time. They are stupid creatures, stalkers. They don’t know when to quit. Bex figures they’ll be at it all night. The swarm swells and recedes, swirls and heaves as they scrape at the object beneath. It’s somewhat remarkable to her that the subject of their attention has even lasted this long at all.

  The explosion makes her jump and Bindo grunt in surprise. Two of the stalkers explode, cut in half by blinding light that fizzles and explodes. They fling against the rock and dirt, their dying crooked limbs flailing and smoking.

  Two more stalkers fly apart as another discharge knocks them away from the pile. Boiling ichor sprays into the air as a fine black mist. If it’s a person in the middle of that mound they must be desperate.

  Or stupid, she thinks. Who would even go into a stalker den? Any one that moronic deserves whatever they get.

  Another explosion—three more stalkers in pieces.

  Light burns at the center of the pit, scattering the stalkers for a moment. The swarm parts to avoid the fire and Bex finally sees the smooth white surface of what looks like—an egg, and it’s huge, so big she can’t even imagine what might be born from something so big. And damaged too. A jagged fissure stretches from top to bottom, black inside.

  Deep instincts stir in her chest as she watches the stalkers (now more cautiously than before) begin to dig methodically around the base of the egg. They scratch and probe, but make no progress.

  One or two begin to split off, looking for something more viable to hunt. A few more lose interest as well, peeling off from the swarm. They begin to move in her direction.

  Bex stands up and runs to Bindo. “Okay, you were right, you were right, you were so right. Let’s go.”

  She hops onto his back and clings to his neck, kicking his flanks with her feet. Bindo doesn’t need anymore permission. Two sublegs extend from the inside of his groin and quiver as they press against the ground. Thick hooves kick up dust as the plainsteer’s flee instinct kicks in. Muscles twitch as he launches them forward, away from the den faster than even stalkers can run.

  Bex knows he can’t keep this up but it’s the only chance they have. She steals a glance over her shoulder as the foreclaws of a stalker reach over the lip. She squeezes Bindo’s neck. Why aren’t we going any faster?

  Then she remembers the pouches. Her head whips around to look at them—filled with that stupid bark. It didn’t weigh much at first, but she’s packed too many now. Sharp dread fills her chest.

  Bindo snorts as he struggles with the weight of her and the extra baggage. The stalker emerges from the gorge and its black eyes roll to stare at her. She almost flies forward as Bindo slides to a halt. A larger stalker lies directly in their path, turning and crouching to leap. The plainsteer bellows in fear and rears up onto its four hind legs.

  Bex sees her world spin as she tumbles to the dirt, hits the ground and rolls. Sand flies into her mouth and nose as she lands on her stomach, gasping. Teeth rattle in her skull. Rolling her head around, she opens her eyes into the liquid black eyes of a stalker, its belly unzipping to reveal white needles and green saliva.

  Her hand goes to her gun and touches only an empty pocket. Why didn’t I just get a holster like any other sane person, she thinks her final thought as the stalker crouches, leaps—

  And explodes.

  Warm black tar sprays across the ground and against her face. Another shot and Bindo steps back from a crippled stalker. It limps away several steps, then slides over the edge of the gorge.

  From below she hears the scrabbling of claws climbing up the side of the ravine. The stalkers chitter to one another, more cautiousl
y now, and Bex also hears the crunching of gravel. Footsteps, but in the dark she can’t even make out who it is until a new sun rises in the sky. Bex blinks in the glow. The stalkers cower, creeping back away into the shadows as the miniature sun hangs in the air, flickering and sizzling. A second flare rises over the ravine and she can see the distant stalkers scatter like oil from soap. She turns and looks into the soft round eyes of an orehorse.

  It looks down at her from flared nostrils, set wide in a long snout, the skin covered with crusty chitin that has grown into a thick lacquer with age. It snorts at her as the rider dismounts.

  His feet hit the ground, then his cane. Vin looks down at the flares he’s lobbed into the gorge.

  “We’ve got about fifteen minutes of light before they get over their confusion. Get your steer and let’s go… What did you do?” He glances at the filled pouches on the steer’s flank and sighs. “And thanks for leaving me a few measly bullets. You’d be dead right now if you’d stolen all of them.”

  She doesn’t say a word, just gets up and walks to Bindo. She kicks her gun along the way, picks it up.

  “And you’ll want an actual holster.” Vin then raises his voice into a high, girl-speak. “Look at me, I’m a big girl, I can go into the desert by myself. I don’t need the help of some old Patcher from the hinterlands.”

  She can’t tell in the darkness if he is joking or not and she doesn’t care. She is numb from the events, her mind trying to grasp what she has just seen, how close she has come to death again. As she mounts Bindo and they turn to follow Vin, she looks over her shoulder at the giant egg glowing orange in the light of an artificial sun.

  Chapter 6

  EVERYTHING SMELLS like tar, smoke, and vinegar.

  He’s killed a few of the shadow things, but now they’re just getting smarter. They look like cats, only flayed at the belly, the inside with rows and rows of nasty teeth. A couple of them latch onto the capsule, flattening their bodies and slapping their bellies against the fracture in the shell. They extend long, dark, lashing tongues into the cabin, tasting the air. Their breath makes him think of vinaigrette dressing and he doesn’t think he’ll ever eat a salad again without thinking about this.