10
TALIA
By midday, the desert stops pretending.
The light hardens, bleaching the color out of everything but shadow, and the sand turns treacherous—fine on the surface, swallowing beneath. Each step costs more than the last. My calves burn. My throat is dry in that way water never quite fixes.
We slow, whether any of us want to admit it or not.
Korr signals a brief halt with a raised fist. Illadon eases Rverre to a stop beside him, offering her the canteen before she asks. She takes a small sip and hands it back without comment.
Korr crouches and presses his palm to the sand, then digs down until stone answers. He nods once to himself, then stands.
“We cut across,” he says. “Faster ground. Less give.”
I follow his gaze. The path he’s chosen looks marginally better—packed hard instead of loose dune—but it’s also more exposed. No rise. No cover. Just open space and heat.
“It’ll cost us shade,” I say.
“It’ll save strength,” he counters.
He’s right. I know it immediately, and that rankles.
“Fine,” I say. “But we keep spacing tight.”
A corner of his mouth twitches. “Agreed.”
We move again, angling into the open. The heat presses down hard, relentless and intimate. My breath grows shallow despite my effort to control it. Epis dulls the edge, but it doesn’t erase the reality of being human on a world that never meant for us to be comfortable.
After a few minutes, Rverre stumbles.
It’s small—just a slip where the sand shifts unexpectedly—but it’s enough. Illadon catches her instantly, arm steady around her shoulders, murmuring something too soft for me to hear. She regains her footing, nods once, and keeps going. But I’m worried all the same.
“We should stop,” I say.
“No,” Korr replies without turning. “She’s steady now.”
“She almost fell.”
“She didn’t,” he says calmly. “And stopping here will drain her more than moving.”
I open my mouth, then close it again. The argument is already playing out in my head, sharp and familiar, and I hate how much it seems to echo the one I lost a lifetime ago.
I push forward instead, jaw clenched, counting my steps, my breaths, anything to keep from snapping. The ground begins tofirm beneath our feet, just as he predicted, and the pace eases slightly.
He slows just enough to fall back beside me.
“You don’t trust me,” he says quietly, not accusatory.
“I trust you with their safety,” I reply, matching his tone. “That doesn’t mean I stop worrying.”
He studies me for a moment, eyes scanning my face the way he scans terrain—looking for fault lines, pressure points.
“Worry is not the same as doubt,” he says.
I almost laugh. “You don’t know humans very well.”
“Perhaps not,” he admits. “But I know fear.”
