The wind hits again, harder this time, and tiny sharp grains strike the side of my face. Not rain. Not dirt alone. Something finer and meaner.
The young guard grabs my basket from my hand outright. “Now.”
There is no room left in his tone for argument.
Finally, finally, fear begins catching up with the part of me that has spent too many days trying to prove usefulness over caution. I rise fast enough that the half-loosened root breaks off in my hand. Useless now. The basket is already taken. The women are moving ahead.
I hurry after them, but my head turns once more toward the east.
And then I see it.
Not a storm, the way Mars did storms, with cloud build and warning sirens and sealed structures locking down in sequence.
A wall.
Far off still, but moving. The horizon is turning into a rising haze of pale gold and white and dust and something harder inside it that catches the light wrong. It rolls low and wide across the plains, swallowing distance. Not smoke. Not fog. Not simple sand. The very air looks sharp.
My stomach drops.
The women are not running yet, but only because the ground is uneven and baskets are heavy and panic wastes breath. They move fast. Heads down. Wraps lifted over mouths. The youngguard curses at me once more and pushes a cloth into my hand for my face.
I obey now without hesitation. Too late, maybe. But finally.
As we move, the wind grows stranger. Stronger in bursts and then dead again. It tugs at the grasses all in one direction, then seems to yank them back. The light keeps flattening. Even the sounds of the world are changing. The birds that called from the stones earlier are gone. The open plain has gone quiet in the wrong way.
My heart beats hard enough to make my mouth dry.
I do not know the signs. That is the truth. I did not know them when the women did. I did not see what was obvious to them. I would have kept kneeling in the dirt for a half basket of roots if they had not dragged me up from it.
Humiliation flares hot under the fear.
I want to be useful. Instead, I have become one more thing they must pull to safety.
By the time we reach the rise overlooking the camp, the storm wall looks closer. Bigger. Real enough now that even I can see the danger in it. The air glitters in places. Not beautifully. Wrongly. As if broken things are suspended in the light and coming fast.
The young guard shouts toward camp. Someone answers. Movement breaks out there at once. Tents being secured. Fires banked. Loose items gathered. Children called in. The whole camp shifting with frightening speed and knowledge.
I stumble once on the slope and catch myself hard on one hand.
Retha grabs my upper arm and jerks me upright. There is no softness in it and no anger either. Only urgency. I run then, properly run, basketless and gritty-faced and ashamed of how long it took me to understand what everyone else already knew. My mind keeps circling the same brutal truth even while myfeet pound over the ground. I do not belong here yet. I still do not know enough. I could die from not knowing enough. And if they save me again, it will be because they had to, not because I earned my place.
The camp gets closer. So does the storm.
Somewhere beneath the fear and the rising grit and the sound of women shouting to one another, one thought burns hotter than the rest. Kaiven is going to know. He is going to look at the sky, at me, at the half-empty hands I brought back with nothing useful in them, and he is going to know I stayed too long because I wanted to prove I was worth keeping.
Chapter 27
Kaiven
Isee the storm before I see Keandra. That is how it should be.
A male born to the plains knows the signs before the horizon fully turns. The wrong light. The dry bite in the air. The way the wind begins traveling low and fast, carrying grit before the real body of the storm arrives. The strange hush in the birds. The distant pale wall building under the sun, like the whole horizon has gone wrong.
Glass storm.
Not the worst I have seen. Bad enough.
The camp is already moving by the time the gathering party comes over the rise. That is good. Tents are being tied down. Loose hides rolled. Water secured. Children and smaller beasts brought in. The warriors are splitting to check the outer lines and close the weak points.
