How do I know this isn’t a trick?

“When you were fifteen, you liked our neighbor Sendiya so much that you spent a month drawing a portrait of her even though I told you she was horribly vain. But she gave it back because she said you made her nose too small. You moped for weeks.”

It wasn’t weeks. Maybe three days.

“Three weeks,” I insist, though I am grinning.

Thankfully my luck has improved.

“Ugh.” I make a vomiting sound. “I don’t want to know. You have terrible taste in girls, Darin.”

Not this time! You know her, she says. Nawal—she’s a healer.

I nod though of course he cannot see me. “I do know her. She’s too good for you.”

Probably. Are you all right? Where are you?

“I—I am fine.”

The lie weighs heavy on my tongue. I have never been able to fool my brother. Not when I broke a jar of Nan’s precious jam and tried to blame it on an alley cat; not when our parents and Lis died, and I told him I could fall asleep fine without him watching over me. In the end, he took the blame for the jam. And he watched over my sleep for months, though he was only seven at the time.

Laia, he says. Tell me.

His words are a boulder that breaks a dam. I tell him everything. My inability to break through to Elias and remind him of his humanity. My impotence when Khuri took control of my mind. The feeling of the scythe falling from my fingers. The only thing I do not mention is Khuri’s death. It is too raw, yet.

“And now I am stuck.” I am surprised that as I finish, a thin line of purple blooms on the eastern horizon, illuminating an undulating landscape of canyons and cliffs and massive fingers of rock jutting into the sky. “I have no idea what I am going to do.”

Yes you do, Darin says. You just can’t see it yet. You feel defeated, Laia. And it’s no wonder. It’s so great a burden to bear alone. But I’m with you, even if I’m not beside you. You will sort through this, like you do everything that comes your way. And you will do it with strength. So stop. Think. Tell me, what are you going to do?

I stare out at the desert, a speck of nothing against its vastness. These rocks, this dirt, it will abide for millennia, while I am but a moment in time that will be over all too soon. The thought is crushing, and I cannot breathe. I look up at the stars as if they will give me air. They have been the only constant in my life these past eighteen months.

Though that is not true. My own heart has been constant too. My will. That is not much. But it has gotten me this far.

“Water runs through a gully nearby,” I say to Darin. “Rare enough in the desert that there’s likely a settlement—or at least a road—nearby. I am going to find it. And I am going to find Mamie Rila and Afya.”

Good. One step at a time, little sister. Just like always. Be safe.

Then he’s gone and I am alone again. But not lonely anymore. By the time the sun rises, I have made my way to a settlement a mile or so from the gully. It is a small Tribal village where I am able to trade news of Aish for a pack, a canteen, and a bit of food.

The villagers tell me of a Martial outpost only a few miles away. In the dead of night, I sneak into the stables with my magic cloaking me and a small sack of pears. I find a likely looking mare, who stands still while I muffle her hooves with sackcloth and saddle her. When I go to put on her bridle, she nearly bites my fingers off. I have to bribe her with four pears before she will allow me to lead her out of the stable.

For the next two weeks, I make my way toward Aish in the hopes of finding the Tribes that escaped the city. Two weeks of gathering up scraps of news about the Nightbringer’s location. Two weeks of rationing water, trading out stolen horses, and avoiding Martial patrols by the skin of my teeth.

Two weeks of plotting how in the hells I am going to get that scythe back.

And at the end of those two weeks, a storm that has been brewing on the horizon finally hits. Of course, it does not strike while I am at an inn or even in a barn. The skies open while I am scurrying through a narrow slot canyon. The wind whistles down the sheer rock on either side of me, and soon enough I am soaked through, my teeth chattering.

Whilst skulking about the last village, I learned that a large group of Aish’s survivors was gathered near an abandoned guard tower a few hours south of the canyon. Hundreds of families, scores of wagons. The Saif caravan made it there, the villagers said, along with the Nur caravan.

If the rumors are true, Afya and Mamie will be with them. But if this storm doesn’t let up, I will not reach them before they seek out shelter elsewhere.

Rain sluices down the canyon walls now, and I look up uneasily. Living in Serra, Pop warned us never to visit the canyons outside the city during the wet season. You’ll get swept away in a flash flood, he had said. They are quick as lightning and far more dangerous.

I hasten my pace. Once I get to Mamie and Afya, I can plan. Keris is by no means done with the Tribal lands yet. But if we get the scythe, we could take out her allies. Stop her in her tracks.

The thought of killing a jinn again fills me with a bizarre mix of anticipation and nausea. Khuri’s death flashes before my eyes for the hundredth time. The arc of her body as she fell. The Nightbringer’s scream of loss.

Khuri would have killed me. She and all of her kin are my enemies now. Her death should not haunt me.

But it does.

“There is no shame in mourning the passage of so ancient a creature, Laia of Serra.” Rehmat’s glow is a soft light that reflects off the swiftly pooling water at my feet. “Especially when it passed by your hand.”

“If your goal is to destroy the jinn”—I raise my voice so Rehmat can hear me over the rain—“why are you so sad about me killing one?”

“Life is sacred, Laia of Serra,” Rehmat says, its voice deep as the thunder rumbling above me. “Even the life of a jinn. It is forgetting this fact that leads to war in the first place. Do you think that Khuri was not loved?”

The rain pours down heavier, and I do not know why I bother to wear a hood. My hair is soaked, and water streams into my eyes, blinding me no matter how much I wipe it away. In a few hours, it will be dark. I need to get out of this damn place and find a dry spot to spend the night. Or, at the very least, a boulder to hunker under.

“I did not mean to kill her,” I say to Rehmat. “One second she was not there and then—”

“You did kill her. This is the nature of war. But you do not have to forget your enemy. Nor should you ignore the toll her slaying has taken on you.”

“There will be a lot more dead jinn before this all ends,” I say. “If I weep over every last one, I will go mad.”

“Perhaps,” Rehmat says. “But you’ll remain human. Is that not worth a bit of madness?”

“Better if you help me get the weapon that could end this war,” I say.

“The scythe cannot help you when you don’t know how to wield it.”

“I know I need his story,” I say. “And I will seek it. But a story won’t do much good without a weapon.” The water is to my calves now and rising fast. I quicken my gait. “I do not fear him, Rehmat.”

“What do you know of the Nightbringer, Laia?”

“He’s careful,” I say. “Angry. Capable of great love, but filled with hate too. He spent a thousand years trying to free his brethren.”

“And his mind?”

“How the skies should I know what goes through his twisted brain, Rehmat?”

“You fell in love with him, yes? And he with you.” There is a strange note in Rehmat’s voice, but it’s gone an instant later. “You must have learned something.”

“He—he suffered,” I say. “He lost family. People he loved. And—” Thunder booms overhead, closer than before. “He plays a long game. The moment he knew I had a piece of the Star, he began planning. When things did not go according to his plan, he shifted quickly.”

“So do you think, Laia of Serra, that the Nightbringer, the King of No Name, will allow you to take the scythe now that he knows you want it?”

“Did you know him?” I am practically shouting, the rain is so loud. “Before he became what he is?”

“What I was before does not matter.”

“I think it does,” I say. “You want me to trust you. But how can I trust you when you will not tell me the truth about what you are?”

Wind howls down the canyon, and it sounds like a scream. Or a laugh. My blood goes cold and not from the rain. The last time I was in a storm this powerful, this angry, I was in the desert east of Serra, fighting to get a poisoned Elias to Raider’s Roost. That storm was the handiwork of the Nightbringer. As was the sandstorm that nearly separated me from Elias just a few weeks later.

“Rehmat,” I say. “This storm—”

“It is him.” The creature realizes it as I do. “He knows you are out here, Laia of Serra. He seeks to harm you. Climb, child.”

“Climb?” The path I am on is too narrow, the walls of the canyon too steep. Rehmat’s light flares in alarm as the earth beneath me rumbles.