Desert heat blasted the glass sands. The empty plain shone like a mirror, glistening with dust that made a mockery of morning dew. It was dry and scorched, and the memory of the dead slug was now long behind them. Bee and Em were bundled up, hidden from the stinging wind beneath a blanket and shawl. Ay merely kept his beak shut fast when the dust picked up, cracking it open from moment to moment to peer out to the horizon.
“You’re burning,” he growled.
Bee whined, pulling her sore, pink feet and hands back under the sheets.
“Suppose the Vat-Mother can make anything,” Ay said, then grunted. “Why do you burn?”
Bee made a pitiful sound again, twisting to stop her little sister from escaping her lap.
“Could she really make anything?” Ay asked, beak turning towards the girl.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. Then, a heartbeat later, she realised Ay was looking at her. She shrank under his fleshy gaze. “I don’t.”
Ay’s beak closed with a clack. He focused on the way ahead, an ululating path winding through blasted dunes and stumps of fractured rock. The servants groaned and struggled, but together, they made a good pace. Their mismatched limbs kept an irregular back and forth, faster and slower as they dragged the cart. The occasional stone under the steel wheels bounced them in their seats.
“She’s hungry again,” Bee said, then sighed. Rocking Em on her lap and muttering to the little one’s maggoty head wouldn’t keep her still anymore.
“Give them more,” Ay said through a crack in his beak. “Get some water yourself. We’ll cross the Oasis this way. Resupply.”
That was all she was waiting to hear. Bee jumped out of her seat and into the back, dragging the fur rags with her. Putting Em down with her other sisters, they chirped together when their swaddling was removed, and their eyes found the light.
“You need to be careful.” Ay rasped back to her. “Children eat those who feed them, when they get big enough.”
Bee froze up as she tore up a strip of meat taken from Heych’s pack to feed the girls. Peering back at Ay, Bee knew his opinion didn’t matter. They were just words. They didn’t matter. Yet she had stopped.
“Shut up,” was her dumb response, and she felt a shiver of regret make her hair and cranial spines stand on end immediately after the words left her lips. Ay only croaked a laugh and continued driving the carriage.
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Above, Bee saw the black spectres swoop out. They began to circle, sharp figures drifting high in the sky. Sweeping, innumerable.
“What are they?” Bee asked, scattering scraps to her sisters.
Ay made a show of leaning his body to one side, beak opening far enough to look up into the bright sky. He shielded his eyes from the sun with a muscular arm.
“Scavengers. Follow freaks in the desert. Wait for them to die.”
“That can’t be a good way to get water.”
“Not just water, their biomass, their augs.” He looked back. “Like hounds. You know what a hound is?”
“Yes.”
“Right.” Ay refocused on the road ahead, such as it was. With every gust of wind, it seemed to twist and turn. This time, he didn’t stay quiet for long. Something ate away at him, looking from the horizon and then back to the child and the offspring she was feeding.
“Your mother was a Goddess,” Ay said.
“Was she?” Bee looked away, pretending she didn’t know.
“People worship her. People worshipped her.” Ay said, squeezing with the reigns in his hands, where the child wouldn’t be able to see. “Every city has temples filled with her wombs.”
Bee turned to stare at him, frowning. She couldn’t trust him. She knew that, now.
“She made so many of us,” Ay eventually said. Speaking about her mother seemed to disarm him.
“Did she make you?” Bee asked quietly. “Maybe you’re my brother.”
“No. No, I was shed.”
“Heych said he was shed—” Bee stopped feeding her sisters and sat there as her anguish rose, gathering the strength to continue. “What does that mean?”
“It means...” Ay began but paused. He needed a moment to find the right words to explain to the child. “Means we fell off of someone who got too big, got too much biomass. Cities do it a lot. First thing I remember, belched out of a malfunctioning chute onto Jaabas Street.”
Bee’s nose wrinkled. Ay looked back, caught the look and explained, “It’s a marketplace.”
That wasn’t what disturbed her.
“Why does it matter?” Bee asked.
“It doesn’t.” Then, vaguely offended, Ay straightened up, bouncing his shoulders in a disaffected shrug. “Just didn’t think she could die.”
Bee stared at the back of Ay’s head as he returned to his silent vigil. She decided not to tell him, finishing feeding her sisters instead. He didn’t need to know.
That bright spark overhead, that foul daystar, slowly arced above. Finally, it escaped over the horizon. Night swallowed them, and Bee’s furs became insulation from the biting cold. She slept. She awoke. The sun made its way across the heavens until it disappeared once more. When night came again, and Bee dared peek above, she saw the darkness break with flashes of light, streaks of fire spitting across the heavens, as if the stars themselves were trying to rake the earth and burn the sky.
Together, they did not slow. Ay did not break even as the thralls mewed at his lash. Even in what seemed to Bee unconquerable darkness, he pressed on. Ever on, those at his command guided down the faintest traces of a path.