Authors: Kameron Hurley
“It’s all right,” she said. “We’re
all dead women anyway.”
Eshe would not come back. He would
leave her behind, leave Hanife and his vision. Eshe would walk to the edge of
the sea, feed her blade to the sea, and the sea would eat all of this sand and
sorrow.
Tarik watched her with eyes she
knew better than her boy’s. He watched her as the smoke roiled up into the sky
behind him.
“There is no forgiveness for what
we do, Nalah,” he said.
Nalah turned away from him. She
stood at the edge of the desert, a woman alone at the edge of the world, a pile
of bodies at her back. She saw the future spread out before her as the past, a
long unending river of women and ladies, blood and sand.
“We have a long way to go across
the sand before dark,” Nalah said.
Shani walked at Nalah’s left, Tarik
at her right, and Nalah’s fighters followed behind.
They left a trail of footprints in
their wake, footprints as constant as the shifting face of the desert.