Widen was terrified. It rolled off her in waves, in the angle of her shoulders, the grinding of her teeth, the way she shifted on the cold stone floor.

  "The city is death," she said. "Nobody returns."

  "Nobody?" I said.

  "There are mines," Widen said. "Guns. Razor wire. Hidden traps that send electricity through you, making you dance as they shoot you."

  "How do you know?" I said. "If nobody returns."

  My brilliant logic didn't faze her. She kept talking about the dangers, the boom of the guns, the flashes and the bunkers. Having spent three days in City, I didn't need a recap.

  "I need to get close to the port," I interrupted.

  It only made her hunch over more. I expected her to argue against that, too, but she didn't.

  "Will you repair our pump before you go?" was all she said. Giving up. In her mind, we were dead already.

  "You're abandoning us," her kid said, her face as stony and cold as the cave we were in.

  That hurt. The kid couldn't have been more than twelve, thirteen years old. She shouldn't live in a world where such distrust was common.

  But what reason did they have to trust us? They'd already given us more than we could have asked for, brought us along when they didn't have to. Maybe because we had the magic ability to haul a whole coat full of food down to the Gash. Maybe because they were decent people living on a hard world, and helping each other was what they did. I thought of the guard in the night, the scraping of the can as it rolled toward those two strange kids.

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  "I'm not," I said.

  "You are," the kid insisted with all the conviction of a pre-teen, her skinny frame, hollow cheeks, and the bald head with the tufts of pale hair growing above hear ears giving her more earnestness that I would have thought possible. For some reason, that made me even more determined to convince her that she was wrong.

  "Look," I said, and stopped. I didn't even know her name. "What's your name?"

  She tilted her head, the motion stabbing me in the heart. So much like the hatchling.

  Now that was a first, comparing humans to a void wyrm. This planet was driving me void-crackers.

  "Ade," the kid said.

  "Nice name," I tried. It didn't buy me any smile. She had retreated into herself, just like her parents.

  I'd seen that so many times. I'd fought that so many times. The giving up. The fear holding you back. The failing before you even tried.

  The sand people wouldn't move. They were sneaks. They said so themselves, living beneath their camouflage coats, taking only a can or a small medkit, leaving the rest undisturbed, not daring to expose themselves. They were mice in a world of cats and dogs. Cats and dogs with guns.

  We needed something stronger. We needed one of the bloods.

  "Ade," I said. "I will be back. And when I am, you will need to come with me, because there will be a ship waiting for you. But before I can do that, I need to talk to someone who's been to City, and seen the port with her own eyes. Do you have any bloods living here? The kind that doesn't eat men?"

  "No," Widen said, her voice shaking. Ade kept looking at me. You could see the connections in her head going tick-tick-tick.

  "The Knife has," she said.

  "Who's Knife?" I asked.

  At that, Widen gripped Ade's shoulder. Not hard, but the kid shut down like an engine with cracked wards. Instead, it was Widen who answered.

  "Darrow," she said. "Take them to see the Knife. But will you repair our pump before you leave?"

  So she hadn't given up entirely. And there were people who'd come back from city.

  "Yes," I said. "Hao will do it. I'm going with Darrow."

  To my surprise, no one objected.