The sand people were nowhere to be seen. I conjured a thread of force, casting it about in widening circles for a good five minutes, making my headache worse, before I found them, almost six hundred meters out. Nothing to be seen, though, only grass, sand, dunes, gullies. Not even any traces. I wished I still had my binoculars.

  With water and meds, Geir could stand, barely. Walking would be impossible. He held out his Chimer to me.

  "Take it," he said. "My hands shake so badly I couldn't hit the sand."

  I shook my head, tapping the strap holding my magerifle slung across my back.

  "Aim for the sky," I said. "The bullets will fall down eventually."

  Geir laughed, and this laugh turned to a cough and a wince.

  "What now?" Hao said.

  "Now we carry as much of this as we can," I said. "We might need it for barter when we find our sand crawlers."

  We could carry it all, using my coat as a carry sling, the cans and bottles sloshing and clanking around. Hao carried Geir slung over her shoulders. I'd forgotten how strong she was. And how much she hated to be touched. That she carried him... I’d make it up to her, somehow.

  I cast a last glance at the bunker, trying to spot Talain's body, but the hill was a mere shadow against the fading sky. The clouds were turning from dark ochre to black as the sun sank beneath the opposite horizon.

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  We caught up with the sand people soon after. They were still crawling, making surprising good time on all fours, scuttling through shallow dells, slithering slowly over the ridges.

  "Get up," I said, catching up to them. "There's no one here."

  "Get down," the woman replied. "What you can't see will kill you."

  "We killed all that we could see," I replied. "Where is your water pump?"

  "Get down," the woman repeated. "It will be dark soon. Then we can move."

  Her stubbornness annoyed me. We'd been walking for half an hour. If anyone had intended to shoot us, they'd done so already.

  "Haven't you heard of night scopes," I said? "Infrared? Thermal? Blue-vision?"

  "Only near the death piles," the woman said, still crawling. Her camouflage coat made a soft swishing sound as it flowed over the grass, obliterating the scuffs she must have been making in the sand.

  "What's a death pile?" Hao said, her voice strained. I felt sorry for her, wishing I could carry the coat of supplies myself. She was strong, not invincible.

  "The cans," the man's squeaky voice said from somewhere in the dusk ahead of us. "Everything in the piles. You come too close, you die."

  Made sense. Then again, this was a Syndicate world. Everything could be a death pile.

  Finally, as the last vestiges of magenta light disappeared behind the horizon, they got to their knees. Still hunched over, not quite daring to stand, they started jogging.

  I'd seen that kind of a jog before. Federal marines, charging across a street in a bombed-out city on a hell world. Crouching to present a smaller target. Running to get into cover.

  "You're fast," I said, trying to stabilize the coat as we ran behind them.

  "Fast will save you," the woman said, her strong voice coming from the darkness.

  "Fast and silent," the man said. "Be fast enough, be silent enough, and you can slit their void-loving throats before they know you're there."

  I hadn't expected that. There was some spirit left in these people.