Nico traced the lines of spit on her map. The glob pulled incrementally away even as she stood there and gawked at it.
“That can’t be right.”
At Nico’s disbelieving mutterings, Suri ventured out from under the overturned wing-sail to join Nico in the high-noon heat. Suri crouched, careful to cast her shadow away from the map. “What’s wrong?”
Nico couldn’t explain the impossible distance Rasia had widened between them. Nico reached for a writing utensil, but her charcoal stick was in her bags under the sail. Nico unbuckled her glaive and used the blunt end to calculate the distance in the sand.
Five vibrations equaled a kull. Five kulls equaled a drum. Eighteen drums in a day.
“I don’t understand.” Suri studied Nico’s calculations. “Rasia is already this far from us? We weren’t that far behind.”
Nico stood over the results. The numbers seemed impossible at first, but she had no choice but to accept them. The truth cracked dry out of Nico’s throat. “She’s not stopping. To get this far ahead, Rasia has to be sailing through both the night and high noon.”
Nico should have caught this sooner, but because she didn’t, Rasia was now too far ahead. They barely had the skills to match Rasia’s pace, so how were they supposed to sail twice as fast as her? Nor were they experienced enough to sail through the night. They could barely sail through the day without hitting a ditch and losing a wheel. Even with Nico’s advantage at the Lake of Yestermorrow, it still might not be enough.
Suri’s eyes begged Nico to see the truth written in the sand. This was the point where Nico should quit. This was when Nico should give up and let Rasia win.
“No,” Nico said, snatching up the map. She slashed her spear through the calculations in defiance of their undeniable truth: Rasia had outsmarted her again.
When Nico straightened, she found Suri barring her path, bow readied. Suri reached for an arrow and nocked it to the bowstring. “Nico, it’s time to let go.”
“I still have time. I can still catch her, Suri.”
“How? We can’t compete with her out here. You’ve got to recognize this for the empty hunt it is. We’re outmatched, and if you don’t turn back now, you put your kull, and the Grankull, at risk. Don’t you want to save the Tents?”
“Don’t use that against me as if you care.”
“But you care. Or so you claim.”
“We’ve still got half our Forging left, Suri. We’ve still got time. I can save Kai. I can save this kull. I can save the Grankull and the Tents.”
“You can’t save everyone, Nico. That’s the whole point of the Forging. There are too many kids for the Grankull’s resources, and some must die. The Forging cuts down the weeds.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Suri raised the bow and pulled the bowstring taut to her mouth. She aimed it toward Nico’s leg. Nico watched the sweat gather in the dip of Suri’s lips and the heat plaster her hair to her face. But Suri’s arms stayed steady and true.
Nico marched past Suri. Nico listened for the quick thwimp of the arrow, but the sound never came.
Nico dipped under the sail and found it emptier than she had left it, nothing but a scattered, unfinished game of rattle-bones and the dirty wrappings from the scorpion jerky they were all getting tired of eating. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where Azan and Kelin had gone.
Nico beat her fist against the hatch door and gave the two a moment to gather themselves before ducking her head into the coolness of the underbelly. It smelled of sex, with notes of salted meat and Suri’s pungent herbs. With the windship turned on its side, Nico navigated the hatch upright when usually she had to shuffle through bent over. Sunlight filtered through the cracks, and Nico spied the shadowed lines of Azan and Kelin’s bodies pressed into the hatch bunks. The barrels, bound by the side netting, blocked most of the view. Not enough, in Nico’s opinion.
“We’re kind of in the middle of something,” Kelin croaked out.
Azan giggled. “I’m in the middle of something.”
Nico lips twitched, fighting the smile at the crude joke. “Finish up. I’m righting this ship whether you two are done or not. We’re headed out.”
“Shit,” they both cursed.
Nico stepped out of the hatch and into the blast of high-noon heat. Even under the shade, the sun boiled hot and stifling. Sweat dripped from every pore, and the crown of Nico’s hair frizzed with unruly strands. The sunblock she’d pasted to her skin earlier that morning slicked almost slimy. Nico leaned against the hull and swallowed a liberal amount of water from her gourd, then unstaked the sail.
Suri watched, bow in both hands and her lips pressed in a thin line. No doubt disappointed in herself.
Both Kelin and Azan emerged from the hatch half-dressed. Kelin reinserted his earrings as he walked. Azan had disregarded his loincloth. In this sweaty heat, the weighty line of his dick printed obvious in his linen pants. Azan caught her staring. His eyes brightened as he asked, “You interested?”
“No,” Nico answered. Azan had too much jih energy for Nico to consider him as anything more than a sibling.
“Got it,” Azan said, leaving it at that.
Kelin squinted. “Why is it still high noon?”
“We can’t afford to linger here any longer. Rasia has gotten too far ahead. We need to leave now,” Nico said.
Kelin and Azan looked at each other. Nico didn’t miss the doubt on their faces.
Nevertheless, they helped her push the windship upright. Nico adjusted the sail while Kelin and Azan dressed more fully for the worst of the sun. They applied a liberal amount of kohl soot to their eyes and slathered each other with Suri’s sunblock mix, snickering and flirting all the while. It was hard to get them focused once they’d been distracted.
“Group up,” Nico ordered, demanding their attention. Everyone trudged over to meet Nico at the center of the mast.
“We have fallen too far behind. Apparently, Rasia is sailing through the night and high noon without stopping.”
Azan’s brows raised. With a jih in the hunting kulls and another in the supply kulls working the mining route, Azan knew how rare and dangerous such a nonstop flight could be. And how utterly unprepared their own kull was for the task.
Azan asked, “Are you steering through the night?”
“I’m not Rasia, and none of us can steer a windship as well as she can. But there’s one last option we haven’t taken. I have magic. She doesn’t. It’s time we used it to our advantage.”
Whenever an Ohan over-exceeded, there was always fear, always consequences. Coming into the Forging, Nico had promised herself to use her magic only when necessary, but it was all the more apparent she wasn’t going to catch up to Rasia if she kept holding back.
“That could kill you,” Suri said. Her hand twitched around her bow.
“That’s a risk I’ll have to take.”
“No, it’s not,” Suri argued. “Your life is worth far more than Kai’s. He wouldn’t want you to do this. He wouldn’t want you to throw your life away for him.”
“To you and everyone else in the Grankull he might be worthless, but to a few, he means the world. Just because you don’t see his worth doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any. Kai is worth fighting for.”
“At what cost, Nico? At the cost of your Forging? At the cost of the Grankull? You can’t afford to put family above the Grankull. You are the Ohan.”
“I am Nico!” Nico shouted, frustrated.
Nico stormed away from the huddle and toward the bow of the ship. Was being Ohan even worth it without family? Nico had spent the last two years fighting to keep it from falling apart. With Kenji-ta’s absence and Kai’s apathy, she often felt like she was alone in this fight. As if she were the only one who cared, but Nico didn’t know how to give it up. Because if she did . . . if Nico couldn’t save her own family, how was she supposed to save anyone else?
Nico stared down the distance with a headache pounding behind her eyes. If she didn’t do something drastic, the distance would soon become insurmountable. Then all this chasing, all this time, and all this effort would have been meaningless.
Nico probed for water in caches throughout the Desert—the springs, the kull cisterns, the oasis, and even the water hoarded by succulents. She borrowed from them. She pulled water from the air and squeezed droplets out of the clouds.
The windship was propelled forward on a wave of water, gliding on a river over dunes and ditches.